I would like someone to explain to me when "life begins"

[ManusJustus]

appolose said:

ManusJustus said:

Everything anyone suggests here is an opinion.

My opinion is that life begins when you become self-aware.  For human children, that would be sometime in late pregnancy.  That also applies to living humans, as it is socially acceptable to pull the plug on non-aware humans in vegetative states who have no chance of coming out.

 

Perhaps, then, you might modify your definition of life to be whenever something has the potential to be self aware, as you noted that a vegetative state person has no chance of coming out (although some do, don't they?), implying that if they did, we might consider them living.  In that case, the potential could also be applied to the very moment of conception (if not further back), and thus you would need to consider before late pregancy the beginning of life.

The human in a vegetative state was self-aware at one time and is now no longer.  Accepting that a person you once knew will no longer be self-aware is hard to come to grasps with, so them not coming out of it is necessary for that decision to be made.  A young fetus has not become self-aware yet, and similary neither have a sperm or an egg.