That’s not your call.
@Christy: In that case (and the example might be better if both were steaks or both were hamburger, either way one rancid and one fresh), the signifier need only be an intracanine symbol meaning ‘healthy meat’, ‘fresh meat’, ‘meat over there’, ‘a more acceptable aroma from something edible’, ‘a more acceptable color from something edible’, ‘better food’, or ‘trustworthy food’ and could be a less sophisticated signifier that fulfills the purpose of leading to a good outcome rather than a bad one. Some animals that hunt animals prefer live animals over already-dead ones and vultures have the opposite preference, but each does have a preference and would need a signifier to fulfill it. Would you have another hypothetical to test?
@beaglelady: I’m not acting as a BioLogos official but as a user like any other, including you. I think you were positing that plants not making choices when they do what they do disproves that some microorganisms make choices, but it does not disprove that, because some microorganisms could make choices even if no plants do. While plants contain microoorganisms, that some microorganisms make choices does not mean that the microorganisms that make choices can be found in plants. If you were positing that plants make choices, that’s interesting, but is tangential, because that does not address whether fetuses do, which is necessary to whether they have a signifier for what they signify as something to choose. It becomes hard to read a topic when several topics get intertwined and there is much new science on plants. Or if you have a line of thought that says that plants indeed make choices and from there that fetuses also do or that plants making choices disproves that fetuses do, please share the line of thought.
But why does the dog need a signifier? Why can’t it make a choice based on nothing more than the stimulus?
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That’s easy enough to do. E. Orthodox clergy love to write on the topic of baptism.
I don’t think that will be difficult at all.
Again, as far as the sin angle goes…yep… it’s part of their world view … but not when it comes to infants.
You see the difference, right?
It’s because it’s logically impossible. There’s no way to do it. The dog has to address, somehow, what it is choosing.
If there’s poison in your food and you know nothing of its presence, either you can’t do anything about it except by accident or prophylactically (e.g., you throw all the food away), and the nonaccidental cases require a signifier.
By the way, although not dispositive, computer science provides a perspective that’s helpful here: the process of breaking a procedure down into steps that can be processed by a computer. For example, you can tell a spreadsheet (a high-level program) to give you the sum of 2+2+2, but the lowest-level hardware can’t process that because it can add only two numbers at a time, so the software has to intervene to convert your problem into 2+2, wait for the answer, send answer+2, and accept the new answer as final by keeping track of all the steps so as not to miss one or go too far (doing all this very quickly). This idea of breaking a procedure down into steps comes up a lot. Another example is that suppose you want to extract someone’s name from a database. In the way the computer stores the database, typically, it assumes that the name starts at a certain place on the hard drive and that a name could be of various lengths, but it still needs to know the length of the name you want so it doesn’t cut it short or collect irrelevant gobbledygook after it. Common choices among programmers are to enclose the name between flags that you don’t see on your screen or to precede the name with a quantity indicator, like 7 for Christy (and other ways may be possible, like having a quantity indicator somewhere else). You, being a human, probably don’t do that. Neither do I. But that’s probably true only consciously, a high level in our mental processes. I’m not sure how our brains at lower levels store words and know where one word ends and another begins, it may not be in the way that computers do, but it has to separate them somehow.
Most of us see colors in three ranges. A few, who are tetrachromats, see colors in four ranges. At least one is an artist and another is an interior decorator whose clients are unable to distinguish some color swatches she shows them. I don’t know if they have names for the additional colors they see, but I’m not a tetrachromat, I don’t think I know any in person (just from the Web), and I doubt most hair coloring shops meet any, so most of us have no names for most of the colors tetrachromats see and therefore we’d have difficulty ordering a wig or a painting as a surprise gift for a tetrachromat, even though the colors in the fourth range evidently exist. We could do it by stating combinations of light wave frequencies or wavelengths, but I, for one, don’t have a list of those combinations specific to the fourth range, so they don’t help me as potential signifiers.
