Jamie_L

Still formulating opinions - please bear with.

At the tail end of life, it is clearly possible for a human being to be functioning biologically, but to be mentally "dead" (i.e. brain dead).

Thus, there is a morally significant dividing line between being simply "physically" alive and being mentally alive.

I propose that there is a similar situation at the beginning of life. That at early stages an embrio is physically alive but not mentally alive. Thus, I feel a similar morally significant line can be drawn. It happens that this line is drawn based on the physical nature of the embrio, but it is a line that is quite different from lines drawn with respect to growing a tooth, losing an arm, or being of some ethnic group.

The obvious grey area is the whole issue of drunken stupors, comatose individuals, etc. Are the mentally alive? I would say yes. They have a mental identity which has existed, which is being maintained, and which will exist again. I just came up with that, so it may not fully reflect what I'm trying to get across. Clearly, this "mental" aliveness is not necessarily contingent on adult-level cognition.

But that seems to me to be the nutshell version of my position.

Jamie

dk

dk: First, let us get the biological facts straight.


Clearly monozygote twins interact autonomously with their environment to demonstrate a survival instinct. Scrutinizer’s Philosophy Guide defines the blastula as human tissue, but not a human organism. The definition of an organism follows:
----------
Main Entry: organism ; Pronunciation: 'or-g&-"ni-z&m ; Function: noun ; Date: circa 1774
1 : a complex structure of interdependent and subordinate elements whose relations and properties are largely determined by their function in the whole
2 : an individual constituted to carry on the activities of life by means of organs separate in function but mutually dependent : a living being.
---------- Source: © 2002 by Merriam-Webster
Yes, a human blastocyst is human tissue, but the question is whether a blastula is an organism capable of supporting the essential life functions. If the answer is Yes then a human embryo must be a living organism (human life), and If the answer is no then by what criteria does a human embryo become alive. To diminish the status afforded a human embryo because it’s pluripotent defies logic and reason; logic dictates greater abilities be afforded greater status, not less.

Personhood is a legal term that extends to all constituents government protections. The US was concieved under the proposition that all people are created equal (under the law). The government also gives special protection to babies, children, teenagers, women, old people, and targeted minorities because they
1) have been systematically oppressed by social institutions
2) vulnerable
3) dependent

If all people are created equal then why is one fetus given the best medical care possible, and another perfectly healthy fetus gets destroyed?

[ April 18, 2002: Message edited by: dk ]</p>

dk

Absent brain activity a body becomes a corpse. Why? because without a brain it lacks the capacity to function as a whole. On the other hand if a person looses a leg or a kidney, the body can still function as a whole, so the person is alive.

bd-from-kg

Jamie_L:

Well, here is one of my increasingly infrequent posts to this thread. Unfortunately (except for some of Scrutinizer’s comments) nothing very new or interesting (to me) has been appearing lately, but I’ll try to comment on whatever I do find worth replying to.
_______________________________________

Response to April 10 post:

As I explain below, you do not have a “sense of personhood” in any relevant sense. In deciding who is a person, the only intellectually defensible procedure is to try to identify the relevant moral principles that you subscribe to and work from there.

Let’s restate this correctly. Murder is wrong by definition: murder is the wrongful taking of a human life. What you were “raised with” was a belief that it is wrong to kill human beings in some circumstances but not in others. Now let’s say that in later life you decide to examine this belief. If you started by saying, “I have a pretty clear sense of when it’s wrong to kill human beings; now let’s see if I can find some general principles which, if true, would forbid taking human lives under just those circumstance where I now think it’s wrong and permit it in just those circumstances where I now think it’s OK”, this would indeed be intellectually corrupt. Instead you should start by asking “What is the reason for thinking it wrong in general to take a human life? What are the moral justifications for the exceptions?” Of course (IMHO) the first question is pretty much a no-brainer; the real challenge comes in understanding the justifications for the exceptions. In the process, you might well come to realize that the justifications for some of the exceptions are invalid (or, what comes to the same thing in practice, that you don’t accept them). Or you might find that the moral principles have been applied sloppily or have been imperfectly understood, with the result that some cases now thought to be murder really aren’t or vice-versa.

Now when you say:

I interpret this as meaning that what you’re doing is essentially like the first procedure described above rather than the second, especially in light of your earlier comment:

My point is that you’re looking for a criterion for personhood that fits your preconceived notions of who is a “person” rather than looking for moral principles that underlie this concept.

