tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1442827238174603755.post258329560405916770..comments2023-09-11T08:30:08.843-07:00Comments on Life Training Institute Blog: Kaczor on Why Consciousness is Not value-Giving [Scott]SKhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01905606527143286458noreply@blogger.comBlogger53125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1442827238174603755.post-38978134781299850312011-05-13T12:08:12.907-07:002011-05-13T12:08:12.907-07:00I believe this example points up what should be an...I believe this example points up what should be an obvious fact: by ending the life of an anencephalic fetus or a permanently comatose patient you are not depriving anyone of anything of value. Keeping either of them alive is a waste of precious resources. If useful organs could be obtained from the living body of a person whose brain had been destroyed, I would not hesitate to remove the organs even though this would result in death. I would not be criminally charged (except for practicing medicine without a license) since we already recognize the state of such a body as brain-dead.<br /><br />You say “we cannot escape the conviction that all human life is valuable.” That is exactly what I have been disputing. Unconscious human life is not in itself valuable. By your answer to the Russian Spy story, you have shown you would not value it for yourself. You now object that making a forced choice doesn’t show that either alternative is “completely void of value.” Very well, if a lifetime of merely vegetative life is not worth a day of life with awareness, how much is it worth? An hour? A second? Would you pay a penny for the prospect of 80 years of continued bodily functions after you let go of consciousness for the last time? I wouldn’t. Many people would pay to escape such a fate, and to spare their loved ones the pointless heartache and expense. <br /><br />So tell me, why would killing such a body be wrong? You have asked me whether my claims are objective or merely subjective or whether they depend on social consensus. Is this conviction you say you “cannot escape” anything but a prejudice acquired from living in a pro-life community and from being exposed to fervent pro-life propaganda? After all, we’re talking here about human bodies which lack all potential for mental activity. Why hold onto this life? Why can’t we at least find common ground here? If your answer is based on authority, what is it? I hope it’s not that same one sentence from the Declaration of Independence penned by a Deist slaveholder to justify a revolution.<br /><br />Incidentally, for anyone following this discussion, during a delay here Jay and I branched off to an exchange on my website, http://lamethinking.blogspot.com/ . Jay, I’m working on an answer to your very thoughtful contribution there. Sorry for the delay.Jerry Lamehttp://lamethinking.blogspot.com/noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1442827238174603755.post-89358663981369585752011-05-13T12:03:18.425-07:002011-05-13T12:03:18.425-07:00I asked the Russian Spy question (whether you woul...I asked the Russian Spy question (whether you would choose one day of consciousness over a lifetime of health without your brain above the brain stem) to rebut Scott Klusendorf’s skepticism about the value-giving nature of consciousness. You chose as anyone would who understood the question, because the only way one can obtain value from one's own life is by first being aware of it. I also asked you if you believed your answer depended on transcendent values or if the value you were choosing might be imminent in the experience of life itself. You answered that your choice is reliant on transcendent values, but I just don't believe you. The fact that we value being aware of our own existence is a completely natural fact. You don’t have to ask your minister or consult a theologian to answer the Russian Spy question. You don't have to know whether God exists or the soul or an afterlife. You just have to be a rational being, it seems to me. So please reconsider your answer, and tell me, if you still disagree with me, how transcendent knowledge helped you decide.<br /><br />You suggested some variations on the question. I will respond, but first let me suggest one closer to my original. Let's say that somehow your auditory system has become an immediate threat to your life. If you don't have an operation immediately that will leave you totally deaf, you will die in 24 hours. You decide you value your hearing so much that you will choose a life of only 24 hours but with normal hearing over a full lifespan as a healthy deaf person. It so happens that an advocate for the deaf and your minister learn of your decision. The deaf advocate tells you that not only is life without hearing worth living, but your choice shows that you are prejudiced against the deaf. You seem to think that their lives are worthless. They would beg to differ. Your minister warns you that choosing to let yourself die after only one day instead of saving your life at the expense of your hearing doesn’t show proper respect for the gift of life. You listen to them and relent.<br /><br />Recall now the original dilemma. You chose one more day of normal self-aware life, followed by death, over a lifetime of existence without a brain and therefore without awareness of any kind. Now imagine that an advocate for anencephalic babies and the permanently comatose learned of your decision and tried to dissuade you. She might say,”Your decision shows prejudice against the brainless. I find this surprising, since you have been an advocate for the anencephalic and the comatose. You yourself said ‘We cannot escape the conviction that all human life is valuable.’ But now you are willing to throw away decades of life for a mere day of continued awareness. This shows disrespect for human life. If the brainless had brains, they would beg to differ.” (Just as I’ve heard pro-lifers say, “If the fetus could think and speak as we do, it would say ‘I want to live.’”) If this pro-life advocate for the anencephalic happened to be connected with the website http://www.anencephalie-info.org/e/faq.php she might add, “Remember, you don’t need a complete brain to give and receive love- all you need is a heart!” But she would be lying. We love with our brains, not literally with our hearts.Jerry Lamehttp://lamethinking.blogspot.com/noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1442827238174603755.post-65707823817764570072011-05-04T08:04:55.769-07:002011-05-04T08:04:55.769-07:00Jerry,
I would also like to add one more thing th...Jerry,<br /><br />I would also like to add one more thing that is wrong with your Russian Spy story. That is that you are asking an either or question, which does not help when arguing for abortion.<br /><br />My point is that you asked me if I could have one conscious day or a vegetative lifetime which I would choose. You did not, however, ask whether I would deliberately kill a conscious man or an unconscious man. The fact that I would choose one over the other given an ultimatum does not show that the other is completely void of value.<br /><br />For example, suppose you were asked if you would like to be able to see or be blind for the rest of your life. Everyone would pick the ability to see, but that does not mean that those who are blind are any less valuable.<br /><br />Of course, your question is far more dramatic than a choice between sight and blindness, but the same concept applies.<br /><br />Let's say you walk into a hospital room where there are two patients. One has been permanently paralyzed, but is still fully conscious and operating at complete mental capacity. The other is perfectly healthy, but is in what may be a permanent vegetative state. I imagine you would feel more connected to the paralyzed patient with whom you can interact, but would you attack and kill either of these individuals? I certainly hope not, and even if you did, you would still be criminally charged.