So, for you, a brain transplant is a memory and personality transplant? Jane receives your brain and with it loses her memories and personality but gains yours in their place?

I've never been a brain. My memories and personality have only ever related to a certain organism.

What counts as an organism?

We've mentioned before that there are five "vital" organs; brain, heart, lungs, liver, and kidneys. At the very least we both appear to accept that we can replace the heart and still be the same person, replace the lungs and still be the same person, replace the liver and still be the same person, and replace the kidneys and still be the same person.

So let's say we separate your body into two, one part containing the brain, liver, and kidneys, and another part containing the heart and lungs. Each part's missing organs are replaced with artificial alternatives, sufficient to keep them all alive.

Are there two living organisms? Which one are you? I say the one with the brain.

I would remain as one organism, except I'd be one that's been cut in half. So I guess I'd have to choose both sides as me.

I don't think either would be me. I'd be dead (even if the rest of my body is kept alive by machines), and there'd be two new people (assuming that half a brain is capable of supporting a sufficient level of consciousness).

How would you die? Split-brain patients can live through such a procedure.

I'm curious; let's assume that brain transplants are possible and easy and that you have been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. Would you accept a brain transplant as a cure (with your diseased brain being destroyed)?

Because I certainly wouldn't. I understand that this would mean my death.

I wouldn't because it would be extremely painful and debilitating. I would choose death before that. But if I did I don't think I'd be numerically identical to someone else.

Sorry, I thought I hit “post” days ago.

Consider it from your perspective. You undergo the operation. When you wake up do you start identifying as Jane simply because you have her arms and legs and chest and organs? Or do you continue to identify as NOS4A2, having grown up in wherever it is that NOS4A2 grew up in, your (only) parents being NOS4A2's parents? You don't have Jane's memories, not because you forgot, but because you're not Jane.

I would be deceased. Jane would identify as Jane because it is Jane that is still surviving, still alive. I say this because one person’s body, via the immune system, would reject the other’s. I suspect that it would be Jane’s immune system rejecting my tissue, meaning my tissue is foreign, ie. not of the person.

What if it was just a limb transplant? What if it was just a heart, lungs, kidneys, and liver transplant? How much of the body (excluding the brain) would it take for you to "become" someone else?

All of it could be changed. So long as the survival of the organism or animal is maintained I remain the same organism or animal.

But to answer your question, the only "biological marker" that matters to me is the brain because that's where my consciousness is found, either reducible to neurological activity or as some supervenient phenomenon. The rest is incidental.

If we could split your brain, put one half in body A, the other half in body B, where is your location as a person?

Terrible choice of it happens.

I hope this happens, big league.

I mean you’re turning inquisitorial, Tim. The winds of narrative aren’t blowing your way so while you sound off on your censorial feelings you also seek for other’s punishment instead of revising your own technique. No one is buying what you’re selling.

The post-truth canard might have some weight if those who claimed to possess it really did. But a Post Truth Era implies that there was a Truth Era, and there never was one. Rather, it is because the commissars of the truth era lied that these people don’t believe their brand of political education anymore. We’re post-legacy media; we’re post expert; we’re post-official word, maybe, but not post-truth. Whoever had it is losing their monopoly on what is true and false and that’s a good thing.

Same. Legal positivism is extremely boring, unfortunately. I remember much of it was drawn from John Austin but I cannot be bothered to read it.

The best defense for legal positivism was arguably put forward by Herbert Hart.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Concept_of_Law

I get it: you can’t substantiate your beliefs. You don’t want to see your errors collide with truth.

Moral behavior versus an official’s dictates. One prescribed by reason and the other by monopoly and power. I know which one I favor.

I don’t think Trump will make it to his term with broken people like this running around.

A crime is committing an act defined as criminal by law.

If we'd like a less positivist definition, we could say a crime is a violation of social norms that's considered so severe that the community reacts with an explicit punishment.

Neither of those really works when applied to state power. As I have alluded to above this kind of anarcho-capitalist discourse suffers from ignoring social relations between people. It considers people self sufficient islands that are only engaged in contractual relationships.

