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One of the difficult things about medicine is the sheer quantity of information there is to learn. People can argue about whether you need to know the finer points of biochem, genetics, etc, but once you get to clinical years a great deal of the information is quite important (though perhaps...

Haha, that paper is great fun. I love this bit in the foot notes: Just as liberal feminists are frequently content with a minimal agenda of legal and social equality for women and ``pro-choice'', so liberal (and even some socialist) mathematicians are often content to work within the...

Yeah, I agree with the way you characterise the situation. Even if consciousness is present in all things it may still be possible to argue that only consciousness of a certain kind warrants models moral consideration - for example, note the difference between a hazy sensation of light, pain...

But that was the linchpin of my hypothetical: that it is possible for the ARAS to be (functionally) destroyed, but not irreparably so. Thus like the embryo an individual can lack the neural architecture required for consciousness but may have a genetically encoded capacity for cells to create...

I don't think anyone claimed that low socioeconomic status (SES) is the only cause of depression. However, it is reasonable to suggest that it plays a role, in which case the trend one would expect is a greater proportion of depressed individuals in the low SES demographic. In fact, this is...

I was watching some clips related to the psychiatrist/philosopher R. D. Laing (<3) and thought that this one was worth sharing. It only just touches the surface of the relevant issues but it is interesting nonetheless. R. D. Laing on the Politics of Psychology

Heya Bradcube, great to see you posting. There are certainly a lot of tie-ins here - all aspects of philosophy are ultimately interconnected, and interdependent. Many thinkers have observed how ethics depends on our theories/metaphysics of things like free will, personal identity...

Youtube wasn't working for me the other day when this was posted. It's a great little video. It reminds me somewhat of a philosopher Thomas Nagel who wrote a book 'The View from Nowhere' in which he examines some of the incongruities between our self-centred, subjective perspective and a...

Thank you for providing an option which allows us to escape commodity fetishism. That is all.

Terminology can get messy here. I was viewing damaged/destroyed as amounting to much the same thing. In the former case (damaged) parts of the original ARAS no longer exist and some remain, while in the latter case (destroyed) none of it exists. However, I was asuming that the functional...

Could have been a strong contender for the Darwin awards.

The ARAS isn't there if you destroy it. Parts of it may remain, certainly, but these parts are not architecturally sufficient for consciousness. What do you mean when you say that 'the ARAS is still there'?

Fair enough. Perhaps that is the right kind of distinction. But consider another hypothetical: Suppose that in the future we develop an extremely advanced kind of brain surgery in which we are to revive a specific part of the ascending reticular activating system (ARAS - a set of brain stem...

Certainly, such a distinction can be drawn - but what is its moral significance? Consider the following hypothetical (which is admittedly unrealistic, though its validity, depending on your taste in ethical theory, likely depends on its mere [meta?]physical possibility): You lie unconscious...

But the embryo does has the ability to become conscious given the right conditions. The nature of these conditions differs, of course, from those that are required for the comatose or the sucker-punched to become conscious (though they could be similar, given an appropriate hypothetical). The...

I wouldn't quite say that I missed it, I simply put the consideration aside (by ignoring issues related to "the way in which one judges what counts as an instance of human life"). I was simply defending a judaeo-christian style ethics from straw man caricatures. Assuming such a religious...

Not really. Regardless of whether a given embryo is tagged for destruction or not, to end its 'life' for the purpose of medical research is to use it as a means to an end.

Most of them will be, certainly (though tbh I can't remember the last time I saw the relevant stats).

The devil is going to hate me for pointing this out but, to be fair, god is choosing life too when it comes to certain forms of cell research. The main difference - apart from the way in which one judges what counts as an instance of human life - is that you are espousing a more utilitarian...

Note in the text of the legislation: 'substantially intoxicated' (whatever that means) It's a definitely a difficult area of law though. It's hard to set it up, perhaps impossible given that so much is based on hearsay, so that you increase the success rate when prosecuting offenders while...