Is Eli a Person?

[babyboi102909]

I thought I over-analyzed!! Of Course Eli is a freakin' person---fictional, yes, but still a person. As for whatever nonsense that article was, I have NO clue. Interesting ideas, I suppose, but this discussion of Eli being a person is pointless. No offense to anyone. Btw, what does Eli have to do with a corporation? We are talking about a character in a book, not the industry of books or movies.

[Ash]

If only JAL included some DNA analysis of samples from ELI in LTODD, he could have put the whole issue to rest.
Chimpanzees are 95% human, so would a few different chromosomes totally excluded Eli from the human race?
The fact is, through her actions, we understand Eli to be more human than many humans today who stake that claim.

[cmfireflies]

is it healthy not to care if Eli is a person?

She could be a vampire, a child, a monster, a boy, a girl. All I want is Eli and Oskar to live happily together nomming on people in JAL's world.

I am of the opinion that we should always be as kind as possible to animals as a barrier against cruelty to humans. But as soon as human welfare can be improved by killing animals, hack away. Sorry GoV.
So that must mean I see Eli as "human." Maybe as a fictional character, better than human. Because I normally hate it when a character's motivations for doing horrible things is that their loved one is kidnapped or such. But I can definitely root for Oskar doing horrible things to save Eli's life.

[sauvin]

I thought I over-analyzed!! Of Course Eli is a freakin' person---fictional, yes, but still a person. As for whatever nonsense that article was, I have NO clue. Interesting ideas, I suppose, but this discussion of Eli being a person is pointless. No offense to anyone. Btw, what does Eli have to do with a corporation? We are talking about a character in a book, not the industry of books or movies.

Welcome to the wild and woolly world of LTROI fandom. Most of us watched the movie and read the novel, though I shouldn't want to guess in which order the majority of us did so, and it doesn't matter because either is a kind of portal into another universe where popes eat breakfast with dinosaurs, winged angels wearing combat boots and pink diaphanous tutus running back and forth between the campfire and the table to serve them, and we're as apt to discuss how much a tsunami resembles a rock band as we are how much politics might resemble frozen molasses on the dark side of the moon.

Rod Serling might have loved this place, I think, where there's no horizontal or vertical to control, only the limits of imagination to bind frozen moments of three different nightmares to canvas. Red pills, blue pills, houses dropping on wicked witches or tumbling through Hasslein curves to discover the doctor you need to see when you get shot is more properly called a "veterinarian". Here is where the sea meets the stars, where the production of monsters explores the reason for sleep - and wasn't that Hitler I just saw painting thousands and thousands of little yellow daffodils on the walls near the mouth of the tunnel to [deleted]?

And what indeed does Eli have to do with corporations? The former, of course, is a literary fiction, and the latter a legal one, but consistent with the many other rabbit holes we've all fallen through in the past couple of years or so, the legal fiction does seem to want nothing more than to bleed the rest of us cattle - erm, I mean "people" - bone dry.

Pointless, you say? And pointless it indeed is, as is all exploration. At just about every point in history, when somebody wanted to go where no man has gone before, there've been no shortage of people standing on the sidelines laughing at him, saying he'll fall off the edge of the earth or that the sea monster will gobble him up, but what the [deleted]? We have to go where our imaginations take us, to the bottoms and the tops of skies - we have to look closely to the skies to see solar systems birthing and peer intently into microscopes to see why Joe's eyes are blue but his daughter's are green.

And that's precisely what we do here. We explore, and sometimes, when we try to figure Eli and Oskar out, we have to leave them behind temporarily while we gaze at rocks or read scrolls written in languages dead these thousands of years. We look towards chaos in order to try to understand the disorder of the kids' lives, because in doing so, we might just wind up discovering something about ourselves.

I don't have a big boat, not like some of the others in the forum. Did you know we have folks with doctorates here? Lawyers, students of philosphy, chemists, mathematicians and engineers? My fearless little canoe is paddling madly in this brainy forum proudly sporting the call sign PS 132. Just like others in the forum, I'll call bull[deleted] when I see it, but with nowhere near the polished and elegant grace others use, I'll just bluntly say "That's a load of horse apples". Mostly, I just wind up asking "Um... can you reduce that to something a high school diploma won't choke on?"

Don't worry about how deep the water is. It's just as easy to drown in a backyard above-ground swimming pool not three feet deep as it is in a calm ocean over an abyssal.

Point is this: go wherever your imagination can take you, peek at whatever might pique your curiosity, because the only real alternative is to die years before you stop breathing.

Edit: 29 Octobre 2011, replaced a "bad word" with [deleted] to comply with renewed restrictions on language.

Edit: 5 Novembre 2011, replaced a "bad word" with [deleted] to comply with renewed restrictions on language.

Edit: 5 Novembre 2011, replaced a "bad word" with [deleted] to comply with renewed restrictions on language.

[metoo]

... I am of the opinion that we should always be as kind as possible to animals as a barrier against cruelty to humans. ...

