Conception vs. Birth

     This article is extracted, with some editing for this context, from Chapter 4 of my book Human Nature: A New Theory of Psychology.

     

     Like all our problems, the solution to the problem of whether a real person begins at the instant that the mother is impregnated or at the instant that the child is born lies in philosophy.  Specifically, it lies in solving the ancient dilemma of uniqueness, which is ultimately a metaphysical question pertaining to the nature of Reality itself.  So let us begin by considering that dilemma, in the terms of human nature. . . .

     

     We all know through our common logic that we are each unique as individuals.  No one else is you.  So we must ask why our intellectuals haven’t yet explained what makes us unique.  Some ancient Greeks tried to solve the problem by positing the psyche, which literally means ‘to breathe’ and which is equivalent to mystical terms such as ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’.  They held that we are each unique because we innately possess this defining essence, which was perhaps god-given but was in any case unknowable.  So for millennia most people assumed that this imaginary thing, which theists called our ‘soul’, caused our uniqueness, and that no further explanation was needed.  Astrologers adopted this mystical explanation without objection, and then came the modern psychologists, who divided into three schools of opinion on the issue -- the mystics (including the Freudians and Jungians), the negativists (the behaviorists who deny theory), and the positivists -- none of which solved the problem.

     

     . . .  Only the positivists offered a solution, but it doesn’t withstand analysis.  Since they concluded that there is no single thing that causes our uniqueness, they had to define it as being the set of all possible attributes of a person.  But they failed to see that this is a truism, since a hypothetical summation of all our attributes must include what makes us unique, whether it is one thing or more things.  So they never explained our uniqueness, they just presupposed it by mass inclusion, and then they agreed as academics to use this class conception to assume a human’s uniqueness, and to refer to it as our personality, a term that is ambiguous, vague, and has many conflicting senses.

     . . .  The real solution to this dilemma is so well known to us all inexplicitly through our common logic that I was surprised to find in my readings that no one had ever stated it directly.  People are not unique because of, say, the color of their eyes, their race, their gender, or any summation of such shared attributes that one can describe.  They are only unique because each person is a distinct event, a motion system within the whole Reality that has a unique position in space, and that is the one attribute that makes anything in the universe unique.  For instance, I am not the only person with hazel eyes, but I am the only person here and now with hazel eyes.

     Nothing is unique to us until we identify its position in space.  Since no two things can occupy the same space at the same time, and since I have shown in Chapter 3 that ‘time’ is not a fourth dimension, but is just another way that we measure space, our space is our defining essence, and it is necessarily unique.  We share some spaces with other things, true, but not our space, which is defined by the spatial point (formerly called ‘the time’) at which we leave our mother’s womb, and then by our own zenith and nadir as we move on the earth as an independent event, or motion system.  Every other attribute of anything in Reality is shared with other things, and no sum of these relative things can explain our uniqueness, either as a species or as individuals. . . .

  

     This solution to the dilemma of uniqueness—which can only be reached through metaphysics—gives us a basic principle of our new science of human nature, and this is that any thing is uniquely defined only by its spatial position.  From this principle we can clarify several ancient confusions, such as our notions of destiny, of forecasting, and of free will, but here I will just show how it solves the old, but politically urgent, argument of whether life, and hence personhood, begins at conception or at birth.

     Critics of astrology argue that the true beginning of any event is its conception and not its birth, but this is not so.  Since the uniqueness of an event is its spatial position (formerly its spatial and temporal position), any reference that we make to the formative process that created it refers to a different spatial event, and it is fallacious to mix two contexts of reference in an argument.  If we don’t consistently hold that the point of birth is the true beginning and distinct identity of any creation, be it a new organism in a womb or a new idea in a mind, then we are either proposing an infinite regression of causes or we are arbitrarily selecting one event in the entire chain of prior events as its cause.

     This is why one who accepts astrology cannot logically oppose abortions.  Astrologists know that a distinct, unique person only comes into existence at birth, but antiabortionists (who to be consistent must also oppose natal astrology) assume that a distinct person is created solely by an act of conception and nothing further.  This is nonsense, of course, for much more is needed after that initial event to make a distinct person, and it is the birth alone that sums up all of those prenatal events that ultimately produce a real and whole person.

