I'm on record as saying I think if I had different genes I'd still exist and be me, at least to the same degree that I'd still exist and be me under the counterfactual where I was born in a different city or a different year
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Replying to @arthur_affect @unwitod and
Was it sensible to go ‘on the record’ with that? In what sense would something with different genes and different environmental experiences be you? If this was possible why is there only one of you?
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Replying to @Shatterface @arthur_affect and
Hahahaha he keeps getting better and better. Now a genetically different 'Arthur', subject to (necessarily) different environmental interplay with genes, is still the same person? Wow!
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Replying to @unwitod @arthur_affect and
This really is the end point of postmodernism. If you aren’t your genes, variation and the environment you are a free floating entity. If you can be anything then everything can be you. It’s Pan-Chuism.
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Replying to @Shatterface @unwitod and
Essentialism is the whole thing we are trying to oppose, yes There is no fixed definition of what makes you "you" - either it's all of it or it's none of it
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Replying to @arthur_affect @unwitod and
You’ve ‘gone on the record’ to say you could be you even if you had another body. You are claiming there is a ‘you’ that us entirely independent of your biological substrate. How is this not essentialism?
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Replying to @Shatterface @unwitod and
It's social constructionism My identity exists as a result of how I interact with and am perceived by others It's the only reason I'd still be "me" if I got conked on the head and woke up with amnesia
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Replying to @arthur_affect @unwitod and
This is completely the opposite argument you made earlier. You said you could still be you in another body; now you are arguing that you would still be you if you lost your memory but retained the same body. Nobody has denied that.
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Replying to @Shatterface @unwitod and
I'm saying both are equally valid or invalid There is no essential self
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Replying to @arthur_affect @unwitod and
I’ve never said there’s an ‘essential self’. I’ve made it perfectly clear I do not believe in a ‘self’ prior to, or independent of, your body. That is the belief of those who wish to alter their body surgically and hormonally to bring it into line with their ‘true self’.
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The self isn't in the body either, it doesn't exist period
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Shatterface and
Or, rather, it's a socially constructed concept, it exists only because we believe it exists and interact with each other on that basis From an "objective" perspective a living and dead body have exactly the same atoms, etc
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Shatterface and
We've gone through all this shit before If you can admit to the existence of desire, that you exist as a person because you however "irrationally" prefer to be alive and to have the molecules temporarily arranged one way over another, then that's all "identity" is
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End of conversation
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