Now if you were trying to find a criterion for being, say, an “automobile”, this would be reasonable. The term “automobile” is just a convenient term used to denote certain things; it is essentially descriptive. Defining “automobile” is just a matter of figuring out just what features we want to call “essential” or “intrinsic”, thereby sharpening our terminology for the sake of communicating better. But “person” is a completely different kind of concept from “automobile”. As we’re using the term, a “person” is any individual entitled to civil rights. This is not an intuitive concept, nor is it (like “automobile”) merely a convenient term designed to communicate information or ideas more efficiently. We do not have an “innate” or “intuitive” concept of who is entitled to civil rights; in fact, we don’t have an innate or intuitive concept that anyone is entitled to civil rights. This is a fairly high-level, abstract concept. Thus to determine who is entitled to civil rights we cannot appeal to intuition or “subconscious reactions” or any other such subjective criteria. And certainly not to whom I currently consider to be entitled to them. If everyone thought this way, anyone who does not own land would still be denied the right to vote. Women would not be allowed to own property. Blacks would still be slaves.

But that’s just the trouble. You do not have a “sense” of personhood, or at any rate not one that can be trusted. The “natural” tendency is to assign a lower status to anyone who is in any way different from ourselves or to people we are accustomed to treating as “equals”. The whole point of the principle embodied in the phrases “all men are created equal” or “equality under the law” is to counteract this natural tendency.

It seems that you’re “tending” toward the idea that perhaps those unborn individuals who most closely resemble you (or individuals you’re used to considering your “equals” under the law) should be given civil rights, while those who don’t should be denied them. But this is exactly the kind of thinking that the principle of equal treatment was set up to oppose and discourage. Blacks (especially the “pure” blacks brought over from Africa as the original slaves) were so different in appearance and behavior from the European settlers that many people thought it plausible that they weren’t entitled to civil rights. How is your thinking different in principle from theirs? You say that your criterion is somehow better than the criterion of skin color. But how is it superior if not morally superior? And to show that it’s morally superior you need to show that the criterion you propose is at least morally relevant. And this is exactly what you’re now arguing you don’t need to do. You’re saying “what difference does it make whether the presence of certain physical structures is morally relevant? They allow me to discriminate between those that I want to have civil rights and those that I don’t, and that’s all that matters.”

OK, I’m preparing a separate post on that now. Should be ready in a day or two; three at most.

As I commented earlier, we in fact regard a comatose patient who (so far as we know) has a chance to recover as fundamentally different from one who clearly does not. And in many cases this is not based on any identifiable difference in physical state (much less “structure”. Of course, there must be some difference in physical state, but in some cases at least it is quite subtle. If we were challenged to explain why this difference was morally significant, the only possible answer would be that it made a difference regarding future mental states of the patients involved. So a comatose patient is not deserving of rights simply by virtue of being a comatose patient.

As to babies, our emotional reaction to them can easily get in the way of what’s really going on. Suppose that we found that a certain identifiable subset of babies never changed; they remained in the exact physical and mental condition that they were in when they were born. Would they be “persons”? Well, they probably would be treated as “persons” because they would have human parents and would look like other babies. But we know that these factors are not morally significant. The demonstration is simple: (1) Imagine a baby that (per impossible did not have human parents but was otherwise just like any “normal” baby and destined to develop into a normal adult. Would it be a “person”? Of course. So having human parents is not morally relevant. (2) Imagine an individual that looked very noticeably different from a human baby, but had the same capabilities, both present and future, as a normal baby. IN other words, although it doesn’t look like a human baby, it acts just like one, and at every age it will act just like a normal human of that age. Would it be a person? of course. So appearance is not morally relevant.

And yet... Suppose that the “nondeveloping babies” described earlier did not have human parents and looked very noticeably different from “normal babies”. would we still regard them as “persons”? Of course not. The proof of this is simple: there are individuals with more current capabilities than newborn babies, but which won’t develop any further, and we do not treat them as persons. They’re called “animals”.

As to why we treat those rare babies who will never develop mentally beyond the level of a newborn as “persons”, but not animals who are more developed, I plan to discuss this on the thread promised earlier. But it is clear from the above cannot be that they actually have the qualities that cause us to give normal humans a fundamentally different legal status than animals, because they don’t. It is not possible to identify a single simple criterion for “personhood” such that everyone who has it is considered a person and everyone who doesn’t isn’t.

I agree.

