100% It was very compelling in Parfit, for me. It moved me from expecting to find something akin to the Soul as an explanation for identity, to not really looking for it. I think even if the TA fails in some sense (i.e, the replacement of those neurons negates the identity they hold) it would still negate the idea that a soul is present and more than likely a stricter (i.e one tied to identity rather than general consciousness) version of emergentism... emerges.

Ironic. I wasn't arguing.

But the intention for doing either is the same: destroying someone, acting in a way so that someone would not exist. — baker

I don't think so. This formulation doesn't apply to murder. "would not exist" applies to a fetus, when you do not consider it an extant person. Perhaps this is purely a wording problem in your comment, but this illustrates, to me, the fundamental difference. Ending the potential for an adult life is not hte same as ending an adult life. Maybe that's neither here nor there for the debate? It seems reasonable to consider it to me.

precisely because it has the potential of becoming a person — baker

I do not think this is a reasonable way to talk about motivations for abortion. Abortion is generally sought to avoid everything else about hte situation - not avoiding a human coming into existence, per se. Again, the difference is illustrated to me in this. If the woman seeking an abortion could simply flick a switch and have a ten year old, most I have known (including several intimate partners) would have done so. It wasn't avoiding the person that matter. It was avoiding the externalities of that eventuality. Again, this may not weight much for you - but it does for me :)

Ironic. I wasn't arguing. — AmadeusD

That was the point. I made a case. You didn't.

I think you've misunderstood what I've said. But I would also say no you didn't. You made some assertions, none of which seem borne out.

No, that's just plain untrue. There are lots of arguments for the soul - philosophy is full of them - and no good one against the view. — Clearbury

This was the totality of your 'case'. That asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. But I'm also not massive interested in that debate.
The concept of the soul, to me, is nonsensical and metaphysically bereft of any real meaning. It's a gap-filler. Nothing describes the soul, or how it could function in any literature i've seen. So, I have no reason to take it seriously. Your claim to plenty of proofs is simply an empty claim, in that regard. You are certainly free to present any you want me to consider, though.

I also take hte point that you're kind of worked up over it, which gives me the sense you're not even relying on those points, but your intuitions. Which is fine, but I don't need to take those seriously without more.

I made a CASE for the immateriality of the mind.

If the mind is material, then slowly transferring the bits of material constituting it to another place would move the mind. That's a premise. It says 'if P, then Q'

The next premise is that transferring the bits does not transfer the mind, for one can in principle transfer the bits without interrupting functioning - as in the valuable machine case - and yet unlike in the valuable machine case, it is self-evident that the mind remains where it is.

That says 'not Q'

The conclusion that follows is "not P", or "the mind is NOT material".

That's called a 'case'. You must deny a premise, yet both premises seem true.

It's one of loads and loads of cases that can be made for the immateriality of the mind.

i also pointed out that whether the mind is immaterial or not has no bearing - none - on the abortion issue.

'Intuitions' are what all cases appeal to.

It is by intuition - which is used by philosophers to mean something very specific, namely a representation of our reason, not some arbitrary assumption - that we are aware that arguments are valid, for instance.

So, if you reject intuitions then you're rejecting the one and only source of evidence. Nothing else can possibly qualify as evidence unless we 'intuit' it to count as evidence, which just goes to show that all appeals to evidence are appeals to intuition.

Imagine a fully informed adult wishes to kill themselves. Are we entitled to stop them from doing so? I think most would say not. Remonstrate with them, yes. But not actually stop them. Not assuming they're in their right mind and so on. A person is entitled to take the exit if they really want to.

Now imagine the person is pregnant. Are you now entitled to stop them? My reason delivers the same verdict: no. That person is just as entitled to kill themselves, it would seem (if my reason is accurate).

A person is not entitled to kill themselves if doing so would kill another, however. For example, if a person is driving a car with an innocent passenger and decides to drive it into a tree at speed, that would be wrong precisely because it would kill another innocent person.

