When does life begin and when does a fetus become human? The current arguments on abortion are faulty because they begin with the errant assumptions of physicalism—that consciousness is an emergent property of matter.
I’ve seen as many arguments as I can imagine—a fetus is just a clump of cells, or a baby is not a human (or even alive) until certain levels of brain activity and viability are achieved, but is this true? When does real life begin?
The idea that certain parts must develop (even to the point of extremes) that an embryo is not really a baby, alive, or even human yet is in error. A body is not made of parts like a car, but grows from within. In fact, an embryo has the code, yet has has no parts. Those are arbitrary demarcations for our understanding only. But a baby isn’t made of parts. That’s not the nature of any organism—only our scientific way of looking at them. There is a big difference between assemblage and growth. We are the same creature as the zygote, in a different phase of replication. The code is the creature that links it to consciousness.
Neurons are not parts. Cells are not parts. They are the inner structure created through self similarity, or cell division. You could easily say the fully grown human is still the original zygote. It is the same entity and code, just with more inner structure, more complexity. The human being is still the zygote. And the multiple cells are the inner differentiation of the original entity. We are the exact same original throughout. We were not assembled by bringing parts together. We are the original entity.
Life begins before conception and therefore, during conception and after it. It is a process, a continuum.
Abortion arguments on both sides are based on the assumptions that life begins through biology, but idealism clearly shows that biology begins with life—that we are not the emergence consciousness but “in-consciousness”. We are a process of replication where birth and death may seem like points on a page, but really contains the entire book.
The whole abortion argument is based on the physicalist paradigm, which is false—that consciousness is an emergent property of matter, though it is the other way around. It seems there are 2 camps on this issue and herein lies the real argument—taking responsibility for your actions or not—and the arguments are built from both sides on this responsibility.
TheCommonAtheist 