__________________________________________

Response to April 16 post:
Obviously there is a distinction between being physically alive and mentally alive. But you are apparently counting as “mentally alive” individuals who are currently not capable of producing mental events but will be able to do so in the future (e.g., people who are comatose). And I gather that you are not including individuals who have been capable of producing mental events in the past but are not able to do so now and won’t be able to do so in the future. There is no symmetry involved here.

So I’m not sure what your point is.

Jerry Smith

bd:

Pardon me for trying to nose back in to my thread here. I know that it has been exasperating to you, trying to get me to understand the need for a unifying moral principle in our definition for granting rights.

You continue to hold that future potential for cognition is the unifying moral principle. You have admitted that you picked this principle, not only because it is something we do value about persons, but also because it includes those you feel should be extended rights, i.e. infants, zygotes, and individuals in comas.

I understand why you chose this quality. It is related to what we really do value over all else human: cognition.

The relationship between future cognition and actual present cognition is this: the first is a quality of the second. A sleeping person, an infant, and a person in a coma are all cognating at the level of a human, albeit without outward signs of it, and without inward consciousness of it. Human cognitive activities include many that are devoted to the future of an individuals cognition: learning, psychological development, remembering (or maintaining memories), maintaining personal traits, etc...

I hold that it is the cognition itself that is valuable, and future potential for cognition is only valuable insofar as is a result of present cognitive activity.

The question now comes down to whether the rights-giving value is present cognition, or future cognition. While structure still has importance (for knowing whether present cognition can take place in some cases), it becomes irrelevant to the moral principle of personhood. The question comes down to present versus future cognition.

I hold that what we actually value about people is their present cognition. Why should I accept a definition based on future cognition? In what way is it especially valuable except as a part of present cognition, to the extent that we should extend rights to an organism that has it, but no other quality we consider important?

I hope you will take time to answer.

bd-from-kg

Jerry:

Hold your horses. This is a reply to your April 13 post.

The “common sense” I refer to is basically common sense in interpreting my meaning. Obviously my criterion was not intended to exclude babies, so common sense suggests that it should be interpreted in such a way that it does not exclude babies.

I agree that, at the margin, the inclusion or exclusion of some individuals will inevitably be somewhat arbitrary. That’s no excuse for deliberately choosing a sloppy criterion that includes some individuals who are obviously not persons, especially when the reason they get included is that your criterion has nothing to do with the relevant characteristics. The tell-tale indication that something’s wrong with your criterion is not that Tim “slips in under the wire” by some technicality, but that he passes it with flying colors. According to your criterion, Tim isn’t even a marginal case! He’s absolutely, positively, a no-doubt-about-it person.

And it isn’t true that treating him as a person does no one harm. If someone decides to disconnect the IV, for example, under your criterion he’s guilty of murder and could be put into prison for a long stretch, or even executed. However, I certainly agree that extending legal protection to some individuals who don’t really “qualify” for it is vastly preferable to denying it to some who do. One can generally avoid negative consequences from the fact that a “nonqualifying” individual has been given legal protection by respecting his rights, but a person denied legal protection has no way to avoid the resulting harm. So we do want to err on the side of granting rights to some who don’t really qualify.

But that doesn’t justify using criteria that are clearly morally irrelevant, especially when the purpose is to exclude some who would qualify under appropriate, morally relevant criteria. The idea is to identify the moral principles that are the basis for our giving some individuals a special legal status and denying it to others. (If you’ve forgotten why this is important, which you really seem to have done, reread my posts on the principle of equality under the law in the <a href="http://iidb.org/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=52&t=000075&p=4" target="_blank">Abortion - Yes? No? Why?</a> thread; specifically my posts of March 27, 12:02PM and 1:45PM.)

OK, I was a little careless. I should have said “some recognized moral principles”.

It makes no sense to say that a moral principle is “well-recognized” but not “defined”. While a perfectly precise definition might be elusive or impossible, it must be possible for the principle to be stated clearly enough that anyone of normal intelligence can say in the vast majority of cases whether it applies or not; otherwise it cannot meaningfully be called a “moral principle”, much less a “well-recognized” one.

Like many of your comments lately, this looks very much like an attempt to allow completely arbitrary decisions as to who qualifies as a person. Unless you have some serious answer to my argument as to why this cannot be permitted without catastrophic consequences, all arguments that can be used to justify such arbirary decisions must be rejected out of hand.

But what I’ve been concerned to show is precisely that the moral principles that are widely accepted in our society and are relevant to this question require us to treat fetuses (and embryos for that matter) as persons. I am not trying to argue that personhood is something fundamentally different from what our values say it is; I’m saying that we must apply these values (i.e., moral principles) consistently.