So, if the fetus is a person, then we would predict that a pregnant person would not be entitled to kill themselves. If our reason tells us that a pregnant person is entitled to kill themselves, then it is thereby telling us that the fetus is not a person.

Another variation: going back to teh suicidal driver with a passenger case - if a third party can stop the suicidal driver from killing both themselves and their passenger by shooting dead the driver before the driver has a chance to drive the car into the tree, then they're entitled to do that. And what justifies them in doing this is saving the passenger's life.

But now imagine that a pregnant woman is about to kill herself by jumping off a building onto an empty street below. Would a third party be entitled to shoot her dead if by doing so this will stop her jumping off the building? My reason says 'no'. Yet we'd predict that the third party would be entitled to do this if the fetus was a person, for then it'd be morally no different from the passenger case.

If your reason concurs, then we have evidence that the fetus is not a person. What our reason tells us about the morality of abortion implies that abortions do not involve the destruction of a person.

But now imagine that a pregnant woman is about to kill herself by jumping off a building onto an empty street below. Would a third party be entitled to shoot her dead if by doing so this will stop her jumping off the building? My reason says 'no'. — Clearbury

I have the same intuition. I'm partial to thought experiments where a person must save a child or x amount of zygotes. No matter what x is, a rational person will always save the child. That, to me, is decisive.

Yes, good point - I think using a child versus fetus example would probably have been better.

, no, because in both cases, the "passenger" or the fetus would die. They would, however, be entitled to try to stop them from jumping.

So we'd be entitled to shoot the pregnant woman dead to stop her jumping off the building?

My reason tells me that this would not be permitted. Whereas it would be permitted to shoot the suicidal driver dead in order to stop them from crashing the car and killing the innocent passenger.

My reason represents the cases not to be moral equivalents. Yet they would be moral equivalents if a fetus was a person. The implication is that the fetus is not a person.

, I just said that in both cases the fetus would die. This doesn't have the same implications. This would be similar to the car case if the person died anyway from the car crash. Is the person's personhood now under question? No. Your reliance on somebody else isn't tied to your personhood. Just because you rely on another person to not crash doesn't mean you don't have value as a person.

Sorry, I don't follow your point. In the suicidal driver case there is no fetus involved. There's just a driver and a passenger. In that case, it seems justifiable to shoot dead the driver if that is the only way to stop the driver from crashing the car and killing both themselves and the innocent passenger.

In the suicidal pregnant woman case, it does not seem justifiable to shoot dead the pregnant woman if that is the only way to stop her jumping off the building.

If the mind is material, then slowly transferring the bits of material constituting it to another place would move the mind. That's a premise. It says 'if P, then Q' — Clearbury

BUt this is a mere assertion. It is not 'a case' other than a case to be discussed, not a case for the outcome you posit. I have made a case for why this might not be true. If that was missed, that's fine.

it is self-evident that the mind remains where it is. — Clearbury

Only tautologically. That is not making a case or presenting a premise, in the proper sense.

The conclusion that follows is "not P", or "the mind is NOT material". — Clearbury

It is not. It is an assertion on the back of two assertions. If that's your style, so be it.

'Intuitions' are what all cases appeal to. — Clearbury

In some sense - but some are presenting empirical difficulties. But this is an equivocation. "a case" (the way i've mentioned above) is about the same as a thought experiment. It doesn't "make a case" for one or other outcome, until the discussion is had. That didn't quite happen here. Anyway, this is not very interesting stuff.

that we are aware that arguments are valid, for instance. — Clearbury

No, not quite. Intuitions tease out our blindspots, along with where our reason is running well. It is not an indication of well-reasoned thinking that something is an intuition.

So, if you reject intuitions then you're rejecting the one and only source of evidence. Nothing else can possibly qualify as evidence unless we 'intuit' it to count as evidence, which just goes to show that all appeals to evidence are appeals to intuition. — Clearbury

Well that certainly explains your comportment.