     

     Imagine a case where a fetus acquires a major disease or defect shortly before its birth.  We clearly can’t conclude that the act of conception caused that defect.  No, we must consider all of the prenatal events that the embryo and fetus experienced during the entire pregnancy.  So until the actual birth occurs, we can’t speak realistically, as opposed to hypothetically, of that being-in-formation as a real and whole person.

     Our metaphysics keeps our thinking straight on this, by telling us that a whole event is defined only by its spatial relativity.  Thus, nothing is a distinct event or a real context of reference until it has been born and exists separately.  So when you refer to either a notion in your mind or a fetus in your womb (which in this context are equivalents), you are not referring to the future idea or child that might later exist independently.  Until an idea or a fetus has been born into its own space and path of motion, it is not a distinct event, or a unique motion system within Reality; it is just an internal part of its carrier’s space and path.  Clearly, one cannot logically speak of the birthing process and the later process of a thing’s postnatal life as if they were the same process.  They are distinct processes by definition.  An event’s conception is always internal to its conceiver, so though we can speak hypothetically of an idea or a fetus as if it had been born, it is not yet a unique external event.  Any internal event in our mind or body that has not been externalized has no life of its own.  Strictly speaking, then, to study the prenatal development of an organism is not to study life; it is to study the formation of life inside a unique person, or motion system.

     As for the specious arguments by the conception-is-personhood advocates that a fetus ‘feels’ pain or pleasure and therefore is ‘alive’ before its birth, this is just wordplay.  The fact that a fetus can be stimulated by events inside or outside the womb and will move in response to those provocations doesn’t mean that it is ‘feeling’ sensations as we wholly formed organisms do.  By definition, a feeling or sensation requires consciousness, and yet no one has proven that a fetus has that essential quality of life.  Consciousness is an awareness of self, and there is no ‘self’ for any thing that does not exist in space independently!  Our common sense tells us that we acquire consciousness and are a unique self only when we are born and not an instant before.

     Accordingly, any social science, including jurisprudence, must begin its reasoning about a person from the point of his or her birth in space and independence from the mother’s space, for otherwise it is not reasoning logically.  Until it has a time of birth, no real person, legal person (corporation), or fictional character can exist.

     Hence the US Supreme Court’s confusions in its abortion decisions.  This rightist court, solely to serve the religions it favors, once again introduced contradictions into our legal system; this time by clouding the established legal definition of a person, as recorded by a birth certificate (which this court also did in its absurd decisions to give corporations, or fictional ‘persons’, the same rights that real individuals have).  So rather than continuing to grant legal protection against murder only to a real person, it granted it to a nonperson, to a thing being formed.

     This decision was also wrong because, like all religions in history, it subordinates women to men, who have no such issue, and it intrudes on a female’s natural right to control her future life, her private space, and her internal processes.  Moreover, we cannot equate a woman’s choice to terminate her fetus to the murder of a living person, for these are totally different acts.

     As even the father must recognize, a woman's womb is not a public matter, no more so that is her mind.  A just state must have an overriding social justification for denying our natural rights as individuals, which include the sanctity of our mind, body, or womb.  In the case of a womb, this justification does exist in our insanely overpopulated world, but for preventing births, not for requiring them.  The Supreme Court claimed that the state has a legitimate interest in regulating abortions to protect women's health and "prenatal life," but this term is self-contradictory because it assumes that the word 'life' can mean something that was never born.  It is true that the state has a duty to protect it's people's health, but a fetus is not yet a person, and that's the issue here.  In fact, this claim makes the state responsible for protecting the health of every woman who elects to abort her fetus.  But this duty does not give the state the right to oppose what real persons want for themselves or their inner processes, and especially not by discriminating against half of them.  To grant our state that right in even one case is to concede its universal right to control the minds, beliefs, and bodies of all of us, and that is a terrifying precedent--though sadly one that has long been considered acceptable by our rightists, or collectivists.