<br /><br />Despite assertions by abortion-choicers that membership in the human species is irrelevant to value, we cannot escape the conviction that all human life is valuable, whether a given human can function as a person or not.<br /><br />To borrow an example from one of Scott's earlier blog posts, there is an important distinction between cooking a hamburger and cooking a Harold burger. Even if because of his mental handicap, Harold was no more conscious than a cow.<br /><br />We may always opt for consciousness given an either or choice, but that does not mean we would deliberately attack and kill another human being, even if he was in a permanent vegetative state.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1442827238174603755.post-1928605239273173482011-04-30T16:34:01.638-07:002011-04-30T16:34:01.638-07:00You may ask, why should the fact that people’s liv...You may ask, why should the fact that people’s lives matter to them matter to me? I could say it’s some version of the Golden Rule. I told you I haven’t made a study of the foundations of morals. But my sense is that it doesn’t start with a rule. It starts with putting yourself in someone else’s shoes, that is, with an act of imagination. What is it like for that being? Given that, how shall I behave toward it? That is the crux of morality for me.<br /><br />We could discuss what comes next. I would not be very good at it. I don’t have satisfactory answers, given the different types of minds that exist, from gnats to professors. I swat gnats. I don’t swat professors. And I confess, I can’t give you a very good account of why. Personhood seems to me much less fundamental and unequivocal than consciousness. But what does seem clear to me (if we put all the problems involving time aside for the moment) is that I can’t put myself in the shoes of something without a mind. I can’t imagine what it’s like to be it, because it is like nothing at all. Put another way, even if it is alive, I don’t believe it values its own life, because value is always value <i>for</i> someone or something, that is, for someone or something conscious. I cannot be called upon to put myself in something’s place when there is no such place. Therefore the Golden Rule cannot apply, and how such beings are treated is not a moral issue, at least with respect to the effects on <i>them</i>. Of course, once you introduce time, and consciousness starts and ends and is intermittent, things get complicated. But I don’t think the central role that consciousness plays in moral questions therefore goes away.<br /><br />That is a lot more involved than I had expected it to be, given that I thought it went without saying, and more crudely put than I would like. I am embarrassed that my thought is so little developed in this area. Nevertheless, have I managed to make my position more intelligible to you?<br /><br />I will try to take a stab at answering your five questions next.Jerry Lamehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04730167055241745938noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1442827238174603755.post-5803024464524780522011-04-30T16:28:09.504-07:002011-04-30T16:28:09.504-07:00OK. I think I just figured something out, somethin...OK. I think I just figured something out, something that should answer a lot of your questions, something I didn’t think to say, perhaps because it seemed so obvious I never even said it to myself. I finally realized this when I was thinking about your answer to my question 1, about the Russian assassin. You wrote: “My point is that throughout history many civilizations did not base value on consciousness/personhood. For millennia, cultures held that things like gender, race, and functional ability are what made someone valuable.” I found this completely baffling. What did history, culture or prejudice have to do with the fact that value depends on consciousness? Was your answer to the Russian assassin question a product of your culture or place in history or sense of equality? Wouldn’t anyone who understood the question always have answered as you did?<br /><br /> Then I realized. Maybe you thought that valuing consciousness was this arbitrary thing one does from outside. I look at something and say, “that’s sparkles, I like it.” Or “that person has white skin, he’s worth more than someone with dark skin.” Or, “I like that guy – he’s conscious. He’s cooler than those zombies, whom I wouldn’t be caught dead with.” It seems weird to me, but I think I get it. You’re asking me, on what basis do I privilege a conscious being over an unconscious one? Why should I place a greater value on them just because they’re conscious? Isn’t it just an arbitrary prejudice?<br /><br />Will this help? What I forgot to mention is that, when I say that consciousness is the foundation of value, I mean <i>value for the conscious subject him- or herself</i>. I asked you whether you would choose a day of consciousness over a lifetime of unconsciousness because I wanted to point out that all value, <i>for you yourself, of your own life</i>, depends on your being aware. (Of course you can affect other people’s consciousnesses, and God’s too, and you might value that even more than your own life. But that would be in addition to the awareness-dependent value to you of living your own life.) <br /><br />Both of us, I think (I hope), agree that things (events, people, emotions, whatever) have value <i>for us</i>. It’s not just God that things have value for. People’s lives have value <i>for them</i>. And this is important. This matters. It matters to me. (I say that. I’m making a choice there.) You may say that what God values matters more. For me that’s not a consideration. And even if there were a God, I don’t see how you could know what He values. Let’s put it this way: I wouldn’t take your word for it. But I’m confident that there are people and animals whose lives matter to them. The value that sentient beings’ lives have for those beings sets them apart from everything else in the universe and demands some measure of respect.Jerry Lamehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04730167055241745938noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1442827238174603755.post-12273447246272767972011-04-30T16:22:56.192-07:002011-04-30T16:22:56.192-07:00Maybe where we differ fundamentally is that I assu...Maybe where we differ fundamentally is that I assume that value is always value <i>for someone</i>. Nothing has value unless it exists at some point for someone, valuably (so to speak), in their consciousness. You may immediately disagree with this. You may think that value is objective, and is independent of all such subjective evaluations, which merit no more respect than any other opinion. This is just a hunch, but perhaps you are mistaken, not in believing this, but in believing that you believe it. Perhaps the dependence of value on consciousness is masked for you by your theism. <br /><br />If you think of something of which no one (not even an animal) will ever be aware, and which will cause nothing of which anyone will ever be aware, and it is not aware of itself either, you may think: Even though no one ever values it, God may. God is the one who decides on value. We just perceive it, or fail to.” Ok. But isn’t God conscious, according to your belief? If He values something, doesn’t He hold it in his mind? If He loves it, isn’t He also aware of it? Doesn’t His love, or anyone’s love, depend in some way on awareness of the object of that love? So it would appear that even for you value depends on consciousness as a precondition. Or am I wrong? You seem to think that, in a Godless universe, nothing would have value. Doesn’t this mean that as a precondition for value, something has to be held in a conscious mind, namely God’s? The fact that you think things would lose value without Him seems to confirm that you don’t actually believe value inheres in an object alone, independent of all minds.