A person is entitled to take the exit if they really want to. — Clearbury

Not in the vast, vast majority of countries and jurisdictions - not according to the vast majority of religions. If this is your intuition, it is an empirical nonsense in the way you're using it. It doesn't apply to others.

If our reason tells us that a pregnant person is entitled to kill themselves, then it is thereby telling us that the fetus is not a person. — Clearbury

No. Not at all. This is just an instance of confused, un-examined reasoning.

, the point is that your analogy is inaccurate. Like I said, it would be similar if in both cases the car crashed. If you shoot the driver, chances are the car still crashes, killing the passenger. Your point, if I am correct, is that since the person can't survive on their own they aren't a person. But every time you have another driver, their life is in your hands. You are dependent on them to drive well. In my opinion, this is a bad question because in both cases two lives are lost. You are single handedly stopping a person from living a full life when you are pregnant and kill yourself. Just because you can't kill a person to save another person doesn't mean that the person who isn't saved isn't a person.

You are single handedly stopping a person from living a full life when you are pregnant and kill yourself. — Hyper

Two people. But again, this would come down to personhood.

It seems completely, and patently wrong to equivocate between a mother and her fetus. That seems plainly wrong. So we need to figure out how to not do that, while maintaining some delineation between "killing a person" and "killing a fetus", even if we can't neatly package each.

I would still maintain your criticisms of Clearbury are pretty on-point, but I think it is wrong to analogise in the way you have. Killing hte adult passenger in your car cannot be equivalent to killing your pregnant self, on my view.

, just because something "seems" wrong doesn't mean it is wrong. There is a difference between the two, that being that the adult person has had the opportunity to live a life and the fetus has been barred from living outside the womb. With this reasoning, I would say it is more immoral to kill the baby inside the womb than killing an adult who has lived for 18 years. This is for the same reason that it would be less immoral to kill a person in a nursing home at the end of their life than it would be to kill an infant.

just because something "seems" wrong doesn't mean it is wrong. — Hyper

Sure, but there is no tie-breaker so that makes it very hard to come to any other statement about it. It seems, on the facts, wrong. I can't understand another avenue to get to a different conclusion.. .so we go head-to-head, it seems :P

With this reasoning, I would say it is more immoral to kill the baby inside the womb than killing an adult who has lived for 18 years. This is for the same reason that it would be less immoral to kill a person in a nursing home at the end of their life than it would be to kill an infant. — Hyper

Hmm, interesting. This seems, to me, understandable, but ridiculous. The fetus doesn't have anything to live for. On some conceptions, it is not yet 'living'. I fail to understand how ending the life of something unaware it exists is more immoral than killing an existing deliberative entity which understands its mortality, and has (assumably) several extremely strong interests in living, as do those around them. Can that be parsed out a bit?

The bold: I can grok this one, but its for entirely different reasons. A person who has lived for say 80 years and has fulfilled their impulse to procreate (let's assume) has far, far less interest in existing than does an infant (though, the difference between and infant and a fetus is stark and important too, so maybe we should be looking at apples and apples). BUT unless the geriatric has requested to end their life, neither is permissible without necessity.

You don't seem to be following the example.

There's a car. It contains two people. One of them decides to kill themselves by means of crashing the car. If we can stop that from happening - thus saving the other person's life - by shooting the driver dead, then we are clearly morally permitted to do that.

There's a pregnant woman. She decides she is going to kill herself by jumping off a building to any an empty street below. if we can stop her doing that by shooting her dead, are we morally permitted to do so? No.

Now if - IF - the pregnant woman's act was going not just to kill herself but also another innocent person, then it would have been morally permissible to kill her to save the innocent person inside her. It's not.

If that's what our reason says about the pregnant woman case, then it is telling us that there's an important difference between the two cases. In one - the car one - another innocent person's life is at stake (hence why we're entitled to shoot the driver). In the other, there isn't.