It isn’t the only essential organ. The heart, kidneys, liver, and lungs are also essential. Hence the phrase “vital organs”. And the vital organs are nothing, or at least hindered, without all the rest to protect and support them.

I would agree that A and B each receive a new lower body, that person A and person B are upper bodies. But this is because the upper body hasn’t died yet, whereas the lower body, being excised from the rest and all vital functions, has. It is only by staving away putrefaction that it is possible to still use it. Bodily survival is the criterion of physical continuity when it comes to personal identity.

But suppose a cancerous brain is replaced over-time with a series of machines that work to maintain mental functions until the brain is fully a machine, and no more cancerous brain remains. Are you still your brain?

Imagine a state enforcing historical and scientific truth and you’ll be imagining the most evil regimes in history.

The brain uses the lungs and mouth to speak. Much like right now you are using a computer/phone to speak to me.

The person uses his lungs and mouth to speak. The brain is only an organ of the person, like the lungs, heart, bones, etc. You are not speaking to a brain any more than you are speaking to a set of lungs. There is more there.

For the sake of this discussion we are able to keep the brain alive after removing it. It's then placed inside another body and all the necessary connections made.

From my perspective I am put to sleep in one body and then wake up in another body. I don't wake up in the same body but with a new brain.

Someone gave the definition of a person as someone who can sustain themselves: self-sustaining. Given that your person needs to be kept alive by external forces, just like a zygote or fetus, wouldn’t your thought experiment contradict that definition?

Thanks for the response, Bob.

It sounds like you don’t believe in personifying the State; and I would just briefly note that in a representative republic you have to—the government represents, to some sufficient extent, the people. You can’t separate any member of the government, or the government in totality, from the people in proper republics.

I’m aware that’s the theory of republicanism. But it cannot be shown to be the case in practice.

I suggest the opposite is the case: you cannot unify any member of government with any of the people it rules over. It’s impossible for someone to represent people she’s never met, for example, and the wants and needs of the people she has met shift to such an extent that to keep track of them all would be impossible. People are only nominally represented by politicians.

That’s incredibly immoral. That’s like saying that an individual should only secure their own power and advance their own interests as much as they can—what about caring about other people? What about moral law?

It is immoral. I’m not saying the state should do that, only that they cannot do otherwise.

I guess it depends on your own theory of state formation, whether it was voluntary or of conflict, because it outlines the nature of these institutions. Did everyone gather together to form the state, as with a social contract? Or did the state arise out of conquest and confiscation, erecting a mechanism for some men to rule over others?

This is so obviously wrong, though. You are saying, e.g., that an nation shouldn’t interfere with mass genocide in another nation. It’s nonsense.

That’s not what I was saying. Imperialism is the expansion of power and jurisdiction. One cannot give aid by establishing a permanent institution and ruling over the victims.

Vietnam tried this in Cambodia. The Vietnamese took out Pol Pot and disbanded the Khmer Rouge, which was good, but then it occupied the country for a decade, which was bad.

Imperialism suggests occupation and the expansion of power. Implying that this is an act to save victims is nonsense.

All human being go through that stage, just as many of them go through the stage of childhood. Zygotes, neonates, children, adults—these are stages, not different organisms.

There is joke in there about big government.

Thanks, that's interesting. I'm interested in your perception of Bernie Sanders. He comes across as strongly anti-establishment to me. Is that your perception?

He seems to be a job-holder, to me, someone who does politics for the salary.

Hundreds? Thousands?

That’s patently untrue. Brains can’t speak. A great deal more is required to utter a single word.

You think that from my perspective I’d fall asleep looking down at my white-skinned body, the operation would be performed, and then I’d wake up looking down at the same white-skinned body, but with a new brain?

Whereas I think that from my perspective I’d fall asleep looking down at my white-skinned body, the operation would be performed, and then I’d wake up looking down at my new black-skinned body.

You wouldn’t wake up, for one. You said yourself brain-death is the death of the person, and once the brain is removed from the rest, it’s dead. Second, the vast majority of you is still left on the other table.

This is hilarious.

Crazy story and turns out to be true according to FEMA. The hatred and evil runs deep. The worms have travelled deep into the anti-Trump brain.

That depends entirely on how you account for an individual identity. There is no objective basis for doing so.