    

Rethinking 'Gun Control'

    As the radical Huey Newton said truly in the sixties, “An unarmed people are slaves or are subject to slavery at any given moment.”

     At issue in our society for centuries now is the right of individuals to have weapons, and to have them freely without governmental restrictions.  What we need to understand today, though, is that the defense of this right is a leftist and humanist policy, and not the rightist and elitist one that it appears to be in the US media.  If we have trouble seeing this, it’s only because our traditionalist intellectuals don’t acknowledge that we have four basic political attitudes rather than just the two of the old ‘political spectrum’.  In my psychologic theory, by definition, leftists are individualists and they are either tolerant moderates or intolerant extremists; I call the moderates ‘progressives’ and the extremists ‘radicals’.  Accordingly, rightists are collectivists, and they too are either moderates, who I call ‘liberals’, or extremists, who I call ‘conservatives’. . . .

     [I omit here most of the discussion in my original 2005 essay on this subject, where I summarized the re-definitions of our key political terms that I put in my book Human Nature.  I end that discussion with this:]

     Leftists believe that only the individual is real and that every collective we form is an artificial construct.  So, like the great leftists Thomas Paine, George Mason, and Thomas Jefferson, they believe that we have natural individual rights that are inalienable and that therefore have logical and moral precedence over any legalized ‘civil’ rights that our artificially constructed states fabricate.  In our traditional political systems, none of which are leftist, this fact is ignored, and we are all left asking, “Who will be the ultimate defenders of our natural individual rights if a tyrannical state oversteps all reason and denies those natural rights by force?”  It will not be any state or its judiciary or other agents.  No, their ultimate defender can only be the people themselves, seen as constituting not an electoral majority, but rather a hypothetical militia, which to be an effective deterrent must be potentially powerful.

 

     We the People have no defense against tyranny unless we are a body of privately armed individuals who will join together as a military force whenever this is necessary to defend our natural liberties in our homes, farms, and streets.  But to fulfill this hallowed social duty to oppose tyranny, we must have adequate weap­ons.  And we will certainly be enslaved by our elitist rulers if we let them disarm us, or even track the weapons we own.

     Mention a ‘militia’ and our rightists point to our Second Amend­ment, as if our constitution were an unimprovable sacred text.  Conventionally, a militia means any body of citizen soldiers, or nonprofessionals.  It could be an organized military force under the direction of a government, but it can also be an unorganized force that has no officers or regulated exercises, with soldiers who are unknown to each other until the time comes to be comrades in justice and the noble defenders of individual rights.

     This latter view of a militia was stated clearly in the great Virginia Declaration of Rights, written by the progressive George Mason and ratified on June 12, 1776 by a legislative convention in Richmond that was attended by the liberal James Madison, the foxy opportunist who in 1791 used it as his guide to write the weakened, so-called “Bill of Rights” of our Constitution.  Madison participated actively in this convention, which ratified Mason’s Declaration about three weeks before Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence.  Mason had written this:

     "[Article] 13.  That a well-regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained to arms, is the proper, natural, and safe defence of a free state; that standing armies, in time of peace, should be avoided, as dangerous to liberty; and that, in all cases, the military should be under strict subordination to, and governed by, the civil power."

     This, and not the 1791 “Bill of Rights” that Madison reluctantly added to the Constitution, is what America’s revolutionists understood by the term ‘the right to bear arms’.  Madison knew that the centralized state that he and his co-conspirators desired would end soon unless some concessions to the people regarding their individual rights were added to their constitution, which guaranteed no such rights.  That elitist constitution was not written or ratified with the public’s consent; it was wholly decided by the conspiracy of the minority Federalists (mainly Washington, Hamilton, and Madison).  But the people, like the great leftists who spoke eloquently for them before and during the Revolutionary War, wanted more than Madison offered in his limited and often-vague “Bill of Rights.”  They also wanted greater political au­thority for their localities, their wards or townships, such as they had before that constitution imposed  federal and state rule of all local governments, and also a prohibition against a standing army in time of peace.  But the rightist Federalists were determined all along to block those demands.  So Madison emasculated the Virginia Declaration and, as regards its 13^th article, he wrote this line instead, as his 2nd Amendment:

