You don't have an argument. Not a shred of a reason for your claim. You just repeat it. — unenlightened
So are you making an argument for a soul that can be embodied by anything? — schopenhauer1
Are you saying anything about a person that is not true of a shirt?What is the particularity of personhood you are pointing too? Any counterfactual is a false narrative in one sense. I am wearing a blue shirt, so it is a false narrative that I am wearing a red shirt. But yesterday I wore a red shirt. — unenlightened
Are ok with my hairdresser saying "You would look better with short hair."? — unenlightened
Are you ok with my sister saying "I wish I had been born a man."? — unenlightened
Are you ok with my hairdresser cutting my hair and my sister transitioning? — unenlightened
It doesn't matter if you would be oblivious of who "you" are today, in your head that "you" would be much happier and have a better life.
It is saying, "I wish my perspective were with a better being in a better situation then I am right now."
— Philosophim
That's fine, but it's still not true that you could be anything else but you. It is just a turn of phrase in the way you describe it, but not an actual point of fact. — schopenhauer1
Philosophy of mind is disappearing into neuroscience, so metaphysics is best answered through there. Ethically and metaphysically with mirror neurons understood, it means we can envision ourselves as other beings, and likely allows us to sympathize and treat other things better. We can imagine ourselves as that being suffering, so we try not to cause it any suffering ourselves. — Philosophim
Well, look at it this way: what makes you you is a set of thoughts and actions and the fact of the matter is someone else could've written the Tractus Logico-Philosophicus and not Ludwig Wittgenstein and someone else could've painted the Mona Lisa and not Leonardo da Vinci — TheMadFool
"You" could be no one else, otherwise it is someone else we are talking about. — schopenhauer1
The point is, that there is no "could have been born a..". That would not be you then. It invalidates that kind of counterfactual line of thinking. — schopenhauer1
Are you ok with my sister saying "I wish I had been born a man."?
— unenlightened
No, becauseif born differently, she would not be her, she would be someone else. That is precisely what I mean. You can't be born something else without being someone else. — schopenhauer1
"You" could be no one else, otherwise it is someone else we are talking about. — schopenhauer1
After schopenhauer1 drove antinatalist arguments into Sarah's head she was not herself anymore. — Nils Loc
What we do know is there was you after birth. — schopenhauer1
So this kind of leads into Kripke's Naming and Necessity a bit. You could not be anything but you, but it can possibly be the case that someone else besides X person had done a specific action. It probably would look slightly different, but in the same ballpark. "You" could be no one else, otherwise it is someone else we are talking about. — schopenhauer1
So this kind of leads into Kripke's Naming and Necessity a bit. You could not be anything but you, but it can possibly be the case that someone else besides X person had done a specific action. It probably would look slightly different, but in the same ballpark. "You" could be no one else, otherwise it is someone else we are talking about. — schopenhauer1
During Gregor Mendel's (genes) lifetime, most biologists held the idea that all characteristics were passed to the next generation through blending inheritance, in which the traits from each parent are averaged. Instances of this phenomenon are now explained by the action of multiple genes with quantitative effects. Charles Darwin tried unsuccessfully to explain inheritance through a theory of pangenesis. It was not until the early 20th century that the importance of Mendel's ideas was realized.
By 1900, research aimed at finding a successful theory of discontinuous inheritance rather than blending inheritance led to independent duplication of his work by Hugo de Vries and Carl Correns, and the rediscovery of Mendel's writings and laws. — Wikipedia
We cannot have been a being other than who we are now — Schopenhauer1
In the course of making these distinctions, Kripke revived the ancient doctrine of essentialism, according to which objects possess certain properties necessarily—without them the objects would not exist at all. On the basis of this doctrine and revolutionary new ideas about the meaning and reference of proper names and of common nouns denoting “natural kinds” (such as heat, water, and tiger), he argued forcefully that some propositions are necessarily true but knowable only a posteriori—e.g., “Water is H2O” and “Heat is mean molecular kinetic energy”—and that some propositions are contingently true (true in some circumstances but not others) but knowable a priori. These arguments overturned the conventional view, inherited from Immanuel Kant (1720–1804), that identified all a priori propositions as necessary and all a posteriori propositions as contingent. Naming and Necessity also had far-reaching implications regarding the question of whether linguistic meaning and the contents of beliefs and other mental states are partly constituted by social and environmental facts external to the individual. According to Kripke’s causal theory of reference, for example, the referent of a given use of a proper name, such as Aristotle, is transmitted through an indefinitely long series of earlier uses; this series constitutes a causal-historical chain that is traceable, in principle, to an original, or “baptismal,” application. Kripke’s view posed a serious challenge to the prevailing “description” theory, which held that the referent of a name is the individual who is picked out by an associated definite description, such as (in the case of Aristotle) the teacher of Alexander the Great. Finally, Kripke’s work contributed greatly to the decline of ordinary language philosophy and related schools, which held that philosophy is nothing more than the logical analysis of language. — https://www.britannica.com/biography/Saul-Kripke#ref918554
the referent of a given use of a proper name, such as Aristotle, is transmitted through an indefinitely long series of earlier uses; this series constitutes a causal-historical chain that is traceable, in principle, to an original, or “baptismal,” application. — https://www.britannica.com/biography/Saul-Kripke#ref918554
Kripke calls designators like ‘The successor of 2’ rigid de facto, rather than rigid de jure: the description happens to be satisfied by the same object in every possible world and never anything else. Compare the intuitively distinct case of de jure rigidity in a name, like ‘Barack Obama’. Here the intent is to refer to this person in all possible worlds, whatever descriptions may designate him. — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rigid-designators/#RelBetRigAssTheRef
You cannot not be you, in other words in all possible worlds. If you were not you, then there isn't even a "you" to be something else. "You" are more than the sum of a bunch of descriptions that could change in any possible world. — schopenhauer1
So the point is... — schopenhauer1
That's an argument, but as a reductio it doesn't quite reach the solid ground of contradiction. bert1 could have been unenlightened (if he had registered the name in time) and not-bert1 could've been unenlightened (and as it happens is). Either of us could have been, but only one of us is. — unenlightened
"I am not bert1" by the way, does not (fortunately) entail that I am everyone who is not bert1.
Would you admit that my mother might have aborted me? — unenlightened
I can be something else and still be me, in all kinds of ways, and that includes loss of memory, body parts, brain function and most of the things one identifies as one's self. — unenlightened
So then what is the you that is the same in all possible worlds? That is the you I am talking about. — schopenhauer1
I'm just average, common too
I'm just like him, the same as you
I'm everybody's brother and son
I ain't different from anyone
It ain't no use a-talking to me
It's just the same as talking to you. — Bob Dylan
"Robert *****" is not the name of the DNA, or the name of anything constant in this world, let alone across all possible worlds. — unenlightened
I also want to add, that the implication is that there is no being born "as something else". You could only have been born as you. — schopenhauer1
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