Sure there is. Technically we could film or track the entire life of a human being from beginning of his lifecycle to the end, and the identity of that being remains the same.

Because the brain is where personhood is found. Personhood concerns consciousness, and consciousness is what the brain does.

How many brains have you met and had a conversation with?

Say currently I'm a white guy and you're a black guy. We have a brain transplant. What colour is my skin after the transplant? I say it's black because my brain has been placed in a black-skinned body, and I am my brain.

I’d say it’s white because that’s what you looked like before.

Why is it still a person if you remove one organ, but not a person if you remove another?

As a thought experiment, let's assume that brain transplants are medically possible. My brain is placed in @NOS4A2's body and his brain is placed in my body.

Who is NOS4A2 and who is me after the operation?

You would still be you and I would still be me. We can compare pictures from before and after to confirm this. We’d be vegetables, but we’d still be occupying the same location in space and time.

The differences between you now and you at the beginning of your life are profound, but at each stage you were present and identical to both. No kind of thing died and was replaced by another kind of thing.

The New York Post has the best covers.

I never said there is no difference, only that one has developed out of the other.

…or a body.

The only difference between a zygote and a conscious adult is time. All adults were zygotes. The so-called moral difference is immeasurable.

There is a moral difference between a living body with a functioning brain and a living body without a functioning brain.

Brain death is death of the person.

And if the brain could be removed but kept alive then even though it's a single organ it's also a person.

Yet not a single person you’ve met was a brain. So there is no moral difference.

Yikes.

The administration is taking form. Trump names campaign manager Susie Wiles as his Chief of Staff, the first female to be appointed to the position.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/07/trump-susie-wiles-chief-of-staff

Yes to both questions. The GOP of Bush and the neoconservatives is largely over, with many of them now voting Democrat. I hope the Democrats can have the same evolution but voters can’t even have the same candidate everyone voted for in the primary.

It’s called “churnalism”. The press in other countries parrot the press from the United States. This way they can save costs on doing their own journalism. Understandably, most people do not have the time to look for the truth so the accept the skewed view.

Three issues give me to reject the proposal.

My methodological individualism leads me to oppose the sociology. A nation does not impose its values on other nations. The individuals in government impose their own values on individuals in another nation, whether the rest of the nation approves or not.

Human flourishing is not the goal of the state. Its goal is to secure its power and advance its own interests. It is an anti-social institution and not fit to impose social values.

Imposing values on another group of people is wrong for the same reason it would be wrong for them to do it to a western nation: it isn’t up to them. They have not been afforded any right to do so.

His opponents come from all parties, so it isn’t really about parties.

I remember in 2016 they were chasing down Trump supporters and beating them, attacking them, or otherwise harassing them with impunity. It wasn’t just the routine bigotry you’ll read from people on here, but it was pervasive movement throughout the United States. It has captured the big institutions, the press, academia, government. There is a moral panic occurring and I naturally side with the victims of it, and it looks like the tides are turning.

He took on both parties, destroyed them both, and ended many despicable political dynasties. But most of all the behavior of his opposition pushed me to support him. One has to oppose an evil movement like that. Some of the policies were an added bonus.

I’m feeling pretty good about it. I overestimated the effects a corrupt press has on public opinion and figured Harris would win, or they’d kill him, so was pleasantly surprised to learn otherwise.

I agree. One principle of the anarchist tradition is to assume all authority is illegitimate until it proves itself to be legitimate. A parent or teacher can proves its legitimacy, for the most part, even if it is a heavy burden to prove. Any voluntary choice of whom to follow eliminates the need to seek this proof entirely.

But when a politician or agent of the state is an authority through appointment or dictate, their legitimacy cannot be proven.

If the brain gives out it just means the brain gives out. Just a body before and just a body after.

A historic campaign and the greatest political comeback in history. Not even bullets could stop the Trump train!

Sadly, the live-action-roleplay of his opponents continue. Fighting an imaginary fascism involves erecting an actual one, so I suspect political violence, institutional subordination, and a captured press will be working diligently to disrupt the Trump regime. Luckily the people aren’t buying it anymore.

It just doesn’t follow from any of this that we require a master. If anything, the fear of others suggests we ought not to have one.

