On Ending The Overall Abortion Debate
A Public Domain Document
(may be freely copied/posted anywhere)
The debate can be won by the pro-choice group. The Internet was scoured to find as many different anti-abortion arguments as possible --be warned, some of them could be called "raw", and not even Religion-based arguments are excluded. The purpose of creating the list was to enable full exposure of all the flaws in those arguments, because all of them are indeed flawed. The result is now available for widespread use.
It is possible that no amount of facts and logic can cause some abortion opponents to change their minds. There is, after all, a particular and perfectly natural foundation for a faulty opinion, a foundation that requires extreme effort to overcome, before a different opinion can be formed. But most people are simply too lazy to bother; they would rather keep their opinions, no matter how invalid, and no matter what the consequences....
In this document that foundation is revealed to be "prejudice", and one of the possible consequences is nothing less than the death of most of the human species. If that isn't enough to encourage abortion opponents --who claim to be "pro-life"-- to introspect their opinions carefully, then nothing will do it, and Society should simply and forever afterward ignore them (like members of the Flat Earth Society are basically ignored).
The order in which these refutations are presented is moderately important. Certain items contain information that is referenced in later items; the reader is assumed to have seen the earlier information. #1 should not be skipped, therefore, and, ideally, they all should be read in order.
As a kind of "quick reference", it could be pointed out that many anti-abortion arguments assume that an unborn human qualifies as a person, and therefore has a right to life. For refutations about right-to-life, see #3 and #38. For "secular" refutations about personhood, see #8, #9, #10, #11, #12, #14, #16, #26, #28, #41, and #42. For refutations about personhood based on the notion that an unborn human might have a soul, see #8, #23, #27, and #29 (and, differently, #30 and #32).
For those who claim an unborn human is "innocent", see #27. For those who call it a "human being", see #17. And for those who call it a "baby", see #33.
1. "All life is special. It is unfortunate that we have to kill other things to survive, but killing any other thing at any other time should be avoided." UNPROVED, because we have no reason to think life is actually that special, two different ways.
First, and more speculative, is the "panspermia" hypothesis, which is as yet unproved, but looking more and more possible all the time:
journalofcosmology.com/PanspermiaHara.pdf
That particular paper describes how the giant dinosaur-killing meteor made an impact at Chixulub (in Mexico) big enough to splash Earthly life-forms to other star systems, as far as twenty light-years away by now. Well, in South Africa is an even bigger and much older meteor crater known as the "Vredevoort Ring"; stars about a thousand light-years away could have received life-forms from Earth by now, as a result of that impact. And this particular life-form is well-equipped to survive the trip:
wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinococcus_radiodurans
Meanwhile, the Galaxy is roughly three times the age of the Sun, so it is possible that life first arose on some other planet ten billion years ago, and eventually made its way to Earth. We do know that life-forms left traces on Earth almost as soon as the just-formed planet had cooled down enough for the oceans to stop boiling.
bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/madeforlife
So, either "abiogenesis" can happen in perhaps half a billion years, or life simply immigrated after a long prior development elsewhere, and typically arrives at habitable planets throughout the Galaxy, almost as soon as they become habitable, with fresh meteoric "vehicles" routinely being sent into interstellar space by events such as Chixulub, also happening all across the Galaxy. So, if life is as common as that implies, then, no, it isn't particularly special...perhaps no more special than a natural-arch rock formation.
wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_arch
Second, the more we study exactly how life works at the molecular level, the more it looks like something that might be called "natural nanotechnology". There is nothing fundamentally mysterious about it! Not even its complexity is mysterious; it is well-known that in an energy-rich environment, water naturally moves uphill (via evaporation and rainfall), and it is also known that complex things can, at random, become more complex:
wired.com/wiredscience/2009/05/ribonucleotides/
As a result of such studies, and other studies about such things as "How does the human brain function?", and, assuming our technology keeps advancing,
intel.com/ ... /moores-law-embedded-technology
we expect to be in a position to, probably within two decades, build machines that would qualify as "intelligent life-forms" in every ordinary sense of both "intelligent" and "life". They will be able to forage for food and other things:
economist.com/node/16095401
They will be able to reproduce:
britannica.com/ ... /von-Neumann-machine
Also, they will be able to interact with us humans much like we interact with each other:
ibm.com/innovation/us/watson
and they will have "common sense":
latimes.com/2002/jun/10/business/fi-techextra10
such that if one of them was communicating with you remotely, you won't be able to figure out that it was an artificial intelligence:
popsci.com/technology/ ... /chatbot-posing-13-year-old-wins-largest-ever-turing-test
Such features of artificial intelligence will come to pass partly because we know how to make those features evolve:
idi.ntnu.no/~keithd/downloads/newai-short.pdf
Human creativity can be expected to be matched (or perhaps exceeded) by artificial intelligences:
thinkartificial.org/artificial-creativity/
And we will even be able to ensure that they have Free Will, because, while that is something that requires access to utter randomness (thereby precluding "Determinism"), the Universe conveniently makes utter randomess available at the level of Quantum Mechanics:
physique. ... /Bell/references/Aspect_Nature.pdf
So, what exactly is it that makes life --or even intelligent life-- "special"? Not the mere say-so of humans, certainly!
Imagine an artificial intelligence able to construct --even mass-produce-- a small and limited version of itself, yet possessing the ability to acquire parts and "grow", such that the small electronic machine eventually becomes another complete and separate artificial intelligence. This small electronic machine would be very much like an unborn human, except that it is seeking parts "in the wild" instead of obtaining them via a womb/placenta.
Let us assume the small machine takes nine months of parts-acquisition to achieve the mental abilities of a newborn human, a couple more years of parts-acquisition to achieve the mental abilities of a human toddler, and perhaps fifteen years after that to become equal to an adult human. That small "growing" electronic machine/life-form is going to be referenced in several parts of the text that follows....
A Public Domain Document
(may be freely copied/posted anywhere)
The debate can be won by the pro-choice group. The Internet was scoured to find as many different anti-abortion arguments as possible --be warned, some of them could be called "raw", and not even Religion-based arguments are excluded. The purpose of creating the list was to enable full exposure of all the flaws in those arguments, because all of them are indeed flawed. The result is now available for widespread use.
It is possible that no amount of facts and logic can cause some abortion opponents to change their minds. There is, after all, a particular and perfectly natural foundation for a faulty opinion, a foundation that requires extreme effort to overcome, before a different opinion can be formed. But most people are simply too lazy to bother; they would rather keep their opinions, no matter how invalid, and no matter what the consequences....
In this document that foundation is revealed to be "prejudice", and one of the possible consequences is nothing less than the death of most of the human species. If that isn't enough to encourage abortion opponents --who claim to be "pro-life"-- to introspect their opinions carefully, then nothing will do it, and Society should simply and forever afterward ignore them (like members of the Flat Earth Society are basically ignored).
The order in which these refutations are presented is moderately important. Certain items contain information that is referenced in later items; the reader is assumed to have seen the earlier information. #1 should not be skipped, therefore, and, ideally, they all should be read in order.
As a kind of "quick reference", it could be pointed out that many anti-abortion arguments assume that an unborn human qualifies as a person, and therefore has a right to life. For refutations about right-to-life, see #3 and #38. For "secular" refutations about personhood, see #8, #9, #10, #11, #12, #14, #16, #26, #28, #41, and #42. For refutations about personhood based on the notion that an unborn human might have a soul, see #8, #23, #27, and #29 (and, differently, #30 and #32).
For those who claim an unborn human is "innocent", see #27. For those who call it a "human being", see #17. And for those who call it a "baby", see #33.
1. "All life is special. It is unfortunate that we have to kill other things to survive, but killing any other thing at any other time should be avoided." UNPROVED, because we have no reason to think life is actually that special, two different ways.