I believe this is a very good reason to keep up our standards of morality. If we shift focus from outwards to inwards, i.e. if the purpose of moral mainly is to keep ourselves sane, we can get around a lot of complex and confusing discussion about why, when, and to whom. While the discussion still is interesting, it might not be necessary on a personal level.

[babyboi102909]

To Sauvin: SO true!! Plus ur post just made my week!!

[bore]

If only JAL included some DNA analysis of samples from ELI in LTODD, he could have put the whole issue to rest.
Chimpanzees are 95% human, so would a few different chromosomes totally excluded Eli from the human race?
The fact is, through her actions, we understand Eli to be more human than many humans today who stake that claim.

Hmm... I'm not entirely sure I follow. Are you claiming that all humans are persons or that no other animals are?

[PeteMork]

I am so very sorry I was away from the forum for a whole day (almost)and missed the beginnings of this thread. Entertaining friends from out of state is absolutely no excuse i know, but I'm going to use it anyway to respond to an earlier Sauvin Post. Please forgive me.

This has occasionally come up in this forum. Here's some food for thought. It seems as though the harder we try to define what it means to be a person, the more problematic it becomes. Maybe we'll never move this debate from the right brain to the left, and for good reason.

I can't help getting a really good laugh whenever I see discussion like this because it smacks so much of folk who spend too much time mulling this kind of thing over starting to run full-tilt boogie and blindly face first into a seemingly insurmountable and impenetrable wall: the absence (and probable impossibility) of a universally accepted morally axiomatic foundation. Mathematics ran into this, too, and so did physics, in the respective forms of Goedel's principle of undecidability and Heisenberg's principle of uncertainty. Would it be so surprising at some future date if somebody were to succeed in finding some meaningful way of condensing moral thought into a kind of symbolic calculus only to find that the same sort of border space inserts itself between larger (synthesised) moral constructs and the ostensibly subatomic axioms and postulates which form their foundations?

I love it!! Once again Sauvin snatches up the bait with a relish, and after pooh-poohing the very basis for the discussion, flies like a moth into the flame at the bottom of the philosophical abyss and emerges victorious. I would love to know which High School you are paddling your little canoe out of. You must have given your teachers a heck of a ride while you were there!

Frankly, I’m glad you weren’t ‘snuffed’ when you were born or we wouldn’t now be able to read these gems you post so often (for the greater good, I’m convinced ). That point alone makes aspects of these high-falutin’ discussions moot. One of my deepest regrets now is that you weren’t in my unassuming little philosophy class at the University of New Mexico to stir up the pot and later, chuckle over our professor’s befuddled reaction, with beer in hand, with me and my friends at the Student Union building.

Back on topic: Of course Eli is a person. The bible tells us so.

[sauvin]

If only JAL included some DNA analysis of samples from ELI in LTODD, he could have put the whole issue to rest.
Chimpanzees are 95% human, so would a few different chromosomes totally excluded Eli from the human race?
The fact is, through her actions, we understand Eli to be more human than many humans today who stake that claim.

Hmm... I'm not entirely sure I follow. Are you claiming that all humans are persons or that no other animals are?

As I understand it, we're not descended from chimpanzees and bonobos. We "split off from them" two million and seven million years ago (I forget which happened when) - but when each split occurred, they went their way and we went ours. If I'm reading this right, when we "split off" from chimpanzees, there were no humans and no chimpanzees; there was just a creature who was part latent chimp and part latent man - and possibly latently other creatures, too. In other words, neither human nor chimp could be said to have existed prior to this parting of ways. Same thing happened when we "split off" from bonobos. This is what evolutionists and anthropologists mean when they say that man and chimps have a common ancestor.

I believe the schism between chimpanzee and human in terms of volume of genetic material is something like 2%. If so, there are at least two possible ways of restating this, equally accurate but loaded with subtle difference in meaning:

1) Chimpanzees are 98% human.

2) Man is 98% chimp.

I sometimes can't help imagining an anthropologist trying to make either statement in a packed American fundamentalist tent revival while the preacher's stuck in some kind of Tourette loop, helplessly shouting "Praise the Lord! Can I get a Hallelujah?" while jumping up and down, red-faced, sweating, frothing at the mouth and aparently suffering spasmodic whole-body dyskinesia. The Bible clearly states that God scooped up some clay, molded it into His image and gave it life - how DARE we profane the Holy Word by likening Man to monkey?

To such dogmatists, which statement do you suppose would be more offensive? The first statement "implies" that chimpanzees largely belong to the human family (using the word colloquially here), and the second seems to be saying that Man belongs to the chimp family. Since everything is either is compatible with Scripture or it isn't, I think we'd have limited success trying to explain that men and monkey simply happen to have 98% of their genetic material in common without this common heritage necessarily implying that one group of creature "is a subset of" the other.

Yet Another Work of Fiction I've read in the past few years has an alternative universe somewhere whose Earth analog was populated by Neanderthals rather than by Homo Sapiens Sapiens. Some fictional technological voodoo happens, a portal is opened between the two Earths, and scientists from both species commute between the Earths for diplomatic and scientific reasons. Naturally enough, a female Sapiens female and a Neanderthal male become romantically involved.

Fertile grounds for racial "debate", anybody?