<br /><br />If this is right, where we differ is that for me all value depends on living sentient beings. There is no special one that gives THE value of something, as there may be for you. For me, value is realized in lives, conscious ones. It is immanent in lived experience. Without consciousness of some kind there is no value. Does that make clearer why I said consciousness is at the center of my worldview? You asked me about that: “Exactly how did you reach the conclusion that consciousness bears such weight in the meaning of life? Furthermore, how do you know that this conclusion is valid or that there is a meaning to life?” Can you see now why I have trouble making any sense of these questions? Without consciousness there is nothing worth talking about. <br /><br />Perhaps, for you really to understand, you would also have to know about my views on primary and secondary qualities, and qualia, so you could see how bare and spectral a world without minds would be, but I’ll leave that for another time.Jerry Lamehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04730167055241745938noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1442827238174603755.post-48209820289754252362011-04-30T16:14:21.693-07:002011-04-30T16:14:21.693-07:00In response to my Russian assassin story, you wrot...In response to my Russian assassin story, you wrote: “I think any person I know would pick one day with full mental capacities versus a lifetime in a vegetative state, including me. However, I don’t think this in itself shows that consciousness is value-giving. What I think you are trying to do here is appeal to my moral intuitions. If you can get me to realize that deep down I believe that consciousness really is what gives value, I will be forced to concede that you are correct. However, why would such a concession validate your case?”<br /><br />I suspect that the heart of our disagreement and mutual misunderstanding lies here somewhere. I was not trying to trick you. I was trying to understand you and get you to understand me. But if we are going to make progress, we have to go one step at a time. If you look down the road and say, “Oh, if I answer this then he might force me to say that, so I’m going to say the other,” then it’s just a contest, not a search for understanding. As a matter of fact, in this question I was not appealing to your moral intuitions. I was appealing to your intuitions about value.<br /><br />Maybe the problem was in the term “value-giving”, which I borrowed from Scott’s original post. Now that I think of it, my claim was never that consciousness alone is ‘value-giving’. It is that consciousness is a necessary condition for any value, including those associated with personhood. Consciousness is the foundation, the context in which value takes place. The point of the example was that you saw, and everybody sees, that consciousness is a precondition for any other value in life, without which it’s not worth living. That was a step I thought we could agree on. What followed would be a matter for discussion.Jerry Lamehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04730167055241745938noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1442827238174603755.post-61827104934894039082011-04-30T13:28:41.148-07:002011-04-30T13:28:41.148-07:00The idea that inherited information would be store...The idea that inherited information would be stored in physical form on incredibly tiny strands of millions of symbols written in a chemical code, that each of the tiny cells making up our bodies would contain all that information, and would use it in a way dependent on its location and history, nobody had imagined. It is a completely different way of creating biological forms than Aristotle or any other philosopher or scientist had ever conceived of. Aristotle invented his scheme, his analysis of reality into substance and accidents, form and matter, potentiality and actuality, in part to explain the obvious facts of life, like growth and development and species membership. Those concepts had work to do in the context of the theory, a theory in which there were no atoms or cells or genes; in which unitary forms had causal powers. To retain Aristotle’s terminology and apply it to a reality that we now know is completely different requires that the words be drained of meaning. I hear you using the terms, but it’s like you’re just repeating a formula to justify a conclusion you’ve already come to for other reasons. As far as I can tell, the words now mean next to nothing.Jerry Lamehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04730167055241745938noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1442827238174603755.post-40556937421951033362011-04-30T13:26:06.237-07:002011-04-30T13:26:06.237-07:00A similar but more surprising example would be a p...A similar but more surprising example would be a program to produce images of the Mandelbrot set. This is an infinitely complex mathematical object called a fractal. Wikipedia describes the math, and lists a ‘pseudocode’ program for the algorithm of just 17 lines, which must be repeated for each pixel in the image. So a few hundred symbols is sufficient to create wondrous designs of surprising and endless complexity. YouTube has many colorful videos zooming in or out of the Mandelbrot set, often with musical accompaniment. Here’s a particularly beautiful one, displaying many biological-style forms, called Fractal Zoom Mandelbrot Corner: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_GBwuYuOOs&feature=fvwrel These forms aren’t suggested by a perusal of the symbols in the program, or even by a consideration of the mathematics they represent. Even Mandelbrot, who defined the set, had no idea what it would look like. The same questions could be asked: are these forms already present in the lines of code, or do they emerge from a process of computation which a computer, using the code, carries out? <br /><br />Other questions suggest themselves which seem closer to your way of thinking. Did Mandelbrot create this object or discover it? Most mathematicians, I believe, take a Platonic view of mathematics. They discover truths, which were somehow waiting to be discovered in some ideal realm of pure logic. In which case the program is making an image of something ideal, like the square we began with, or like your idea of the human species. Math defines the set. An algorithm approximates the math. A program implements the algorithm. The computer runs the program, and produces one imperfect, physical image of the ideal set. Was the set there all along, in the computer? Was it making an image of itself? I don’t think so. I don’t think the Mandelbrot set has causal powers. What made the image was something else.<br /><br />I recently attended a lecture by a computational neurophysiologist who is modeling the formation of neocortex using a program that represents cells and genes and chemical signaling in abstract form. Each simulated brain cell contains rules for it to carry out, specified by the genes inside it which are activated. The rules say things like, “if you detect chemical X, divide asymmetrically into two daughter cells, and activate gene Y in one of them.” Or “send out an axon horizontally”, or “move upward”. All the rules are local to the cell. Nothing contains the big plan for what is being made. The computer simulation showed hundreds of cells migrating, growing, branching, until they formed the layered structure characteristic of cerebral cortex, with several different nerve cell types, each with its distinct pattern of arborization determined by a combination of the cell’s activated genes and the environment it encountered as it grew, which was in turn produced by other cells doing the same thing. With its iterated local-rule-based construction, and lack of any overall plan or goal, this simulation of brain development looks a lot more like the plotter and the Mandelbrot set examples than the Polaroid.Jerry Lamehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04730167055241745938noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1442827238174603755.post-9300342746214227652011-04-30T13:17:11.835-07:002011-04-30T13:17:11.835-07:00A technical note, which is made less significant b...A technical note, which is made less significant by the point I just made: you say that a toddler’s brain is not the same one as the infant’s because “throughout the growing process, too many cells have died and been replaced to constitute the same organ.” This might be true of other organs, but not the brain. For a long time, it was believed that <i>no</i> new brain cells were grown after birth. Some new cell growth has recently been detected in the brain, but this is very minor in comparison to the bulk of the organ. There is massive nerve cell death early on (called ‘pruning’) and growth of new nerve <i>connections</i>, but I don’t believe there is substantial replacement of old with new nerve cells in the brain. This presumably is in order to retain learning, which is stored in the detailed structures of neurons.