But humans are always born into social relationships that come with obligations. These obligations don't need to be justified by reference to some wholly fabricated state of absolute independence. They need to be justified by reference to other rules for social interaction and organisation.

That’s a common straw man. Anarchism does not consider people to be self-sufficient islands, and therefor does not suffer from it. Rather it considers people on an equal footing, and that one man is rarely fit to be another man’s lord and master. Statism, like slavery and feudalism, believes to opposite: that some men are fit to be other men’s lord and master.

There is little moral underpinnings to your definition of crime save that the act upsets some people. It lacks any clear principle and would treat any vice as a crime if enough people were against it.

As evidenced by what? Do small time drug dealers threaten the state's monopoly? I think not.

Does your government not deal in drugs?

And according to me they're not. Claims without arguments don't get us anywhere.

You have neither claim nor argument. What is a crime to you, then?

But obviously the government does not actually have this monopoly, because other people commit plenty of crimes.

More to the point, this kind of argument just sidesteps the question of whether the state is moral by positing "crimes". But what's the moral significance of a "crime" here and how is it established?

The state shows no disposition to suppress crime, but only to safeguard its own monopoly of crime. They tend to only punish those who threaten their monopoly.

According to anarchism crimes are those acts by which one man harms the person or property of another. Unfortunately the state sustains itself through these activities. That’s why I can see no way to differentiate state agents from any criminal class.

When elites look down on voters because they lack degrees, here’s what the educated look like:

Glad to be one and not the other.

This seems to imply that what makes governments unjust is primarily the monopoly on violence. However, the monopoly is not constitutive. In and of itself, the monopoly on violence does not grant government any permission to use violence, rather it limits the violence of all others.

Another way to formulate it is that the government has the monopoly on crime. It can do and get away with theft, murder, kidnapping, for example, which are incidences of violence and coercion.

The EU already capitulating, and Trump isn’t even in office yet.

EU may consider replacing Russian LNG imports with those from US, von der Leyen says

BUDAPEST, Nov 8 (Reuters) - The European Union could consider replacing Russian liquefied natural gas (LNG) imports with those from the United States, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen told reporters on Friday.

"We still get a lot of LNG from Russia and why not replace it by American LNG, which is cheaper for us and brings down our energy prices," said von der Leyen.

She said the EU approach to trade policies implemented when Donald Trump takes power again as U.S. president in January will be to engage, look at common interests and negotiate.

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/eu-may-consider-replacing-russian-lng-imports-with-those-us-von-der-leyen-says-2024-11-08/

Your son is Australian right? He will be fine if he's white, most likely. It's black and brown people that will have an issue, sad to say.

I love all this fortune-telling. Why would black and brown people have an issue?

Yeah but you have Stockholm syndrome. You like being stolen from and told what to do by a bunch of pencil-necks, the younger the better.

Trump appears to have better advisors this time.

If government personnel are discriminating against you because of something it shouldn’t discriminate against, then yes, the government is the enemy. It’s oppression. You’ll find that generally speaking the government is a common enemy of oppressed people, no conspiracy theory required.

Then what of the head transplant? My head is removed and kept alive (and conscious) by one machine and my torso kept alive by another machine. Are there now two people instead of one? Which one is me? The same procedure is also performed on Jane. Which one is Jane? My head is then attached to Jane's body and Jane's head is then attached to my body. Which organism is Jane and which organism is me? The person with my head and Jane's body will have all of my memories and will think of itself as me, and the person with Jane's head and my body will have all of Jane's memories and will think of itself as Jane. And that's all the matters.

I don't know. I don’t get similar intuitions. I suppose these beings would neither be you nor jane, but a mix of the two, a chimera. On the one hand you have Jane’s fingerprints, her body, on the other hand she has a different eye, hair color, and dental records. The biological markers of this person’s identification are skewed. But only one part of her is different. And given that you have a female body, and most of the markers of her identification (height, weight, sex), I can only say that you are mostly Jane. This suggests to me that Jane is mostly still Jane, even with your head.

Does your notion of identity not include biological markers of identity?

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.