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Illegal Beings: Human Clones
Your lucky day
libfemme ( 10/02/2003, 02:21:19 )Pat, if my thought processes followed the same path as yours I could satisfy you in a nanosecond and we would understand one another. But I think very differently from you so it is going to take much longer to reach that same point. For one thing I tend to think very literally. My initital reaction to the word ‘planet’ is more or less a rock. If you say “Earth” I think of the terms Earth science and geology. If I used the word Earth I really would be using it in the limited sense of an inert entity, the chemical components from the iron core to the outer atmosphere exclusive of the biomass.However I am aware not every one uses the term in that way. A significant number of people, including many biologists will use the word “Earth” to include the biomass on the planet as well the planet itself. That’s fine with me. I can work with any definition just so long as we come up with one. .Why do I make this distinction about the definition of “Earth”? Because the word need which you used in your first post refers only to a living thing. Only living things have needs. Inert objects don’t. Inert objects stay the same or change as the consequence of impersonal laws of physics. The word ‘good’ doesn’t relate to a lump of iron, or a nugget of gold or a diamond. What good does research do a lump of graphite? Nothing does a ‘good” to graphite. The word is meaningless in that context. Silcon and nickel, basalt and granite, volcanoes and continents don’t have needs. They are not alive by any meaningful definition of the word ‘alive.’Living things, on the other hand, “need”certain conditions in order to remain living. Inert things don’t need anything to remain inert.Therefore saying a planet needs anything is a nonsense phrase to me. Unless you redefine the word.planet to include the biomass on that planet. If you make the statement, as an example, that oxygen is necessary for humans to live that is a true statement. It is not however true that the Earth needs oxygen. What good is oxygen to the planet earth? It rusts iron for one thing. It creates ozone that blocks out all that natural ultraviolet radiation for another. A case could be made from the point of view of the Planet that free oxygen is not ‘good ‘ for it, if the good is defined as remaining in an unchanged state.However, human beings definitively do benefit from oxygen. Oxygen does human beings a lot of good!So is it beneficial have oxygen in the atmosphere or good old natural ammonia and methane?You see the very expansive subject ‘this planet we call home’ is so general as to include mutually opposing entities. There is no united planet, one living entity. There are lots of competing living entities and non-living entities tossed into that phrase you so calvalierly dash off as ‘this planet called home.”If I don’t take you literally, but metaphorically, however, I can come up with another sense of your statement. If I take you to mean; what good does this research do for Patrick and for that aspect of Patrick’s physical environment that sustains his life, I suspect I am getting closer to the crux of your argument.But if I make that statement to you I doubt you would agree. Because I don’t believe you know exactly what you mean by the statement yourself. It seems to include contradictions and I don’t believe you either know or want to know that. And there is just no polite way I can state that opinion and be clear to you.If you harbor contradictory conclusion, then how in the world can I, who am outside you, hope to understand your meaning any better than you do?For instance I still do know understand what you position is on “civilization”. Are you in favor or oppose? I mean just putting aside the substantial issue of how you define civilization, whatever it is to you is it good or bad? You seem to give me two very different evaluations on its value.On the way hand you disparage it’s arrival and on the other fear it’s departure.When you say ‘nothing but trouble” that leads me to believe that civilization is in your estimate bad. Then immediately after you suggest that if continued along this path of civilization we will descend into poison, murder and death the antithesis of civilization, and that would be a bad outcome. Is your fear that civilization will continue or that it will end?You have specifically asked me for help on this issue. You mention teacher who failed you that regard. So I’ll take you at your word and step out on a limb here.Life times are lived in decades not millions of year. If you feel that life is not worth living because the species will be not exist in a million years you are living too far ahead in the future. Live in the moment. Or at least the next week!A million years is plenty of time to find a solution to the end of mankind as a species. In fact, Patrick even the dinosaurs found a solution to the problem of extinction. They evolved. Dinosaurs aren’t dead. Their genes live on in modern birds. They even live on in you.Species change. Change is not death. In fact the definition of living includes the necessity of change. If you aren’t changing you aren’t alive, Pat.You fear change. Or at least the thought of it depresses you. Might I suggest two possibilities out of this?1. A fear of change may be a rational response to an inability to adapt to change because you simply do not have the physical health to do so. Health conditions like thyroid problems, neurotransmitter imbalances and a host of other things can be experienced as depression. 2. Another cause of depression is not physiological but experiencial. People who are undergoing life threatening situations, the death of a loved one, physical or psychological abuse in childhood etc. go through bouts of major depression.Since I cannot possible know you anything in the world could be going on in your life. I do not diagnosis I only suggest.If your position, however, is purely philosophical my answer is Man is the measure of all things. That which benefits Man is the good. That which does not, is at best irrelevant.Bacteria might not think that, if bacteria could think, but I am not a bacteria. Neither, Patrick are you.
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