Human cloning

[theapportioner]

Hey no problem - sorry if I've offended you or anything. I just don't see how you could come up with a useful hypothesis for memory formation and storage involving subatomic particles. There's systems neuroscience, cellular neuroscience, and molecular neuroscience, but no subatomic neuroscience.

If you're curious about proposed mechanisms for memory formation, check out the wikipedia article on long term potentiation (LTP), for starters.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_potentiation

[sadie]

Originally Posted by CaptainBubba

Sadie were you being sarcastic with the previous questions about clones having souls and rights and whatnot?

Like seriously?

i can't remember who held the reins at that point.

[kellychaos]

While having a firm stake in empiricism, I do tend to question whether it is the end all. I do believe in the scientific method and discovery to the point where it becomes a bit too theoretical for my tastes and too heavily reliant on models and technology that we, ourselves, developed the further the investigation goes along. In the way that a tangential angle, while first coming close to the topic, moves farther away as more assumptions based on previous discoveries are made. Who really reads the fine print for the early acceptable margins of error?

I believe, and I'm paraphrasing in a large way here, in Kant's theory that there is sort of a matrix that governs our view of the world and which largely governs most of what we can sense empirically (with a little a priory knowledge like mathematics, morality, ect thrown in). What ultimately controls us that we cannot perceive, and probably won't be able to conceive being, pretty much, a closed system? I don't know. Call it theology. Call it the metaphysical. I believe that there is a force behind life with a direction and a purpose. We are largely beings that move along by sensation but what provides the direction and purpose ... call it "will" or whatever. I refuse to believe that we are static models. At the same time, I refuse to believe in fairy tales half-based on pagan ritual and theological dogma which largely smack of common sense, altruism, humanism and the Golden Rule while giving too much credit to deities based on our own arrogance which we've cleverly managed to hide from ourselves.

[kellychaos]

I didn't mean to get too heavy with this.

I don't know what the hell I'm talking about and have probably bitten off more than I can chew here.

[Big Papa Goat]

So the empirical scientific method is too theoretical, but Kant's metaphysical notion of some kind of soul isn't?

[kellychaos]

What I'm saying is that I have more faith in an empirical scientific method to a point where it becomes too theorectical. When discovery upon discovery is based on, at least, pseudo-empirical scientific observation, proveable mathematics, proveable logic, ect. I am fine with that. However exhaustively tested and proven, the more things become dependent upon or, at best, layered upon theories that are not empirically observeable (or observable under technology which I, as a layman, cannot understand) it becomes just as much as a faith-based belief as does theology. That being said, I would tend to lean toward the scientific.

[kellychaos]

An interesting counter-point/op-ed piece to my arguments (second article down by Leonard Susskind):

Evolution wired us with both hardware and software that would allow us to easily "grock" concepts like force, acceleration, and temperature, but only over the limited range that applies to our daily lives — concepts that are needed for our physical survival. But it simply did not provide us with wiring to intuit the quantum behavior of an electron, or velocities near the speed of light, or the powerful gravitational fields of black holes, or a universe that closes back on itself like the surface of the Earth. A classic example of the limitations of our neural wiring is the inability to picture more than three dimensions. Why, after all, would nature provide us with the capacity to visualize things that no living creature had ever experienced?

LINK TO FULL ARTICLE