<br /><br />I am also skeptical of your claim that “the best research to date indicates that an infant does not become aware of the fact that it is a separate entity from its mother until more than a month after birth.” I would appreciate a reference for this. It sounds to me like an assumption in the tradition of Piaget or Freud rather than the result of experimental research. Recent work in developmental psychology has transformed our knowledge of early infancy. Very young infants have surprising abilities. They are not blank slates.<br /><br /> Finally, staying with this science-related theme, I want to criticize the Polaroid metaphor: “we can’t see the image yet, but it’s there from the start,” you say. It’s hard to know just what this metaphor is meant to convey, but it definitely gives the wrong impression. If by ‘image’ is meant some likeness of the final product, this is definitely not the case. I’d like to suggest some other metaphors.<br /><br />You quoted Greg Koukl about the triangle and the square. The essence of a square is to have four straight equal sides joined by right angles. That’s what it is by definition, and it can’t change. Very well, consider a ‘computer program’ that consists of a list of instructions for a plotter: <br /><br />“Start with pen up. If starting, move the pen to (0,0). If the pen is up at (0,0), put it down and draw to (1,0). If the pen is at (1,0), draw to (1,1). If the pen is at (1,1), draw to (0,1). If the pen is at (0,1), draw to (0,0). If the pen is down at (0,0), lift the pen.”<br /><br />Let’s say that this ‘program’, if run on a computer connected to a plotter, would draw a square. Does the program have four equal sides joined at four right angles? No. It doesn’t have any sides at all. It consists of a string of symbols, just as DNA does. But if the essence of a square is to have four sides, then the program lacks this essence. Was there perhaps some invisible image of the square that ‘developed’ like a photograph? No, there was nothing squarish at all to begin with. There was just a string of numbers and letters. If we consider the program, the computer and the plotter as a single system, do they together contain the essence of a square? No. Yet if we press ‘Enter’ and do nothing to halt it, the computer will run the program and produce a square. Where did the essence come from, and when? I’ll leave that to you. You’ll say this is a manufactured thing, but the example has important parallels to the processes controlling embryonic development, resemblances which the metaphor of a Polaroid photograph completely lacks.Jerry Lamehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04730167055241745938noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1442827238174603755.post-61807104988669900352011-04-30T13:10:39.822-07:002011-04-30T13:10:39.822-07:00I would just add to this that I don’t quite agree ...I would just add to this that I don’t quite agree with your usage of the word ‘scientific’. You seem to use it as a synonym for ‘physical’. To me, science is a critical experimental approach to knowledge. I believe (this seems to be a minority view) that science does not presuppose that the explanations it discovers will be physical. For instance, there was a long controversy, within science, (the vitalism/mechanism debate) over whether life would be explained by physical mechanisms and general physical laws, or whether a separate, immaterial, ‘principle of life’ or ‘life force’ (read ‘soul’) was required to explain vital organization. I believe it could have turned out either way, depending only on which alternative was actually the case. That is, the scientific method didn’t bias the result. At the very least, if the explanation had been a life force, then physical mechanisms would have been inadequate to explain things like evolution, development and inheritance. This was confidently predicted by vitalists, but turned out to be wrong. Likewise, if Zeus made thunder and lightning, forensic science would detect it, and physics would be shown to be inadequate. The reason it’s easy to confuse ‘scientific’ with ‘physical’ is that everything science has investigated so far, except consciousness (on which the jury is still out), and phenomena dependent on consciousness, has turned out to be physical. Although I have to say that what ‘physical’ means has greatly expanded, to include things like fields, energy/matter equivalence, curved space-time, and quantum peculiarities. It is no longer just solid atoms and the void. Perhaps, if we ever understand consciousness, we will expand the meaning of ‘physical’ again to include it.<br /><br />I agree with you that science cannot prove that the soul does not exist. However, I think it is beyond reasonable doubt, given the phenomenal success of molecular biology in the last half century, that the soul, if it exists, is not life, because we know what life is. Life is a suite of physical processes, not an unchanging essence. It follows that, if there is a soul, we cannot conclude that, just because a human organism is alive, it has been ensouled. So the adage “science shows that life begins at conception” has no bearing on when a human soul might enter the body, and so implies nothing about soul-based claims to human rights.<br /><br />You say, of my claim that human beings are modes and not substances: “if you replace every piece of wood on the deck of a house, do you have the same deck afterwards? Not really. Although it may look identical to the original deck, the parts are different, and there is no inner substance with which to retain identity.” This is just to say that, if you assume that the only kind of identity is the kind found in a substance-based ontology, then modes don’t retain identity. However, there is no reason to stick with this assumption. The world we live in shows continuity within change. Most entities familiar to us are best described as open systems: the sun, a waterfall, a tree. These are systems which maintain their structures while energy and matter flow through them. The biological theorist Ludwig von Bertalanffy made a career promoting the concept of open systems. Likewise, Ilya Prigogine, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, whose field was non-equilibrium thermodynamics, explained self-organization in open systems. Living organisms are best understood in this framework. They are not the same over time if this means nothing flows in and nothing flows out. But then they wouldn’t be alive. The idea of constancy without change is the antithesis of life. It shouldn’t be a surprise that ancient philosophers and theologians didn’t get this. But what is keeping you from doing so?Jerry Lamehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04730167055241745938noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1442827238174603755.post-46732265769109431872011-04-30T13:06:14.313-07:002011-04-30T13:06:14.313-07:00You