Funny, I hear seagulls...

Excellent, I will check it out! Is there a specific paper you'd recommend?

In the final section, I argue that this isn't just a metaphysical puzzle - it's tied up with the ethics of pregnancy, because the metaphysics constrains how many loci of moral concern there are, and what it takes for them to be harmed or to die. 7/7

So we can have the 'organism' view or the 'baby-shaped' view, but we can't keep both. Whichever one we pick, we will have to revise our thinking about the metaphysics of birth, and perhaps our nature and persistence. 6/7

There are other views of the organism, on which immunological or evolutionary considerations determine what organisms are and what they're made of. But they all put pressure on the idea that the foetus is a baby-shaped organism. 5/7

So, either the foetus is not an organism, or it is a *much* bigger organism than we tend to think: it overlaps completely with its mother. 4/7

Pregnancy is fundamentally a collaboration between the parts we think of as 'maternal' and 'foetal'. It induces profound changes in almost every maternal organ and system, as they adapt to support the developing pregnancy. 3/7

The paper asks what foetuses are. Most of us assume they're organisms, and they're the roughly baby-shaped things we see on scans.

I argue that can't be right, because - at least on one prominent view - organisms include all the parts that work together to maintain a system's structure. 2/7

Not chaos related, but I very much enjoyed this video essay about knitwear in movies youtu.be/ZJMMqo5N1as?...

excellent!

@raphaelmilliere.com and @cameronbuckner.bsky.social have two philosophical overviews - a great place to start: arxiv.org/abs/2401.03910 & arxiv.org/abs/2405.03207