First, and more speculative, is the "panspermia" hypothesis, which is as yet unproved, but looking more and more possible all the time:
journalofcosmology.com/PanspermiaHara.pdf
That particular paper describes how the giant dinosaur-killing meteor made an impact at Chixulub (in Mexico) big enough to splash Earthly life-forms to other star systems, as far as twenty light-years away by now. Well, in South Africa is an even bigger and much older meteor crater known as the "Vredevoort Ring"; stars about a thousand light-years away could have received life-forms from Earth by now, as a result of that impact. And this particular life-form is well-equipped to survive the trip:
wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinococcus_radiodurans
Meanwhile, the Galaxy is roughly three times the age of the Sun, so it is possible that life first arose on some other planet ten billion years ago, and eventually made its way to Earth. We do know that life-forms left traces on Earth almost as soon as the just-formed planet had cooled down enough for the oceans to stop boiling.
bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/madeforlife
So, either "abiogenesis" can happen in perhaps half a billion years, or life simply immigrated after a long prior development elsewhere, and typically arrives at habitable planets throughout the Galaxy, almost as soon as they become habitable, with fresh meteoric "vehicles" routinely being sent into interstellar space by events such as Chixulub, also happening all across the Galaxy. So, if life is as common as that implies, then, no, it isn't particularly special...perhaps no more special than a natural-arch rock formation.
wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_arch
Second, the more we study exactly how life works at the molecular level, the more it looks like something that might be called "natural nanotechnology". There is nothing fundamentally mysterious about it! Not even its complexity is mysterious; it is well-known that in an energy-rich environment, water naturally moves uphill (via evaporation and rainfall), and it is also known that complex things can, at random, become more complex:
wired.com/wiredscience/2009/05/ribonucleotides/
As a result of such studies, and other studies about such things as "How does the human brain function?", and, assuming our technology keeps advancing,
intel.com/ ... /moores-law-embedded-technology
we expect to be in a position to, probably within two decades, build machines that would qualify as "intelligent life-forms" in every ordinary sense of both "intelligent" and "life". They will be able to forage for food and other things:
economist.com/node/16095401
They will be able to reproduce:
britannica.com/ ... /von-Neumann-machine
Also, they will be able to interact with us humans much like we interact with each other:
ibm.com/innovation/us/watson
and they will have "common sense":
latimes.com/2002/jun/10/business/fi-techextra10
such that if one of them was communicating with you remotely, you won't be able to figure out that it was an artificial intelligence:
popsci.com/technology/ ... /chatbot-posing-13-year-old-wins-largest-ever-turing-test
Such features of artificial intelligence will come to pass partly because we know how to make those features evolve:
idi.ntnu.no/~keithd/downloads/newai-short.pdf
Human creativity can be expected to be matched (or perhaps exceeded) by artificial intelligences:
thinkartificial.org/artificial-creativity/
And we will even be able to ensure that they have Free Will, because, while that is something that requires access to utter randomness (thereby precluding "Determinism"), the Universe conveniently makes utter randomess available at the level of Quantum Mechanics:
physique. ... /Bell/references/Aspect_Nature.pdf
So, what exactly is it that makes life --or even intelligent life-- "special"? Not the mere say-so of humans, certainly!
Imagine an artificial intelligence able to construct --even mass-produce-- a small and limited version of itself, yet possessing the ability to acquire parts and "grow", such that the small electronic machine eventually becomes another complete and separate artificial intelligence. This small electronic machine would be very much like an unborn human, except that it is seeking parts "in the wild" instead of obtaining them via a womb/placenta.
Let us assume the small machine takes nine months of parts-acquisition to achieve the mental abilities of a newborn human, a couple more years of parts-acquisition to achieve the mental abilities of a human toddler, and perhaps fifteen years after that to become equal to an adult human. That small "growing" electronic machine/life-form is going to be referenced in several parts of the text that follows....