wrote, “I don’t understand why you believe tha...You wrote, “I don’t understand why you believe that consciousness is an immaterial property. Since it is related to brain activity, wouldn’t it have to follow that it can be explained in scientific terms (although at this point in time we are yet unable to do so)?” That’s a good question. <br /><br />First, I wouldn’t say that I believe that consciousness is an immaterial property. I am agnostic on the relationship between consciousness and the brain. ‘Completely stumped’ would probably describe it better. <br /><br />There is a problem in philosophy of mind called “the explanatory gap.” You can read about it in Wikipedia’s entry on ‘Qualia’. ‘Qualia’ (the plural of ‘quale’) refers to the subjective qualities of conscious experience – the redness of red, the smell of peppermint, the way a toothache feels, etc. You mentioned that you “don’t understand how you can say that you are a materialist about life but not consciousness.” Well, my understanding is that all the known life processes (metabolism, inheritance, development, movement, sensation, etc.) have yielded to mechanistic biology to a very great extent. Myriads of details have yet to be filled in, but why things are alive, and how life operates, are now understood at a very deep level on the basis of physics and chemistry. There is also a great deal of knowledge, but also persistent ignorance, about how brains go about doing what they do. So what keeps them alive we understand, but just what brains are doing is still a frontier. And on the far edge of that frontier lie qualia. We have no idea how to derive qualia from physics or chemistry or physiology. Physics can predict, given cell structure, metabolism. It cannot predict, given brain structure, that laying one’s eyes on something red will result in the experience of redness as we know it, or even that it will lead to any qualitative experience at all. There is no known way of going from nerve firing to the quality of redness, nor is there any known theory or method for how to do so. When I say consciousness I mean what it is like to experience, and essential to that are qualia. If you haven’t explained qualia, you haven’t laid a finger on consciousness.<br /><br />The philosopher David Chalmers distinguishes two aspects of this problem of the explanatory gap, epistemological and ontological. Epistemological: We don’t know the relationship between consciousness and the brain. We may someday; we may not. Ontological: consciousness may be a property of matter or it may not. It could be that consciousness is material but we could never know it. I am no expert on this tangle. Professional philosophers are all over the map on these questions. Some deny such a gap exists; some (amazingly) deny qualia exist; some say the gap is real and insoluble. To my knowledge, there is no similar gap in any other field of science. This makes consciousness, for people like me, the central mystery of the universe.Jerry Lamehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04730167055241745938noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1442827238174603755.post-47308401095035014992011-04-30T13:03:07.397-07:002011-04-30T13:03:07.397-07:00First let’s get this out of the way: You repeatedl...First let’s get this out of the way: You repeatedly ask me, as you do in your Question 1 for me, some version of this: “To whose authority do you attribute your conclusions? Is it merely the consensus of society?” No. It’s never that for me. After all, I’m an atheist. That puts me in a distinct minority right off the bat. I was brought up Jewish, another small minority. Both have been oppressed by the (usually Christian) consensus of society. Seeing pictures of the Holocaust is one of my earliest memories. I have known Holocaust survivors. Members of my extended family were lost to it. It has shaped my moral outlook. So you don’t need to lecture me on the dangers of relying on social consensus alone for ethical norms. You may think that abortion resembles the Holocaust. I might agree if I thought abortion was murder. But I don’t think abortion is even wrong. That opinion is not the result of some tortured rationalization; it’s my strong moral conviction. So I think that the pro-life movement is an unjustified and therefore an unjust attack on women’s consciences and on their freedoms, and is therefore (and for many other reasons) a great evil. I also think pro-life activists are so obsessed with the evil they think they’re fighting so righteously that they are completely oblivious to the great harm they may be doing if they’re mistaken. So, as you can see, you don’t have a monopoly on moral outrage. As a matter of fact, if you ever want a proof of atheism, here’s a powerful one: The Holocaust. Q.E.D.<br /><br />As to whose authority I rely on, I don’t regard authority as a reason for doing or thinking anything. Any authority worthy of respect would have to have reasons and evidence. Once you have those, you don’t need the authority. I believe what I do, out of a lifetime of trying to make sense of things for myself, constrained only by what I take to be sound science and my own experience, and by whatever assumptions I have not yet thought to examine. These are the conclusions I’ve come to so far. As the founding motto of the Royal Society, an engine of the scientific revolution, had it: <i>Nullius in Verba</i>, on the word of no one. I also admire Kant’s motto for the Enlightenment: <i>Sapere Aude</i>, dare to think for yourself.Jerry Lamehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04730167055241745938noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1442827238174603755.post-49356161848237408682011-04-30T12:59:05.385-07:002011-04-30T12:59:05.385-07:00Thanks, Jay, for your thoughtful response. You hav...Thanks, Jay, for your thoughtful response. You haven’t offended me. Once again, there are many issues to discuss. This is going to take me awhile, so please have patience. Sorry for the delay.<br /><br />You keep wanting to go into questions of ethics, not just practical ethics but the foundations of morality. This has never been my focus, and my ideas in this realm are not worked out, so I am reluctant to talk about it – which is not to say that I won’t. <br /><br />Instead, my interest in the abortion question has centered on a hunch of mine that the reason people differ on this question, and the reason that they can’t seem to communicate about it (each side taking the other’s arguments as not just mistaken but completely bonkers) is that we have very different, largely unexamined assumptions about what’s there – what an embryo or a fetus is, what it means to be alive, etc. <br /><br />Another hunch of mine – a hopeful belief – is that the two sides don’t really differ in their moral sense. I think most people on both sides are basically decent people. If we could agree on the situation – the story, what’s really going on – my hope has been that we would then just naturally come to agree on the morality of the situation, without having to go into much moral reasoning, and certainly without having to bother about metaethics.<br /><br /> I think in a way you guys tend to agree with me on the importance of getting clear what’s there – what an embryo and a fetus are, that they’re alive, that they’re human, etc. You may disagree on the basic decency of your opponents however. I think that’s because you have no grasp of the differences in our world views, so you think we’re not being honest when we tell you that issues like personhood and consciousness are really of central importance to us, independent of the abortion debate, and that they play a decisive role in our moral judgements.<br /><br />So far my hopes have not been realized. Nothing has come clear. We still talk at complete cross-purposes. And it may turn out that people come to their moral judgements and then fill in the metaphysics to support those judgements, instead of the other way around, as I had supposed. I guess that’s what you were saying about the use of personhood. I have similar suspicions that the whole Aristotelian rigmarole – substance and accident and natural potential and the rest – was never part of any of your thinking until you needed to justify your pro-life positions, and the Catholics happened to have all this St. Thomas Aquinas stuff at their fingertips, and suddenly all you evangelicals forgot your grudges against the pope and became honorary Scholastics.Jerry Lamehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04730167055241745938noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1442827238174603755.post-87564690596961227872011-04-26T12:45:25.379-07:002011-04-26T12:45:25.379-07:00So now here are my questions for you:
1. How did ...So now here are my questions for you:<br /><br />1. How did you reach your conclusions about consciousness and personhood, and to whose authority do you attribute them? Is it merely the consensus of society?<br /><br />2. What makes your definitions about when abortion ought to be allowed more valid than other abortion supporters? Specifically, why can you tell Peter Singer and his followers that their definition of what makes humans valuable is wrong? Why shouldn’t they be allowed to practice infanticide if that is what they see fit?<br /><br />3. What is the moral status of the mentally handicapped and those that will never achieve personhood? May these humans be killed since they will never be able to function as moral persons?<br /><br />4. Why is it my moral imperative to support the right to an abortion? Or should I say, why should I not fight against this right? All evidence aside, what if I simply don’t like abortion and therefore think it should be illegal? It seems you think abortion-choicers can fight for legislation based on their metaphysical views, but pro-lifers can’t.<br /><br />5. Where does the right to an abortion come from and furthermore where do rights of any kind come from? If from the State, why shouldn’t the state revoke those rights? If you do not assume a transcendent grounding point, I don’t see how you can give me an objective reason for why rights of any kind exist.<br /><br />Thanks Jerry.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1442827238174603755.post-7258605133433357652011-04-26T12:44:49.993-07:002011-04-26T12:44:49.993-07:005. Yes, I think he is still the same person becaus...5. Yes, I think he is still the same person because I believe in the substance view of human persons. We are not property things that change over time like cars and houses, but rather we possess an inner nature that makes every person a unique individual. A person is still a person even if he is mentally or physically handicapped. You can reject this if you like, but if you do, I don’t see how anyone is a unique individual or how you can presuppose any kind of human rights.<br /><br />Would it be wrong to pull the plug rather than attempt the treatment? Yes, I believe that if we have the means to save a human life we should do so. Of course, the medical world is not perfect and I know that it is impractical to think that in every such situation it is possible to save such a person.<br /><br />However, as I stated before, your “pull the plug” analogy doesn’t work. Abortion is not merely the withholding of life giving support. It is actively choosing to attack and kill the child by poisoning or dismemberment. As Francis Beckwith says, “Euphemistically calling abortion the ‘withholding of support’ makes about as much sense as calling suffocating someone with a pillow the withdrawal of oxygen.”Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1442827238174603755.post-79985750965916026702011-04-26T12:44:11.849-07:002011-04-26T12:44:11.849-07:004. Why does a human embryo with human DNA have mor...4. Why does a human embryo with human DNA have more value than that of a monkey embryo with very similar DNA? Because of the kind of thing that they are intrinsically. The human embryo, if uninterrupted, will naturally grow into an adult human being and has the inherent capacity for moral and rational agency. A monkey embryo is a member of its own species. It will grow into an adult monkey, if uninterrupted, and will not develop the inherent capacities that humans have. This has been demonstrated time and time again through scientific observation, not with any theories of Aristotle.<br /><br />I know you will reject this position and say that humans do not have value in virtue of the kind of thing that they are, but exactly what makes your position correct? Can you offer me a biological or scientific reason for why this is the case, or will you have to do metaphysics? If we are really nothing more than a bunch of randomly changing, scientific possibilities, how can you say anything is valuable or has a right to life?Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1442827238174603755.post-5470623958320499022011-04-26T12:43:35.121-07:002011-04-26T12:43:35.121-07:003. I am not necessarily sure what you mean by “the...3. I am not necessarily sure what you mean by “the secret of life.” It is true that the discovery of DNA gave us an understanding of the physical processes of life. However, it does not necessarily invalidate the notion that life is spiritual as well as physical. If something cannot be proved or disproved by science that means only that science is inconclusive, not that it doesn’t exist.<br /><br />I think DNA advanced the pro-life cause more than the abortion-choice one. DNA showed that all creatures do develop according to their own kind. They are not constructed piece by piece from the outside but rather develop themselves from within. From the moment of conception, DNA lays the framework that determines what the person will grow into (unless acted upon by an external force).<br /><br />I don’t really understand why you referred to human embryos prior to consciousness only as “possibilities.” The science of DNA shows that a human embryo has begun to grow from the moment of conception and will grow into an adult human being unless the process is unnaturally interrupted. It seems that you think because, random mutations, disease, or other spontaneous scientific phenomena may kill the embryo or perhaps split it into twins, there is no reason to suppose that a person will come into existence anyways.<br /><br />However, how does it follow that because nature may spontaneously abort a human embryo, I may deliberately kill one? Am I justified in killing an adult because he could have just as easily died of a heart attack?Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1442827238174603755.post-5035495469043250762011-04-26T12:42:40.003-07:002011-04-26T12:42:40.003-07:002. Yes, I would have to say that my choice is reli...2. Yes, I would have to say that my choice is reliant on transcendent values. I hold that all human beings are valuable regardless of size, level of development, environment, or degree of dependency. What makes them valuable is their inherent capacity to exercise rational agency, not the present capacity to do so. This standard of equality among men is referenced in the Declaration of Independence, with an obvious appeal to divine authority.<br /><br />If we remove a transcendent source from the equation, what reason can you give as to why we ought to value all conscious human beings? I don’t think you can deny that not everyone agrees with you on this. It is true that in this day and age, a far greater number of people do, but can morality really be based on the random whims of society. If it is the collective opinion of all that makes something valuable, how are you going to oppose a society that decides not to treat all conscious humans equally? Some of these cultures still exist today. On what objective basis can you tell them that they are wrong unless you assume a transcendent source?