Link: http://acsh.org/fact...news_detail.asp
It was interesting that I found stem cells and the rights of artificial humans discussed in the same article.
My criteria for personhood would at the very least, though, entail that an entity have a mind. There is a reason, after all, that we think someone who loses an arm is still a person while someone who loses a head ceases to be one, and it's not just the fact that it's much harder to keep someone's heart and lungs pumping when he loses his head. It's that his mind -- which is what made him a person rather than just a big lump of flesh and blood -- is gone. You might hear people say, "He lost his leg, but thank goodness he survived!" I submit that you will never hear even the most ardent pro-lifer say, "His head was destroyed, but thank goodness he survived!" (not even in an era in which a headless body could be kept "alive" indefinitely on machines).
Echoing the brilliant artificial intelligence researcher Douglas Hofstadter (specifically, the concluding chapters of his book Le Ton Beau de Marot), I am even willing to concede that in some sense the mind is a non-material thing -- not that it has ever been demonstrated to survive without the fleshy medium of the brain, but it is, after all, a pattern (of thoughts) rather than an object. In principle, that pattern could perhaps be replicated in another medium than the one in which it was originally found: minds might someday be uploaded to electronic containers or downloaded into robot bodies. It is the mind that matters, not the flesh. Call that non-material pattern the soul, if you wish, even at the risk that the pro-life crowd will pounce on the word as an implicit endorsement of all their religious claims.