You’re misunderstanding my argument. In a society that does not accept the principle of equal protection and the idea that rights inhere in individuals rather than being “given” to them by the government, there would be little point in arguing that fetuses should have civil rights. Such a society would have far more serious problems to deal with; in terms of individual rights it would be a lost cause anyway. (Of course one could argue in the abstract that such a society should respect the principle of equal treatment, etc., but this is a much harder row to hoe.) But fortunately our society does respect these principles. And for such a society it seems irresponsible and reckless to undermine these principles and risk the destruction of our precious, hard-won freedoms for the convenience of a few.

But what I have been arguing is precisely that it does have such a grounding. A careful examination of who we consider “persons” and why shows clearly that future cognition is considered a sufficient qualification for personhood in all cases except for fetuses.

It’s a little late in the day to be questioning the definition of “person” as an individual entitled to civil rights. In terms of this thread and the “Abortion” thread it spun off from, I made it clear on my very first post (on March 15) that this is what I meant by “person”. Moreover, this terminology is completely standard in discussions of abortion and many other “bioethics” issues.

Now as to what the Constitution means by “person” or what the Founding Fathers would say about the status of fetuses, I see little point in debating this at length. This is only relevant to the question of whether Roe v. Wade was decided correctly. There’s no room for doubt that the principle of equality under the law was believed in fervently by the Founding Fathers, and that they intended that the Constitution embody this principle insofar as it was possible in the conditions that prevailed at the time. The fact that women and blacks (among others) were not immediately granted the equal treatment that the principle demands doesn’t matter in the end: the acceptance of the principle itself eventually had this effect. That’s how moral principles work.

The Founders presumably agreed with the Catholic Church’s teaching about abortion (and would have agreed with its new teaching after it was learned that a new human life begins at conception) even though most of them weren’t Catholics and many weren’t Christians. But these teachings were based on the concept of a “soul”, which is of course a religious idea, and I don’t want to make too much of ideas based on this concept. The form of the statement of the principle of equality under the law in the Declaration also uses religious terms, but the principle itself is clearly not a religious idea; it was based primarily on their reading of Locke, not the Bible or some theologian.

Clearly principled objections exist, but your point here seems to be that moral principles are not “objectively true”. I don’t agree with this, but that’s a subject for another thread. The important thing is that even if moral principles are subjective, which moral principles are accepted by a society clearly has objective effects. (As Richard Weaver put it, “ideas have consequences”.) And the question of what the objective results of accepting or rejecting a given moral principle would have is an objective question. So unless we have a fundamental disagreement about what kind of society we want, the question of whether morality itself is “objective” or “subjective” need not be decided in order to have a meaningful discussion. What I’ve been talking about all along is the objective effects of making arbitrary distinctions – i.e., making some individuals “persons” and others “nonpersons” on the basis of criteria that cannot be justified by any widely accepted moral principle. If, like me, you don’t like these objective effects, and you agree that making such arbitrary distinctions (i.e., ones that cannot be justified by the moral principles that are widely accepted in our society) will have these effects, you should find my argument persuasive.

In the end, we are free to decide who has civil rights and who doesn’t. The legal criteria for granting such rights will be whatever we decide they are. There is nothing and no one forcing us to adopt criteria based on “intuition” or “subconscious reactions”. In fact, the trend away from such criteria has been all but irresistible – or at least it was until Roe v. Wade. It would seem that your “fact” is far from being “unalterably there”.

Where have you been? I’ve been arguing for some time that our society (not to mention every other human society that recognizes the concept of civil rights at all) does exactly this routinely. The failure to grant equal rights to fetuses on this basis is an anomaly.

And how can you even think of calling future cognition “meaningless”? Do you consider the question of whether you’ll be capable of cognition in the future (say a year from now) “meaningless”? Is this really a matter of little or no interest to you? If you learned that someone close to you had developed a disease similar to Alzheimer’s except that it had no effect on the victims’ physical health, would this trouble you in any way? If you learned that your baby was never going to progress beyond a mental level of a newborn but would otherwise be perfectly healthy, would you greet this news with cheerful nonchalance? I daresay that you find the prospect of future cognition to be very meaningful indeed.

Autistic persons are generally capable of cognition to the extent of being capable of being moral agents. However, it’s true that some humans are not capable of being moral agents, and yet even such humans are generally accorded the status of persons. See my upcoming post on this subject.