They baptize infants for the remission of sins. I am Curious George as to why you don’t see this. But whatever.
What are you even talking about? Fungal diseases?
A scientist wrote and in reference to that I wrote “some microorganisms”. Whether fungal or disease-specific, I don’t know and it doesn’t make a difference. If some microorganisms make choices, then maybe fetuses do, too. And any organism making a choice has to have a way to refer to each choice: a signifier for each signified. Therefore, if a fetus makes a choice, the fetus has to have at least two signifiers. In other words, if fetuses make choices, they have signifiers (precursors to words) before they are born. If fetuses make choices, that result is important to science and, arguably, to much of our lives. That’s what I’m talking about and have been in the opening of this topic and ever since.
I think this is the weakness of your whole argument. You assume that it is impossible to choose without symbolic labels. I don’t think this is true. I don’t think it is a given or a logical necessity at all. It’s just your assumption. You need to ground this assumption in something other than what seems intuitively obvious to you. Mice run mazes. They choose over and over again whether to go right or left. I don’t think there is any reason to assume they have to have an abstract symbolic label for “right” or “left” in order to turn and proceed in a direction. It is as “logically” obvious to me that they don’t need a label as it is to you apparently logically imperative that they must.
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If you have two choices, plate A or B, and B is poisoned , you most certainly can intentionally (non-accidentally) choose one of them without knowing anything about the poison. How is me picking A not a choice unless I can can deduce the presence of poison? I don’t have to even know it’s food or have to eat it. I can be deluded or mistaken and think it’s rocks. If I pick A, I pick A, I make a choice. No labels or knowledge required. Choices do not have to be informed at all, a choice is just the elimination of other options.
I don’t know what you are talking about with seeing color in three versus four ranges, but I do know that perception of color and labeling of color are two separate things. Color studies were a big thing in linguistics, when people were arguing about the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. Some cultures only label three colors, black, white and red. Eleven basic color terms exist cross-linguistically. That doesn’t mean people’s eyes work differently or that people from those cultures are unable to correctly choose between differing shades they have no distinct term for (as in pick the color tile that matches a tree leaf and pick the color tile that matches blood.)
Food: Yes, but that’s a different case, because I had lumped food into one mass (which either had poison or didn’t) and you had divided onto two plates (one poisoned but not both). I was addressing whether you do something to get rid of the poison; you’re addressing whether you eat the nonpoisonous plate of food. The labeling of anything already familiar to us is usually subconscious but not less than a label for being subconscious; it is also usually rapid and not less than a label for being rapid; even combining both subconsciousness and rapidity does not make the signifier less than a signifier.
Color: I was referring to the physical condition, not a cultural one. Human eyes have nerve receptors in the retinas that sense within a color range; most of us have those for three color ranges, with the ability to perceive one hundred shades in each range (combining yields 100 x 100 x 100 = 1,000,000 colors). Estimates are that two percent of women and zero percent of men have genes for tetrachromacity but that of the two percent of women very few biologically express that genetic characteristic, due to epigenetics. It’s also likely that culturally we are taught as children not to see additional colors; a tetrachromat’s parents probably are not tetrachromats and they’ll teach their children how to understand what they see, especially since human children, unlike any members of other species, see pictures in books and on TV and those media don’t support tetrachromacity, so the most of the children who do have tetrachromaticity will ignore it, just as we learn in the first few months of life to ignore vocal echoes that aren’t useful. While many retailers sell products for the “long tail” (few sales per item across many items), such as for books (Barnes & Noble as of a few years ago reportedly carried many titles that sold at a rate of one copy every 3-4 months per store), I have not seen that effect (in the big city where I’ve lived for years) for product color choices that would appeal only to tetrachromats, so they’re not likely to be anywhere near two percent of the population. One tetrachromat lives near a river and can see, in the river, colors most people don’t see, so tetrachromats evidently find some of the additional colors not only in paintings and color swatches (arguably artificial) but also in nature. There is a little bit of research on the subject available online.