Some of what I remember reading in those novels (there were three that I remember) seems to conflict with what Wikipedia reports. In the novel, for example, Neanderthal and Sapiens could not interbreed without technological intervention, whereas Wikipedia says there's evidence we did interbreed with them (or they with us) some fifty thousand years ago.

Within the novel's reality, however, since technological intervention was necessary for conception, it followed that Neanderthal was a separate species from Sapiens. It also followed that physical intimacy between "our" female scientist and "their" male scientist constituted "miscegenation", if you're being polite, and "bestiality" if you're not.

One question posed in the novel, explicitly considered by the female scientist, is: "Could you imagine yourself being physically intimate with this other creature - having children with it - without being repulsed?" If answered affirmatively, then this other creature is human, or human enough, by at least one "defintion", with technological intervention needed for conception being sidelined as an irritating and relatively insignificant technical detail. The scientist hardly needed bother - by the time this question had a chance to bother her, she'd already implicitly answered it long before.

Science fiction can be intriguing, vexing, thought-provoking - it can even sometimes [deleted] you right to [deleted] off - because it can explore sensitive issues subjectively that we "can't" explore more directly. The "miscegenation" mentioned above is just one aspect of social, sexual and racial relations touched upon in the novels - another neatly little loaded bomb for the narrow-minded to run afoul of is the concept of strict fulltime heterosexuality being contrary to cultural norms.

What do we think it is to be human?

A very good friend explained to me while I was still living in predominantly black Detroit (I'm not black) why it was so insulting to say a particular thing of a black woman. This explanation is offensive as [deleted], one of the things that can [deleted] a Sauvin right to [deleted] off, and if you offend easily, do not read it. He, also being black and therefore having insights into racial matters I lack, said that Once Upon a Time, when very few black people had any money, and most were out scrabbling to make a dollar any way they could, black women would prostitute themselves. The difference between a black prostitute and a white one, though, was pretty dramatic for most (white) customers: a bit of casual "intimacy" with a white woman may or may not result in a pregnancy, and who gave a hot sweet [deleted] one way or another? - but the same with a black prostitute nearly always consisted entirely of another kind of intimacy in order to eliminate any possibility of creating yet more "things" to infest our fair cities. Black women apparently (or at least, anecdotally) developed enough strength in this arena to become notorious.

Here is no science fiction. The customer looks at the prospective service provider and decides "No, I cannot imagine having children with this... creature", thus clearly identifying said provider as being something other than "human". It's very far from being the only possible example of this kind of exclusivity, it's simply the one I remember most clearly because it's so [deleted] VILE. I don't have a clear fix on the time frame involved in the story my best Detroit friend told me, but would hardly be surprised to learn it stretches back into the days when black people first started unwillingly gracing our shores.

These attitudes still exist. They're craploads more common than I'm comfortable with.

So, on the one hand, we have this "requirement" that anything that's human has to be manifestly physically "human", whatever that term is meant to mean. To a degree, we still look upon people with missing limbs as being somewhat less than human, presumably because some dark holdover beast from our days as nomadic hunters and gatherers whispers that such people have diminished capacity to contribute to the family or clan in relationship to the resources they consume.

I wonder, if medical technology ever manages to start retrofitting such people with powered prosthetics functionally identical to (or even superior to) the arms and legs we "normal" people enjoy, would that dark beast shut the [deleted] up? What would it say about a man with four artificial but fully functional limbs, an artifical heart, two artificial eyes (New! Improved! Ultraviolet and infrared with full definition! X-ray band available at modest additional expense!) and a sump pump where his colon oughta be? Would that beast be sit still for a base genetic profile that reads "human"?

I suspect the guy with the PhD who'd spent a couple decades pondering such matters in the finest universities in Europe and the impoverished, illiterate black Detroit prostitute desperately trying to keep her children from starving to death would come up with very different answers.

Then, again, if the sole requirement for being "human" is simply in base genetic profile, since chimpanzees and humans have an overwhelming common genetic heritage, maybe we'll start seeing chimps applying to the US government for asylum and green cards.

Yet then again, some drooling idiot is apt to try to suggest legislation for genetic screening to bar anybody whose genetic material includes more than (say) 1% Neanderthal from the Brotherhood of Man.

On the other hand, we have the requirement that "people" have "souls", that they be "sentient" and capable of enjoyment and suffering. Would Washoe qualify? Koko? Fido and Rover (they have to be! They're family!)?

This is one of the many reasons I sometimes get to be prickly in "moral" matters. We can't discuss what morality is until we decide what is to be human. It's fine to decide these things in some ivory tower, and it's potentially even better if done in some Parliament or Congress, but no such decision will ever have any practical effect until I see the guy working across from me on the assembly line getting on board with it.

[a_contemplative_life]

"Who would not think, seeing us compose all things of mind and body, but that this mixture would be quite intelligible to us? Yet it is the very thing we least understand. Man is to himself the most wonderful object in nature; for he cannot conceive what the body is, still less what the mind is, and least of all how a body should be united to a mind. This is the consummation of his difficulties, and yet it is his very being."