<br /><br />Furthermore, if there is no God, how can we trust our moral intuitions to tell us the truth about anything? Per Darwin himself, Evolution isn’t concerned with the truth; it’s only about survival of the fittest. If there was no plan with truth in mind, why would our brains function this way?Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1442827238174603755.post-77343931962910519242011-04-26T12:41:59.985-07:002011-04-26T12:41:59.985-07:00You see Jerry; you say we owe it to someone who ha...You see Jerry; you say we owe it to someone who has already existed to protect their body, but not to someone who has not yet existed. However, I’m not really sure how you reached this conclusion. Why is this the case that I have such a moral obligation to a former person but not to a soon to be person? If I don’t agree with you, how are you going to argue that I must respect the body of my born son but not my unborn son?<br /><br />Finally, on to the questions that you posed to me:<br /><br />1. In your Russian assassin story, I think any person I know would pick one day with full mental capacities versus a lifetime in a vegetative state, including me. However, I don’t think this in itself shows that consciousness is value-giving.<br /><br />What I think you are trying to do here is appeal to my moral intuitions. If you can get me to realize that deep down I believe that consciousness really is what gives value, I will be forced to concede that you are correct. However, why would such a concession validate your case?<br /><br />As of yet, the only argument I have seen you use for your position is that everyone allegedly agrees with you. You tried to show subtle flaws in both mine and David’s positions that show that we don’t really believe what we are saying, and deep down we agree with you that consciousness is value-giving. However, even if David and I do concede and agree with you, would your position then be true?<br /><br />My point is that throughout history many civilizations did not base value on consciousness/personhood. For millennia, cultures held that things like gender, race, and functional ability are what made someone valuable. Whether or not they defined everyone as human persons is irrelevant, because the fact of the matter is that they said these people were morally inferior to others. If it is really just the consensus of people that validates a position, why were these cultures wrong? Furthermore, what would happen if society suddenly shifted back to this line of thinking?<br /><br />To amend your question just a bit, would you rather spend one day as a fetus at 32 weeks gestation, or an entire biological life in a vegetative state? I don’t think anyone is compelled to pick either of these scenarios, so why is this mature fetus valuable?Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1442827238174603755.post-76225706094162693642011-04-26T12:40:32.401-07:002011-04-26T12:40:32.401-07:00Also, you said,
If the pro-life cause is premised...Also, you said,<br /><br />If the pro-life cause is premised on belief in a soul and an afterlife, that’s perfectly legitimate, but should it be in a position to legislate the consequences of those religious beliefs and impose them on the rest of us?<br /><br />To this I would ask why your beliefs are in a position to legislate against Singer’s. Both yours and Singer’s positions are inherently religious as well, since any question of rights and values requires metaphysical reasoning. What gives you the right to tell Singer that he can’t act on his convictions and practice infanticide?<br /><br />So, now to your amended version of Francis Beckwith’s thought experiment. I would first like to point out that you cannot substitute pulling the plug to dismemberment because without this, the situations are not parallel. Pulling the plug refers to simply withholding life giving support despite the fact that an individual will die without it. This doesn’t work, because abortion is not simply the withholding of life giving support, it is a search and destroy mission that actively kills the child by poisoning or dismemberment. I may not have an obligation to attempt to save a man that I see dying of a heart attack, but am I then justified in shooting him in the head so to accelerate the death process? Dismemberment must remain in the thought experiment or the two situations are not parallel.<br /><br />Anyways, I understand what you mean by loyalty over potential. You do not believe that a person is present when a body sleeps or becomes comatose, but it is your loyalty to the absent individual that drives you not to harm their body. In this way they can return and interact with you again.<br /><br />However, this explanation lacks explanatory power. You and many others may choose to respect these non-person bodies such that they might return, but you did not try to explain why this is a moral imperative. Suppose I am not loyal to whoever happens to be absent from his body.<br /><br />Here’s a scenario I thought of. I hate my son. I wish he were dead, and I care for him only because I have a legal obligation to. My son then is in a car accident leaving him comatose. The doctors tell me that it is very likely that he will regain consciousness three months from now, but I tell them to pull the plug. I feel no loyalty to my son, nor any moral obligation to spend my money on the possibility that he may become a person again. Why is it a moral imperative for me to maintain his body so that he can return? Sure, you think I should, but on whose authority must I do so.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1442827238174603755.post-65238378404772273482011-04-26T12:39:06.549-07:002011-04-26T12:39:06.549-07:00Early on in this debate, you said human beings are...Early on in this debate, you said human beings are modes not substances. Thus, as the parts change, a different being comes to exist. To borrow an illustration from Greg Koukl, if you replace every piece of wood on the deck of a house, do you have the same deck afterwards? Not really. Although it may look identical to the original deck, the parts are different, and there is no inner substance with which to retain identity.<br /><br />By the time an infant has become a toddler and obtained the present capacity to begin making deliberate moral decisions, he technically no longer has the same brain that he did as an infant. Throughout the growing process, too many cells have died and been replaced to constitute the same organ. So why exactly do we protect fetuses that have reached the conscious point in brain development, when those are not the same brain structures that they will be using as human persons?<br /><br />Furthermore, to say that the structures necessary for personhood first become present at this point is really not true. From the moment of conception, those structures are part of this new human being, embedded in their DNA. The embryo’s cells are functioning together as a whole organism towards the continued health and well-being of its body as a whole, building these structures from the very moment it came to be. Think of it more like a picture from a Polaroid camera that has just been printed. We can’t see the image yet, but it’s there from the start.<br /><br />So now I’ve reached what I believe to be the most confusing aspect of your position. Since we can’t pinpoint exactly when personhood begins, but we are certain that both fetuses and newborns lack some of the important properties of personhood, why can’t we draw the line after birth? In your earlier posts, you said that because an infant is actively heading towards personhood, we now feel inclined to love it as a person, but is this really sufficient? At any point on from conception, the embryo is actively heading towards both consciousness and personhood. This is what the DNA structures that you cherish so much are driving it to do. Since the structures required for personhood are neither present at conception or birth, what is morally wrong with infanticide? Sure, we typically don’t feel inclined to practice infanticide, but what objective reason is there to say that someone ought not to?