When I think about everyone I’ve ever met, and pick the individuals who I believe might run amok if government disappeared tomorrow, the number is very close to zero. And just dealing with people in my day-to-day leads me to believe that people aren’t as anti-social as statists make them out to be. Anarchism, in my opinion, has a more accurate view of human nature, one where people typically work together rather than at constant war with one another.

Understandable. No one would want any criticism of routine nonsense.

Trump’s opponents never accepted the 2016 election, therefor they had fascists tendencies, like Hitler. Trump joked he was going to be a dictator, therefor he’s going to be a dictator. This is the level of reasoning over in clown world.

This is a tangent. I have no problem with identifying an individual identity as a series of causally-connected spatiotemporal stages. The objection I have is in defining the "natural kind" (for lack of a better term) of "individual human being". This would have to be based on a well-defined set of necessary and sufficient properties, that unambiguously identify an object as either being one of these, or not. An object that can produce multiple human beings cannot possible be said to be an individual human being, even though it is commonly in the developmental history of human beings. The same is true of blasotocysts- clusters of cells, that may produce multiple human beings at several stages.

So my position is that an individual human being (i.e. an object of that type) is something that emerges. gradually during fetal development. I regard a properly functioning individual human being as a self-sustaining organism with certain physical and intellectual capabilities, including a sense of self. You can disagree, because there is no unequivocally correct answer. But you have no rational basis for denying me (or women) the privilege of deciding for themselves.

All objects that can produce multiple human beings are individual human beings. A mother, for instance, can do that. But this is also true of asexual reproduction. An individual amoeba, for instance, can produce another amoeba. Unfortunately (and oddly), we may have to think of one zygotic twin as the parent of the other.

I would never deny you or other women your privileges, but your distinctions are completely arbitrary. Worse, they are inapplicable to those with developmental disabilities, those who cannot care for themselves, and those without your favored set of physical and intellectual capabilities. At any rate, the reduction of humanity and dignity to that of “material” is the name of the game for anyone who wants to end such a life.

I recognize the image on the right as a person. I don't recognize the image on the left as a person.

If you recognize the image on the left as a person, can you explain how you recognize it as a person?

The one on the left is what the one on the right looked like about 9 months earlier. In those 9 months, what changed for you?

Provide your complete principium individuationis. My issue is that there is no such thing because "individual human being" is a concept with vague boundaries. A zygote isn't a strict boundary because a zygote can produce multiple individuals. If we focus on the histories of a set of twins, they are clearly not individuated at the zygote level.

It occupies its own unique and distinct position in space and time. A zygote is alive. At no point does a zygote die and get replaced by another living being. If left to live a zygote can continue his life, without interruption, for upwards to one hundred years.

Twins are individuated at the zygote level until it reproduces asexually, then there are two individuals.

The bipartisan Trump team is a big FU to the establishment uniparty, but also the inevitable result of the political triangulation made popular by bill Clinton and its most recent representative, Kamala Harris. The two parties were nearly indistinguishable since then until now. Whatever the results, new parties are emerging from the old ones.

Identical twins begin with the same genetic material, they lack this uniqueness you mention. So unique genetics can't be the basis for identifying an individual human life.

The genetics only distinguishes the zygotic human being from the rest of his environment, ie, from his parents. But I also included the principium individuationis, his location in space and time, as the marker of his uniqueness.

If 2016 was any indication, people know what will happen should Kamala lose. I wager she will win, but better safe than sorry when the participants of a moral panic still have a chance to receive that last, crushing blow to their psyche.

Rights *arent* just values. It seems you havent understood my post. Rights are values instantiated in the world through physical force. I can value anything I wish, but I do not have the power to enforce my own values in the world.

Why do they need to be instantiated by force? Why do you need to enforce your values on the world? They only need to be instantiated by your own thoughts, speech, and actions. You can confer anyone else any number of negative or positive rights you wish. You can confer someone the right to free speech, for example, and simply refuse to censor him. You can confer someone the right to housing and give him a place to live. It’s a superstition that only man in his official form can confer rights. Rather, like any man, you can confer anyone else any rights you wish.

“Material” doesn’t encapsulate what it is and what is occurring, whether it is living or non-living, and so on. Everything in there is a material by definition. The difference is this is the one thing in there with its own distinct and unique genetics, occupying its own unique and distinct position in space and time, and will remain as such until the end of its life.