When do we as individual spirits make the decision to come to earth and inhabit our bodies, I don’t know. But I’d say after the blastula stage to be sure. In fact if you look at fetal development, it takes many weeks before we divurge from other forms of life and truly look human.

How far is science from being able to clone a heart let alone a person as described above. Decades.

Stem cells, eggs, sperm, embroyos, etc are all life in waiting, in potential. Just like Adam and Eve in the garden. When self-awareness happens, when we eat of the fruit, then a spirit is born and must surely die, no matter how it was “conceived”

Melinda (PhD student in Molecular Biology)

No, you just need a watertight laptop bag — white, of course.

More seriously, though, I don’t think human-level artificial intelligences should be defined as humans. We should use some other classification, such as sentients, of which humans are a subset. (We may need to expand the definition of “person” to include AI beings, but that’s not much of a stretch, since the law already counts corporations as persons in many contexts.)

So then we reach the question of whether non-human sentients have spirits in the same sense that we believe humans have spirits — i.e., an intelligence without a physical body, that existed prior to beginning life on this earth. Orson Scott Card envisioned something of that sort in writing about the A.I. being in Xenocide.

I wonder if we’d have to find something other than water to baptize them in.

You’re right that there’s a problem with that statement, but your diagnosis is incorrect. Your syllogism is not analogous to mine. The premise of mine is flawed, not the reasoning from the premise. (Although, to be more precise, I should have worded the syllogism as follows: “If conception defines the difference between a human life and mere human tissue, then if there is no conception, there is no human life.”)

Some opponents of embryonic stem cell research are using conception as a way to distinguish such research from adult stem cell research. I’m pointing out a potential consequence of such a position.

J. Stapley,

> If it looks human, tastes human, feels, and operates human, then it probably is.

I don’t think I can argue against that.

Glen Henshaw,

> But this is a limitation on our understanding of when life begins.

Exactly. That’s the point of speculations like this; to look at those limitations on our understanding. And so I’d say that it cannot be conception itself that makes a human being, if a human being can be created in another fashion. So I go with the concept of ensoulment (for lack of a better word.)

> I think creating a blank brain is impossible, because as far as I can tell the wiring of a brain is
> accomplished through giving the brain experiences, which necessitates it’s not being blank.

OK, then, let’s call it an unwired brain. In other words it is a mass of brain tissue that will have its neuron wiring imposed on it according to a template created by analyzing another brain. The creation of brain tissue is not impossible; the use of nanotechnology to arrange nerons is theoretically possible.

The questions raised by the physical duplication of a brain — or even just the thought patterns — while the original remains alive are a different tanker truck full of monkeys. Are you sure you want to release them into this discussion? :)

Not very scientific but an intersting concept.