     “A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

     Note that he intentionally used the phrase "a well-regulated militia" in order to suggest to all that he was following Mason in this, but then he discarded the prohibition against standing armies and distorted Mason’s clear definition of what a militia is.  That is, he failed to say that it was “the body of the people, trained to arms” as Mason did, and said instead, “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State…”  But that second clause is just a bland truism and digression from the real issue, which is wheth­er a militia should be considered (a) a stand­ing army controlled by the central state, or (b) the “body of the people, trained to arms.”  The autarchic Federalists wanted a standing army under their centralized control in order to defend their wealth and status against the people, and to humble the citizenry to that end, as the British monarchy had done before them.  And that is just what most of the people who wanted a true democracy feared.

     Rightists ever since the Federalists have continued to vitiate our individual rights and to further expand federal authority at the expense of the people and their communities.  For some years now elitist Democrats have united behind elitist Republicans like the conservatives Nixon, Bush II, and Ashcroft in their attempt to give us a fascist Department of Justice, an intolerant judiciary, a standing mercenary army to impose its will upon us and the world, and (to make its subjugation of the people easier) an unarmed citizenry.  Note that the liberal Hitler, like many dictators before and after him, disarmed the people in Germany as soon as he assumed power, for this is the first step in the old rightist textbook on how to trans­form an electoral democracy into a dictatorship.

     I won’t join Madison in calling this “the right of the people to keep and bear arms.”  Rather, I call it ‘the right of the individual to have reasonable means of self-defense’.  As a progressive, I also reject the rightists’ assumption that this right to adequate self-defense is a civil right that can be granted or denied by any govern­ment.  Instead, on universal moral grounds, I say that self-defense is a natural right of all real individuals, and that it therefore takes precedence over any of a state’s artificial rules, customs, or laws.  The only open issue is what we mean by ‘reasonable’, since in practice even a universal human right must be subject to reason under the circumstances.  But it surely cannot mean anything less than what a state’s police or mili­tary forces could use, legally or not, to control its own people.  If it did, then both a people’s militia and our individuals’ self-defense will be prohibited, whereupon democracy and justice are lost.

     Liberals lie to us when they pretend that the right to have arms is merely about our right to hunt animals, engage in target practice, or defend our homes against illegal thefts or invasion.  We also need to defend against legal thefts or invasions.  A constitution must provide for this universal right because it is the surest way to deter elitists and selfists, who always want to transform a leftist democracy into a rightist tyranny.  It is a check against tyranny because it is far more difficult for any military force, foreign or domestic, to subdue an armed people than an unarmed people, especially across a land as vast as ours.

    

     No state in history has ever been just; therefore, that which is legal can be as much a threat to our life, liberty, and property as that which a state declares to be illegal by its own rules.  Moreover, criminal corporations and underworld operations are tolerated by elitist rulers and politicians when it profits them to do so.  Add to this that every day our world is becoming more ignorant, barbaric, and dangerous, and no one can honestly or sanely deny that we each need adequate means of self-defense.

     The blame for our dire world situation today belongs mostly with the rulers of our multination­al corporations, religions, and other collectives, whose selfishness and greed make them the chief opponents of democracy and justice, and hence the opponents of national and individual self-defense.  Their media encourage ‘nonviolence’, but only from the people or nations they have targeted for theft, reserving to themselves the right to do great violence to anyone anytime.  If we are all disarmed, they can expand their unjust empires and excessive riches at will.

     Excess profits are theft, and theft requires the denial of reason and the use of lies or force.  So an increasingly militaristic and warring world simply means that global thievery is increasing.  Disarming all others is thus high on the agenda of these behemoth corporations, and our prostituted politicians only want what they want; hence ‘gun control’ and international ‘preemptive strikes’.  By using force to impose world ‘peace’, they can reduce the costs of securing their immoral activities internationally and at home.  They already do this through our public treasury.  Our budgets for police, intelligence, and ‘defense’ forces are largely just corporate welfare, a largesse that is not even confined to our domestic corporations.