Some cultures name only two colors (white and black, or, I think about as likely, light and dark) and there’s a sequence for add-ons (if there are only three colors named, most three-color cultures have the same third color, if there are only four colors named, most four-color cultures have the same fourth color, and so on, but not all the way to very large name sets, probably because agreement evaporates near the high end). It’s likely that they don’t find it useful to distinguish more colors, perhaps because, for what’s important to them, other characteristics suffice to distinguish the items. If we need to distinguish between elephants and giraffes, we don’t need “gray” and “orange” because there are enough other differences. And even for a culture without a name for ‘green’, that’s a name composed of sounds or writable characters; if they match a green specimen to a palette of greens, either the sample doubles as a signifier and the palette is a palette of signifieds or the palette is a palette of signifiers and the sample doubles as a signified. That’s like a child pointing to someone; the someone is a signified and the pointing motion is a signifier.
On Sapir-Whorf: I agree that language influences perception in individuals and cultures, but I’m not relying on that here. Rather, I’m arguing that perception, in this case that a choice is available and what that choice is, influences language and, earlier in life, biocommunication systems that can accept symbols.
The assigning of communication symbols is probably driven by utility. We can tell pet cats apart but most of us, facing a forest, would have a hard time telling oaks from other thick trees, never mind oaks from each other. Some primates, however, know each oak individually. We can look at a valley of grass and enjoy it but we’d hardly give every blade its own name. Few would try, even for fun. But identifying mushrooms would be vital, because some are delicious and some will kill you. And humans are not the only one who had better identify mushrooms. Mushrooms can’t run away, so their survival may depend on prolific reproduction or discouraging eating them, and discouraging works much better if prospective diners remember which is which. Prospective eaters include many animals, including birds. Having a bird brain may be a very good thing, noted one ethologist.
I believe they say they baptize people of a moral age for the remission of sins.
That doesn’t appear to be the reason they baptize infants. I would have spent more time on this issue if I had realized that this the part you find impossible to believe. I’ll chalk it up to you having great diplomacy skills…
Here is an official page for the Orthodox community… I think it is the kind of gravitas you were looking for ( I had to cut it into 3 sections if it was going to be legible…)
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I acknowledge that they don’t believe in original sin. But they do recite the Nicene Creed at the Baptismal service, saying,
I acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins.?
But my main point has been to counter what you originally claimed. You originally said
that baptism for them is often merely to offer comfort to the parents, and that “very few of them use the word sin anywhere in the context of infant baptism.”
btw, I don’t think much of this web site. “They claim that Protestants believe infant baptism is unbiblical.” That is outrageously false.
@beaglelady and @gbrooks9
This discussion of Orthodox baptism practices is completely tangential to the OP. If you really must continue the discussion, do so via PM, please.
After further reflection, I will start a new thread that specifically addresses the issue of Sin and the Eastern Orthodox communities. That should smooth things out! 
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I would like to mildly protest your edict.
The way millions of Eastern Christians perceive the sin status of infants seems quite relevant to the problem of Paul, Sin and Adam.
It’s the specific reason I have brought it up. And just as @beaglelady and I are coming to terms with what to many is a pretty alien world view… you want to shut down the whole discussion?
Could you reconsider that idea please?
Note to @beaglelady - I noticed that off-base note… which i think confirms more of my position. The Eastern communions don’t really know the West that well… and we don’t know them that well!
But the OP isn’t about any of these things.
TIME AND CHANGE ARE OPPOSITE WORLDVIEWS!
Oh wait… wrong thread…
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LOL!
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Thats why I just went ahead and created a separate thread.
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As for this thread here… you don’t think the question of “fetal sin” was a more productive aspect of a thread asking about fetal language?
I guess there is a taste for every one…