On Wednesday, June 5, 2002, at 05:42 PM, Jeffrey Fisher wrote:
>
> On Wednesday, June 5, 2002, at 05:39 PM, Marta Russell wrote:
>> How does Singer know when the moment of "conception of self" occurs?
>> He doesn't. He's full of BS.
>>
>
> i fear such stuff is more measurable than you would like to admit. in
> any event, leaving the limit cases aside, are you disputing that there
> are some living beings clearly lacking self-conception and, on the
> other end, some clearly exhibiting a sense of self? in that case, why
> is it even necessary to find such a "moment" in the abstract?
>
>
meant to send some of the below with the above, but accidentally hit send.
"Before about two years of age, no one has experiences that can be consciously recalled in later life. Consistent with my interpretation, this period of "infant amnesia" stops at about the same time that children begin to show self-recognition. As would be expected, the onset of an autobiographical memory only begins with the emergence of self-conception." http://www.sciam.com/1998/1198intelligence/1198gallup.html
also see at least one of the entries on the following page:
"Mirror recognition has been used as a sign of self-awareness. Monkeys exposed to mirrors certainly look in them and seem to find them fascinating, but this alone does not imply self-recognition. To test for self-recognition, scientists use the "mark test" in which a mark is placed on an animal's forehead, without them knowing it. Now when animals look in the mirror, will they realize that the image they see with the strange mark on the forehead is them? If they do, they will touch their own foreheads. If they do not, they will touch the mirror. Human children beginning about 18-months of age "pass" this test (that is, touch their foreheads), as do chimpanzees and orangutans, but at an older age. Most gorillas seem not to understand that they are looking at themselves in the mirror, and, to my knowledge, no monkey, even the very bright capuchin, "pass" this test." http://www.pbs.org/saf/1108/hotline/hbjorklund.htm
my understanding in general is that it is pretty generally agreed that 15-21 months is where this typically happens in human children. i haven't found a convenient quotation from singer, but i would imagine he works with some similar figure.
now you can argue about this as a criterion, BUT here is where singer is, so to speak, dead on, in that he's identified precisely the potential for sophistry involved in, say, brain-death. see, for example, this review of a recent collection of singer's work:
'Consider the revolution over the past 30 years in our definition of death. Following the famous Harvard Brain Death Committee report of 1968, the U.S. (and since then most other countries) has adopted brain death, or permanent loss of all brain function, as the criterion for declaring a person legally dead. This radical change in our definition, which had previously held that death occurred when the heart stopped beating, transpired with almost no opposition despite its revolutionary nature, and has been hailed as one of the great achievements of bioethics. What is not so widely known, Singer points out in one chilling chapter, is that this redefinition coincided historically with the advent of organ transplants — just nine months before the Harvard report came out, Dr. Christiaan Barnard performed the first successful heart transplant. This change in the definition of death has meant that “warm, breathing, pulsating human beings” can have “their hearts and other organs . . . cut out of their bodies and given to strangers.”'
<http://www.laweekly.com/ink/01/23/wls-wertheim.shtml>
makes yoy wonder who the real doctor deaths are . . . if this sort of thing is to be something other than mere sophistry, we need to take it seriously in terms of our ethics, and singer is doing that. i really don't like singer's utilitarian approach (which i imagine is what luke likes about him ;-), but he's onto something very important, in any event, and is probably one of the few people in the world trying to develop a thorough and rigorous ethics that isn't always being broken by "exceptions," like allowing harvesting of organs at brain-death, for example.
j