<br /><br />I know I have mentioned this already, but I don’t believe I’ve seen an answer other than most peoples’ moral intuitions draw them away from infanticide. Peter Singer, in his book Practical Ethics, infamously defends the position that the conservative approach for personhood is that abortion should be allowed until thirty days after birth. Although, I am appalled by Singer’s conclusions, I would have to say that his case is probably the most consistent abortion-choice position out there.<br /><br />I’m not saying that moral intuitions are useless when trying to determine the truth, but I think Singer rightly points out that if there is not a rational argument behind them, we must follow the logic wherever it takes us, regardless of how appalling the conclusions we reach are.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1442827238174603755.post-73647394584882460232011-04-26T12:37:34.463-07:002011-04-26T12:37:34.463-07:00Also, following your logic, I don’t understand why...Also, following your logic, I don’t understand why you believe that consciousness is an immaterial property. Since it is related to brain activity, wouldn’t it have to follow that it can be explained in scientific terms (although at this point in time we are yet unable to do so)? I also don’t understand what you mean by consciousness is the center of your worldview. Exactly how did you reach the conclusion that consciousness bears such weight in the meaning of life? Furthermore, how do you know that this conclusion is valid or that there is a meaning to life?<br /><br />I understand your distinction between consciousness and personhood; I do not, however, understand why you are choosing to give rights to the fetus once its first primitive stages of consciousness develop.<br /><br />“Given the difficulty of nailing down, let alone detecting, personhood, I suggested that it would be safest, if we didn’t want to violate the rights of a person, that we treat a fetus, after the structures necessary for personhood and capable of consciousness first developed, as if it were a person, because we don’t know how to draw the line any better than that. Is that clear? You may not agree with me, but do you understand me?”<br /><br />It would seem to me that personhood in the view of most abortion-choicers is self-awareness and the ability to make deliberate, moral decisions about the world around you. Most philosophers agree that this is what separates us from animals. Now, if I understand this correctly, you are saying that we ought to grant the non-person, conscious fetus the rights of a person in order to err on the side of caution. Because the brain structures necessary for personhood are now present, this is the best way to draw the line between persons and non-persons.<br /><br />However, I do not follow this logic. The brain structures necessary for personhood are not present at this point. A third trimester fetus and a newborn infant are completely incapable of making deliberate moral decisions about their surroundings. Their brains (while functional) are simply too underdeveloped. In fact, the best research to date indicates that an infant does not become aware of the fact that it is a separate entity from its mother until more than a month after birth. Conscious memories from infancy to roughly two years of age are not retained in adults, and thus, I believe your rejection of the substance view of human beings defeats your own argument here.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1442827238174603755.post-23169047906297789452011-04-26T12:36:10.624-07:002011-04-26T12:36:10.624-07:00Jerry,
I apologize if I offended you in anything ...Jerry,<br /><br />I apologize if I offended you in anything I wrote. I did not intend to put any words in your mouth or attack any straw men. Rather, I found that based on what you had written, these were logical inferences to draw and the relevant issues that needed to be addressed. In the same way, I do not believe you have done a very good job of addressing the primary questions that I have posed to you, but I think this is rather the result of the fact that we are both looking at the issue from drastically different perspectives.<br /><br />So I accept your suggestion that we specify what questions we want answered in our rebuttals. I will use this next series of posts to address each part of your previous rebuttals with your questions at the end. I will also post my questions for you.<br /><br />First, I do not think it was a mistake for you to mention the fact that you are an atheist. It is important for me to understand where you are grounding your claims about moral truth if I am to understand how you are drawing your conclusions.<br /><br />However, I don’t understand how you can say that you are a materialist about life but not consciousness. In a nutshell what I hear you saying is that you are completely rejecting the substance view of human beings. We have no essential nature that maintains our identity over time. Life can only be explained in the scientific sense, and thus we are constructed things like cars and houses.<br /><br />I don’t see how this follows that the soul is therefore non-existent. Science can neither prove nor disprove its existence. It may be true that you see no reason to suppose that the soul exists, but this does not mean that scientific facts about the physical processes of life disprove its existence. In the same way, science cannot prove the existence of dark energy, the big bang, and macroevolution. These are theories based on scientific evidence that we can observe, but cannot be regarded as absolute fact. So do I disagree about Watson and Crick? No. I do not, however, believe that the science of DNA shows that the soul does not exist.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1442827238174603755.post-28696614639790395092011-04-25T15:38:11.040-07:002011-04-25T15:38:11.040-07:00That’s my answer. My questions for you are:
1) In...That’s my answer. My questions for you are:<br /><br />1) In my Russian assassin story, given the choice of one day with your full mental capacities versus a lifetime of biological life lacking only that which a functioning brain provides, which would you choose? If you choose the conscious day over the unconscious lifetime, do you agree that consciousness is value-giving?<br /><br />2) Assuming you chose consciousness over unconsciousness, do you think your choice is reliant on transcendent values, which I take to mean roughly God’s opinion of what’s valuable, or might the value of having a conscious mental life be immanent in the experience, and not depend on any outside standard?<br /><br />3) Do you disagree that Watson and Crick (the discoverers of DNA’s structure) and their successors cracked the secret of life? If not, why not?<br /><br />4) You said “I do not disagree with you about the nature of DNA, or that Aristotle was incorrect about some of his theories.” Take the human and monkey fertilized eggs I discussed. Can you say how the human cell is different from the monkey’s in such a way that we understand why it has human rights, but without using Aristotle’s concepts of substance and natural potential? If not, can you defend the use of these concepts to describe a single cell in a world where molecular biology is true?<br /><br />5) In my version of the comatose patient story (with the regenerated cortex) do you think, when he wakes up, he’s the same person as before? And do you think it would be wrong to pull the plug instead of ordering the treatment in the first place? Why?<br /><br />I’m not asking you to answer all these at once, but if you’re going to demand explanations of me, please make an effort to reciprocate. Thanks Jay. And if anybody else wants to take a shot at answering my questions (Scott?), be my, or rather LTI’s, guest.Jerry Lamehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04730167055241745938noreply@blogger.com