[Skybird]

No mind without material basis - brain. No brain, no mind. No brain, no awareness of "self" and no awareness of "environment". No signal processing. No brain, no quality of that kind that qulifies a body as a human. Without brian, without mind, a humanoid body is noi human, but just a corpus, dysfunctional, for it is designed for the purpose to serve the needs of the biological basis for a mind. If the biological basis can be replaced as carrier of a mind, then even this basis obviously would not be needed. That this is possible, and that we one day will move opur mind from our biological bodies into lets say ,machinery, is speculation only, and we also have no final answer if this even would be desirable. Not the body makes the human a human. Its his mind. The mind is the criterion.

An important step takes place in the 24th week of pregnancy: Then a group of nerve cell extensions from the diencephalon reaches what will one day be the cerebral cortex. It begins in the so-called thalamus, a switching point that collects, sorts and sends perceptions of our senses to regions that should continue to work with it. Only when these pathways are formed can the child notice what its sensory organs is recording. And react. Before that, information from the body does not reach the cortex at all, and there can actually be nothing that the fetus could perceive as "I".

I fail to see a relevant difference between the backwardedness of militant anti-abortion "activists", and for exmaple Islamic fundamentalists who completely want to own females as lifestock. Both root in anti-feminist, patriarchalic claims for possession of females by males, and patriarchalic hunger for power and control over women. Its primitive, its bigott, its unfair, its feverish religious zealousness. Its emotional irrationality killing ratio and intellect. To its defence, I also think that deep-rooting genetic programming is at play here. Some people can become aware of their genetic preset programs, others cannot. The latter have no chance to escape their preset behaviours, they will always be instinct-driven, and trapped in that. Its not kind to say that, but many of these people are not any kind either, but are quite cruel on mankind, causing a lot of hamr and suffering, thus my uncaring frankness. I take no prisoners on this one.

A clump of cells is not already a human. It takes systematic structure, its takes structural syntax, and these need time to form up.

But some people even go so far as to decry the fate of baby lives not being lived because they have not even been sired. These usually are the same people who want to procreate all life long, and have a dozen of children and more. The logic in this reasoning is so confused and absurd that words fail here.

Perception of the environment. Awareness of "self" and processing and discriminating stimuli, differentiating between "me" and "not me". That is where a clump of cells starts to become a living creature, may it be animal, may it be human (which is in principle also just another animal).

Unrealised potentials, single eggs or sperm cells, speculations about being that could be if only it would be fathered - are no humans, no creatures, no living things. They are just single cells, clumps of cells, or not even that. Nothing. Hypothetical possibilities are just that. If this is not understood, mental sanity sooner or later must necessarily fly out of the window, leaving borderline syndrome, hallucinations, and other mental darknesses behind. Psychotherapeutic manuals are full of descriptions of problems coming from the inability to differentiate functionality between different qualities and quantities of "own" and "other", as well as "real" and "surreal" existence. Its like in a dystopia by Philip Dick. Your world falls apart into ever smaller fragments.

From Eros to Cosmos. From Cosmos to Logos (that is a retranslation of the German title of a main book by Ken Wilber: Sex, Ecology, Spirituality). Always only in this sequence, never any other way. It just does not work in any other sequence. Logos forms up last, not first, the material universe is its basis and precondition.