I dream of giant squirrels.

[i_am_the_owl]

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Main:
How many components can one remove from a human being and still have them be a person? It's pretty safe to say that an individual who has lost their hand is still a person, and beyond that, not 95% of a person, but a person. Thus a human is not simply a sum of their parts or they could be more easily quantified. Even without lungs, a

Comments

[anijayoukai]

If this has already been alluded to, please disregard, I skimmed the comments instead of reading them thoroughly.

I don't think any one part of a person makes them a person. I think the ability to have the essential parts (brain, lungs, some type of vocalizing mechanism, facial expressions) work together to act, react and exerience things is what makes someone human. Just like we could personify dogs/cats/other animals w/ personality (although this is pretentious), if they didn't have the ability to get our attention or just behave differently than, say, a rat or a gerbil, they wouldn't be themself. Again I'm in conflict, b/c of what I learned in my buddhism class. What theravada buddhism says is that there is no essential self, but when you die there is SOMEthing that gets transfered either into the body of an animal, human, god or nirvana. this of course is debatable. ANYWAY the point is that I think there is something outside of a brain and just body parts that makes a person or animal. If I knew what to classify it as I would, but all I can come up with for now are brain waves; simple eletrical impulses. And some humans/animals have the ability to act on something other than instinct.

[i_am_the_owl]

I'm not really interested in Buddhism or any other religion as a means to answer what should be an empirical question.

Yet, without lungs, you can be in an iron lung and still be a person. Without the ability to speak, you can still be a person. Without facial expressions, you can still be a person. Without a brain, you can't be a person. See?

[anijayoukai]

I do. The point I was trying to get across was that we don't classify ourselves as people based on one thing. And this is not an emperical question, otherwise we would be able to answer it based on evidence/direct observations. The tangible things that biolgoically make us human don't make us people, otherwise animals would be people too...but PETA would say they are anyway >_> And I most definately think Chloe is a little person w/ fur.

[i_am_the_owl]

A human brain isn't the same as a cat brain. Furthermore, the question presupposes keeping the brain intact and alive, thus retaining the "intangible" things.