Oh, please. Obviously what I meant by the “human kind” of cognition is the level of cognitive function that is peculiar or unique to human beings – the kind that justifies us (or at any rate that we believe justifies us) in giving humans in general a different legal status from animals. The fact that newborn babies act slightly differently from newborn chimps cannot reasonably be considered to qualify them as persons. In fact, I strongly suspect that baby chimps raised by humans will “learn human social behavior” at least as quickly as human babies – up to a point. Does that make such a chimp a “person”?

Forget about “fancy”. Explain how you can know in advance that no moral principle could possibly convince you that zygotes are entitled, as a matter of moral principle, to civil rights.

[ April 21, 2002: Message edited by: bd-from-kg ]</p>

Jerry Smith

Your objections to my rant (of April 13) are warranted. I apologize: I was getting carried away emotionally about this.

As I stated in my last post, I do believe there is a moral principle, that I hope we can agree on, about which individuals are entitled to civil rights. The future potential for human cognitive thought still falls short of embracing this moral principle. You have effectively shown that it can be applied in many cases, but you have not effectively shown that present cognition (what I feel is truly the important standard) does not serve equally well in those same cases.

I admit that I have been going off on a lot of tangents to offer alternatives to future cognition as a moral standard for personhood/recognition of rights. I have been repulsed by that idea since we began speaking. Your arguments about present cognition being untenable on the basis of the personhood of the comatose or infant had me looking for another standard that would embody the same principle as present cognition, and that was a wild goose chase. I am now changing course. I hope to defend present cognition against your arguments.

One thing you said: that (the society we want) must accept the idea that rights inhere in individuals and are not granted. If this should become important to the debate, we will need to look at this statement. I don't think that the idea that rights are inherent is provable or rational, but I don't see that it will be relevant right away, so I won't argue it now.

Another thing you said: "Oh please..." (infants do not have the level of cognition that is important to us). I disagree. The development of infants may be on the moral and intellectual level of some animals, but the quality of their cognition is human, because they are learning human ideas, morals, and customs, in a uniquely human way, from humans. In short, they are developing personalities, a kind of cognition that we value.

For my first arguments in favor of present cognitive qualities as the standard for personhood, please see my last post.

Scrutinizer

Jerry Smith,

I'm going to do something that seems to be quite frowned upon on Internet discussion boards as it is usually taken as a sign of intellectual weakness. I'm going to change my mind.

Honestly, I never have been secure in my opinion on abortion. These past couple of months have been a period where my opinion on abortion has become very tenuous, and who knows, I may revert back to my old view soon. But at this point in time, even though I have the potential to be anti-abortion once more, I am currently of the opinion that abortion is not directly wrong, and that's all that's morally significant since potential doesn't matter!

Critical reflection has convinced me for the time being that you are indeed correct about the comatose man. We don't value his potential personhood; we value the personhood he already has that is just simply not being currently manifested. The force of the potential argument seems to be pretty weak when the analogy of the comatose man is removed.

Regards,

- Scrutinizer

[ April 22, 2002: Message edited by: Scrutinizer ]</p>

Jerry Smith

Scrutinizer, you've got it all wrong! You are perfectly free to change your mind here: as long as you come around to MY side

Seriously though, I have always been a fence-rider on this issue too. I see something wrong with the idea of abortion. I just cannot concieve of it being on the same moral plane as murder. Anyway, bd being the sharp cookie that he is, we both might wind up on his side b4 all is done...

[ April 22, 2002: Message edited by: Jerry Smith ]</p>

bd-from-kg

Jerry Smith:

This is a reply to three of your posts, including a reply to Scrutinizer. I think this brings me up to date with you.

Really? What about someone with amnesia? Certain kinds of accidents can produce not only amnesia but a change in personality, and perhaps in moral standards. Is a victim of such an accident no longer a “person”? What if (as a result of improvements in technology) we could predict that a comatose individual would be in this state when he regained consciousness? Is he no longer a person? Would it be all right to kill him?

Besides, it seems incoherent to say that we value someone because of his ideas regardless of what those ideas are, and regardless of whether he is having these ideas at this time. Do we value someone equally for having the ideas of Albert Schweitzer and the ideas of Hannibal Lecter? You have the same problem with attitudes, moral standards, etc. This seems analogous to saying that you value someone for his net worth without regard for whether his net worth is positive or negative; whether he owns billions or owes billions.

Finally, any comatose individual can be said to have a “unique identity” in your sense whether there is any chance that he will recover or not. Unless you’re prepared to say that a brain-dead individual is a “person” (which seems to me to be absurd), your only recourse, if you want to use these things as criteria of “personhood”, is to define them in terms of expected or potential future mental states. This is perfectly defensible (in fact, I think it’s clearly correct), but it brings you back to my criterion.