     There are two clear proofs of this charge.  First, the United Nations, a creature of its rightist member states and their multination­al corporations, is working to achieve global ‘gun control’, in a way that will preempt the wishes and sovereign­ty of all the people and communities of the world.  Second, the elitist Anglo-American axis is now waging a so-called ‘war on terrorism’ against minor or even fictional enemies, whose limited power and scattered acts of destruction are being used by this elitist axis to rationalize a vast worldwide war, possibly another Hundred Years War, the sole purpose of which is to benefit the world’s greedy and unregulated multinational corporations.

     The participation of the United Nations in this elitist conspiracy against the world’s people should not surprise us, for nothing is closer to tyranny and more removed from democracy and justice than international organizations and the fictions that create and bind them, which monarchic jurists since the sixteenth century have presumed to call ‘international law’.  Did the people anywhere ever pass or approve those ‘laws’?  No.  This is a bastardization of the centuries-old but prevailing concept of law as a hypothetical “social contract.”  It is just a rightist shortcut by which elitists can achieve global tyranny without ever having to argue, with people of all types and views, the fundamental issues of legal legitimacy.  And my psychologic theory shows that legal legitimacy comes directly from our judgment process, or more specifically our common moral reasoning, which precedes, implies, and hence determines all the social laws, rules, customs, and practices that we devise.

     No international union, agency, or court yet formed has a charter from the people who are being ruled by it.  Their absolutist authority over us has no plebiscite, no consent of the governed, no "contract" of any kind with us, or no other honest foundation.  These international agencies represent lawlessness, for they imitate their modern-era paradigm, the United States, which itself imitated the bestial British Empire.  They are all created alike, by private conspiracies at elitist ‘constitutional conventions’, the first purpose of which is always to subdue and enslave the unrepresented population.  If we ever do have a sound and just world legal system, you may be sure that it will be conceived by leftists and humanists, and not by rightists and elitists.

The Consideration Cycle, Briefly.

     The psychologic theory that I use for my character analyses is presented in my recent book Human Nature: A New Theory of Psychology.  This theory claims to explain people’s congenital nature as distinct from the traits they develop after birth.  Modern psychologists refer to the latter, our postnatal nature, as either our personality or our character, and throughout their work they use these two words ambiguously and interchangeably.  In my theory, however, the term character means only our congenital nature, the basic impulses of which I believe stay with us throughout our lives, while the term personality means our total nature; both the characteristics we had at birth and all the developed traits that we acquired later from our life experiences.

     The premises of my theory are that we humans reason cyclically and that the structure of the universal “Consideration Cycle,” as I call it, forms our common logic.  This Cycle begins in us each time we consider a new event, or realize that something has happened, after which we may analyze that whole event and perceive its parts.  Then we choose some of those parts for further speculative reasoning and we create hypothetical constructs that form those fictional notions that, in new turns of the Cycle, become our fictional notions of Reality, or of what we think is happening.

     The Cycle, as I conceived it, consists of four cardinal ideas plus various conscious and subconscious phases.  It has five conscious phases, which I call our psychologic systems, each of which consists of two polar ideas, one of which is an objective perception and one of which is a subjective perception.  We have an objective perception when we assimilate something from outside ourselves, and we have a subjective perception when we project something from inside ourselves.  The tension between these two opposite poles is what allows us to form tangible ideas that we can explicate and remember for future uses.  But in our subconscious phases we can do nothing but store these tangible notions as memories for possible recall in the future.

     I have named our five psychologic systems, in their invariable order, our Will, Thought, Feeling, Judgment, and Power systems (WTFJP), each of which consists of two polar ideas.  And since there are two ideas in each system, each of which we perceive either through assimilation or projection, we humans will handle each system in one of four different ways.  We can be balanced (B) in a system, which makes us realistic and logical at both poles; we can be reversed (R) in a system, which makes us unrealistic and illogical at both poles; we can be projective (+) in a system, which makes us subjective at both polls and so only half logical there; or we can be assimilative (–), which makes us passive, accumulative, and half logical in that system.

