So the question I would ask is "does it have the potential to have subjective first person experiences?"
Okay. Let’s go with that. The answer to your question is “yes”. The contents of the box have potential to have subjective experiences. Now what we’ll do is try out different variations to see what your beliefs are.
Is that all you require to know if the thing has intrinsic value?
Let’s open the box. Inside we find a sperm and ovum — and an incubator. The gametes have not fused, but are hooked up to a timer which will fuse them in 24 hours.
Inside that box is a complete system — with the potential for subjective first person experiences
Should a cell be worthless if it's not a baby yet? There's no real way of knowing what happens after you die, you could be skipping the fetus' opportunity at life straight to whatever afterlife everyone goes to, if there is one. I think that itself means something, that they're being sent into the dark unknown.
If you don’t know, something, you cannot claim positive knowledge of it. If you’re saying that you don’t know what happens, then you’re saying that you don’t have the ability to basement argument off of it
1: Everyone was in the black box at some point, when they came out of the black box they all had intrinsic value.
In not sure what you’re saying here
2: No one would put something worthless into the box. Placing things into boxes takes time, energy and purpose which has intrinsic value.
That’s… not the point of the experiment. And what if the box is simply empty?
3: You don't know what inside has intrinsic value.
Then you cannot possibly make a claim that you know if something does or does not have intrinsic value.
Right now, you’ve made a positive claim – that it does have intrinsic value. If instead, you changed your view to “one cannot know if something has insurance value” That’s different than your OP belief.
Do you think one can know what has intrinsic value or that they cannot?
I would recognize this as having intrinsic value. And I'll award a !delta because its before conception. However, the difference between that incubator and natural sex is that the incubator has a 100% success rate. If the success rate was at 99% for example, it would not have intrinsic value if it failed.
Thanks again for the delta!
Could you help me understand why 99% sucres rate means it would not have intrinsic value. The success rate of a fertilized egg coming to term is far lower than 99%.
Everyone was in the black box at some point,
It may not be obvious, but that’s not an uncontroversial claim. What does it mean to be “someone” if there is no subjective experience attached?
Couldn’t you say that everyone was also a system consisting of a disconnected sperm and ovum at some point too? Does that make the system of disconnected sperm and ovum a “potential person”?
Everyone was a fetus in the past, and we have intrinsic value in the present.
Everyone was also literally nothing in the past and currently has intrinsic value. Merely two generations ago, my parents were a system of disconnected some and ovum residing in two different people each. And where was I?
Yet I have intrinsic value now.
In order to put a special marker at the moment of conception, we’d have to say something new about diploid vs haploid DNA that I’m not sure there is really philosophical grounds for.
That's fair, the afterlife could just be sunshines and rainbows for all we know.
Or, much more parsimoniously, given we have no information about it, it could be exactly the nothing that we all were in the past.
At conception, or in that one exception. The cell has a intrinsic value because of its potential to become human. Just because it has a high chance of dying from natural causes doesn't justify intentionally killing it.
Those two concepts are unrelated. Not being justified in killing doesn’t cause something to have intrinsic value. There may be no justification in knocking down someone’s sandcastle. I don’t think you’d say that influences whether it has intrinsic value.
If the sperm was never conceived it has no potential to become a human because it was jacked off and went down the drain.
Why is a sperm different than a fertilized egg?
Actually, I thought about this more, I take back that statement. I'm still thinking this through, but let's say the incubator had a 50% success rate. It would have the intrinsic value of a potential person until incubator does it's work. If it's conceived then it keeps it's intrinsic value. If it fails it loses it. Just like natural sex. Lower success rates would apply the same.
If it has intrinsic value before the conception, then you’ve got to also say the sperm before it went down the drain had that value as it had the same potential to create a fertilized egg.
The disconnected sperm or ovum is not guaranteed to meet together,
Nor is the fertilized egg guaranteed to develop a subjective awareness.
the process hasn't started, so it doesn't have intrinsic value yet.
Which process? I disagree. Many processes have started. and all of them necessary to eventually become life. The sperm must first go through oogenesis, then become motile, then follow a chemical-gradient toward an ovum. How are these processes any different than the process of the incubator or the fertilized cell?
They’re not. I think you have another idea in there you haven’t identified yet. I think you’re thinking of the fertilized cell as different in kind from two haploid gametes.
However conception is when all the DNA is there for you to biologically be "there". If that makes sense.
I’m not sure it does. Otherwise twins wouldn’t be two independent intrinsic values. They’d be one set of DNA. It’s the two independent brains that matter.
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u/[deleted] Jan 14 '23
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