Sentience

[theapportioner]

You are forgetting completely about the intense organization required for embryonic development. For it is not the size of the organization that matters. If that were true there would be animals that are "higher" than humans. They utilize greater organization of their neurons. Is an elephant now a greater being?

All this just illustrates my point. You cannot have a neat and tidy definition of what is human -- because "humanness" in ordinary language is much more than what biology can describe. You have different perspectives from which one can describe what is human, and all of them contribute to some degree in our understanding of the concept. The perspectives are distinct however, and blindly mixing them up creates confusion. By interpreting a scientific event in a moral or metaphysical context you are always going to have contradiction and untidiness. Why this is so unobvious to so many of you is beyond me. To say, "science tells you that humanness begins here" is utterly wrong because it is nonsensical.