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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: one_less who wrote (23115)	8/19/2001 2:20:54 PM
From: The Philosopher	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 82486

If thought I said self-awareness, not awareness. If not, I should have. A dog and a cat certainly have awareness. But do they have self-awareness? Do they know they are dogs and cats, and ponder what it is that makes them dogs and cats, and where they come from, and all that? From my experience living with them for 50 years, I think not. (But then, I've lived with women for 50 years and wouldn't pretend to understand their thinking, either! LOL!) But if self-awareness is in our DNA, that raises a real issue. Someday somebody will probably be able to snip that gene out of a zygote and create a human being--or a whole tribe of them--without self-awareness. Would they still be human? Would we be entitled to treat them as dogs and cats and horses, to be our companions and do our work for us without any sense that we were using or enslaving people? What is it that makes us human? Not a new question to ask, but one that for me is still unanswered, at least by science or rationality. (Some religions are satisfied that they have the answer._) And until we know the answer, we don't know what forms of human genetic material deserve to be treated as full humans and what ones don't. Which for me remains the dilemma of abortion.