First potentiality

Alexander Pruss, "A Miscellany of Pro-Life Arguments; IV: Personhood"

3. Hardware and Software

But perhaps I was unfair to the pro-choice arguer in aligning the position with Aristotle. Maybe the distinction to be made is between having the capacity to develop certain mental structures and having the mental structures in place. The fetus lacks the mental structures on this view, while the sleeping adult has them (there they are, in the brain).

However, this distinction would be problematic, at least outside an Aristotelian framework. For it is not like that there is are helpful distinctions between hardware and software (i.e., structures and the information they hold), or between having a structure and being able to engage in an activity, that would allow one to make the distinction the way one needs to.

We could imagine an organism that for the winter encodes all of the information in its brain into a very small cyst, then eats the brain, and in the spring grows a new brain and populates it with the information from the cyst. When the information is in the cyst, do we say that there are developed structures or not? If we answer in the negative, then our criterion seems to be that the information doesn't count because it cannot be used immediately--a brain needs to regrown first. But by this criterion, a sleeping adult human does not have developed structures, since she needs various changes--physical (electrochemical) changes--to occur in her brain before she can be awake.

But if we say that there are developed structures when the brain is replaced by a cyst in this hypothetical organism, then how is this different from a case where structures are encoded in DNA?

Now one distinction that could be made is that not all the information necessary for us to become persons is found in the DNA. Interaction with the environment is necessary. Could be. But can we make such a sharp distinction between what forms solely from internal influence and requires mere sustenance from the outside, and what comes from the outside?

The use of thought experiments to clarify reality... I've critiqued this practice before, haven't I?

The point is that we have a better understanding of development now, which can be used to "update" Aristotle's biology, rather than invalidate it. Does the developing conceptum have the same organs that the mature adult has? Obviously not. Does this mean that it does not have the same capacities/powers as the adult? Yes, in one way, no in another.

If a power is dependent upon a corporeal organ and seated on it, does that power really exist when the organ is absent? What if that power is not purely spiritual (like the intellect) but is corporeal?

(It seems to me that "mental structures" is less precise than "organ" or "tool." Is this just the analytic disposition to create and use new technical terminology when ordinary language and the Western intellectual tradition suffice? It seems so to me.)

When the information is in the cyst, do we say that there are developed structures or not? If we answer in the negative, then our criterion seems to be that the information doesn't count because it cannot be used immediately--a brain needs to regrown first.

A very questionable hypothesis to begin with. What exactly is information? Is it the act of a power/organ? Or merely the material correlate to that act? I deny that there can be such information in the cyst, since a cyst cannot be the bearer of information.

If we accept the genetic reductionist model of life, then DNA may encode for "mental structures" but in a conceptum those mental structures do not exist in actuality, only in potentiality--only when DNA is transcribed and the structures are really generated do they come into existence.

So it is correct to say that the conceptum has a first potentiality, or do we need to speak of something like a pre-potentiality? At the moment I am leaning more towards the second than the first; what impact would this have on our understanding of natures? I think we can understand that a thing has a certain nature, even if not all of its first potentialities are yet present, as long as other potentialities are being exercised which lead to the development of those absent potentialities.