     It follows by hypothetical count that in each of our psychologic systems 25% of us are logical, 25% of us are totally illogical, and 50% of us are, in opposite ways, half logical and half illogical.  These facts confirm the old understanding most of us have that in total, considering all five systems, very few humans are realistic and rational.  Offsetting that bad news, however, is the fact that with this new psychology theory, we now have an objective analytic tool that shows us why and when people or generations of people are or are not realistic and logical, and specifically just who those people are.

Theism versus Realism

 (Reply to Facebook post by Richard Schloss)    
     
     Richard, if you analyze that conflict more deeply -- that is, from an epistemological perspective -- you see that the difference between theists and their opposites, who I call 'realists' and not 'atheists', is in the primary (or metaphysical) reasoning with which we all begin our considerations of events. The error that theists make is that instead of acknowledging the initial view of the whole Reality that they and all other humans have, they deny that insight and wait until they reach their tertiary reasoning, where they can fabricate a pseudo-reality from their partialistic passions, one that makes them feel better than the truth about Reality does.

     I have explained this, clearly I believe, in my book HUMAN NATURE: A NEW THEORY OF PSYCHOLOGY -- specifically, in Chapter. 3. Reality, in the section entitled "The Epistemic Refutation of Monotheism."

On Gun Control

At a DNC convention this week, Hillary Clinton said, “We need to put an end to the gun violence that plagues our communities.”  This is true, but only if by ‘gun violence’ we also mean the attacks by law-enforcement agents against blacks and other minority people.  It’s strange that she waited to mention this need until there was a fatal incident involving white victims that didn’t require her to mention the recent murders of black citizens by racist police.  So her real position on this is clear, and it contrasts sharply with the “black lives matter” position that Bernie Sanders warmly supported at that same convention.

Then she said that “We must keep weapons out of the hands of the domestic abusers [and] the violently unstable. . . .”  This merely echoes the old calls by anti-gun conspirators for laws requiring “background checks,” which some rightist-liberal states have already legislated.  The greatest danger of such laws is that they are the first step in creating a national registry that will tell our centralized government the identity not only of those who were denied the right to buy a gun, but also of everyone who did buy one.  And when our rightists (or collectivists) win control of all three branches of our government, they will suspend all of our rights as individuals with new “Patriot Acts,” and then use that registry to seize everyone’s weapons.

But there’s another basic flaw in those background checks that goes unmentioned in the media; namely, that today no legislation can be correctly written and fairly enforced as regards mentally disturbed people.  This is so because, notwithstanding nearly two centuries of academic propaganda to the contrary, no philosopher or human scientist has ever explained human nature fully and truly.  Therefore, we cannot logically assume that our scientists’ current ignorance and ex post facto (or empirical) methods will allow them to judge people correctly, and to do so before the fact, which is when it really matters.

Moreover, if it is true, as researchers recently reported, that 70% of all murdered people in the US were family members or lovers of the murderer, background checks will require a vast expansion of our family and social counseling programs, and this will produce an even greater intrusion by our government into our minds and private lives.

As a philosopher, progressive, and humanist who tries to reason deeply and fairly on all issues, I can see no logical or moral validity to the old arguments by rightists—including establishment Democrats such as Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Biden—that we need more laws to restrict gun ownership.  As individualists, we leftists know better than to let our state have such total power over our natural, inalienable rights and hence our thoughts, beliefs, and life decisions.

I consider my core belief here to be a fundamental principle of any truly sane and just society that anyone could ever conceive.  As Jefferson put it, once again echoing the views of true leftists like Thomas Paine and George Mason, “The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.”

But we must go even further than that, for the right to own weapons is an inalienable right of every individual who is born anywhere, just because it is the right of self-defense.  That right is as natural and inalienable as eating, sleeping, loving, and breathing.  So why should we surrender it to the massive centralist government that rightist elitists created for us in 1787 and hope to rule us with forever?

The gun restrictions proposed by our collectivistic rightists, whether liberals or conservatives, are irrational because they put the cart before the horse.  Only after they have helped us establish a moral government that serves and protects every individual equally can they reasonably ask us to lay down our arms.