Where did I “admit” this? I picked it because I consider those who have it to be “ends in themselves”, to be valued for what they are and not for any benefit (i.e., “instrumental value”) that they may have to ourselves or others. To me, this is what we mean by saying that someone is “entitled” to rights: it means that he is entitled to at least the minimal degree of moral autonomy that allows a meaningful amount of moral agency.

You’ve lost me. First, in what sense is future cognition a “quality” of actual present cognition? Second, in what sense can someone be said to be “cognating” without being “conscious of it” – indeed, without being “conscious” at all? Third, how can someone who lacks the physical substrate necessary for cognition be said to be “cognating”? It seems to me that to maintain these things you have to stretch the meaning of “cognition” beyond recognition.

This is also evident in your comment in your latest post:

It appears that you’ve decided to keep beating me over the head indefinitely for the trivial slip of referring to the “human kind” of cognition. For the last time, I was not referring to cognition that consists of interacting with humans specifically, or for that matter with behaviors that are unique to humans but are of no moral significance. I was referring to the level of cognition attained only by humans. I specified the sort of thing I had in mind a long time ago:

As I also pointed out long ago, if some species (terrestrial or alien) turns out to have the requisite level of cognition, most people would grant its members the status of “persons” even though they would obviously not have “learned human ideas, morals, and customs”.

As for “developing personalities” being a “kind of cognition we value”, it is also a kind of cognition that we value in kittens and puppies. Indeed, their personalities are both more developed and more enjoyable by far than that of a newborn baby, who has almost no “personality” at all, or if you prefer, an extremely simple, undeveloped, boring one. (Have you ever been around a newborn? I really have the impression that you’re thinking of something more like a six-month-old – a very different thing.) Yet almost everyone (Dr. Singer excepted) considers babies, but not kittens and puppies, persons.

Although I disagree radically with the conclusions he draws from the facts, I think that Dr. Singer’s statement of the facts themselves pretty well beyond dispute:

And of course (as Singer notes) there is essentially no difference in this respect between a newborn and the late-term fetus that it was a couple of minutes earlier.

It seems that you are determined to define “actual current cognition” to include anything that would ordinarily be said to be preparation for future cognition. Except, of course, that you apparently mean to exclude the preparations that a fetus is making for future cognition for no reason that I can discern.

One of the items on your list is particularly illuminating: “maintaining memories”. This is what my computer does when it’s turned off. Is it therefore “cognating” (or whatever you want to call what it does when it’s on)? It seems to me that merely remaining in a static condition cannot reasonably be called “cognition”, because cognition is a process. An entity which is not changing its state cannot reasonably be said to be performing or undergoing a process. The item “maintaining personal traits” has the same problem.

As for “learning”, this has a different problem which I’ll explain later.

This seems completely unsupportable. Is it really true, for example, that you only value the potential for enjoying a book that you haven’t read, or a movies that you haven’t seen, insofar as the cognition involved is a result of present cognitive activity? Do you value taking a course in a subject you know little about (Chinese history, say) only insofar as the cognition involved is a result of present cognitive activity?

In fact, in a great many cases this seems to be completely backward. for example, if you learn computer programming for the purpose of getting a job programming computers, it seems to me that your present cognitive activity is valuable only because of the resulting potential for future cognition rather than the other way around. An even clearer case would be doing some research to decide what books to read or movies to see. Once again the current cognition has value to you only because of the potential it creates for future cognition of a kind that you value.

Finally, your idea is inconsistent with the most elementary facts of human psychology. We do not value future wealth only insofar as it as a result of present wealth. We do not value future health only insofar as it is a result of present health. (If we did we would have no use for doctors.) We do not value future beauty only insofar as it is the result of present beauty. We do not value future knowledge only insofar as it is the result of present knowledge. We do not value future happiness only insofar as it is the result of present happiness. Why would we value future cognition only insofar as it results from present cognition?
Again, this flies in the face of all human experience. To paraphrase what I said in my last post:

Also, many parents go to great expense to send their gifted (or even not so gifted) children to special schools designed to bring out their full potential. Does this suggest to you that what they value in their children is present, rather than future cognition? Examples of this sort are endless. Anyone who knows anything about people knows that everyone places a very high value indeed on future cognition.

[ April 23, 2002: Message edited by: bd-from-kg ]</p>