you just answered your own question ...you say your friend and her device...are you trying to find a way to become your car again?

Damn...I hit the wrong button and lost a post - perhaps someone is quoting it in their response.

I find your refusal to directly answer simple and relevant questions tiresome - as is your tendency to ask questions that are unrelated to the topic at hand.

Your post suggests that the grammatical construct "is my friend her device" intrinsically suggests that she isn't.

And yet, I can ask: "Is my friend her body?" The same logic must apply - the grammatical construct intrinsically suggests that she isn't.


I think that you have the position that she is not her device.

Yet, she depends on it to live.

Therefore, claiming that we are the parts of our bodies because we depend on them to live isn't logical.

jeez....why do people believe they can use parables like Jesus ...if your friend was not born with the device then she is not the device....

your friend is using the device the same as she is using air and water to keep herself alive....is your friend also the air .....if your friend was not her body then explain where else were she supposed to hook the device to

Fascinating. Does it work the other way also? Is there a one to one correspondence between 'what one is both with' and 'what one is' ?

Rhetorical: If I have organ transplants, I am the old organs, but not the new organs? If I'm born with a tumor, and have it removed, have I lost part of myself?


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If you believe that my friend is not the device, though she depends on it to live, then we can discount the argument that 'we are our bodies because we depend on them to live'.

Have we now arrived at 'we are whatever we are born with, and depend on to live' ?

There are some people who think so! And I find their argument to have equal validity as yours.



I see this as a nonsense statement, in that it implies 'having a constrained choice' is proof of, or even equivalent to, 'identity'. There is only one body that upon which my friends continued existence wholly relies. This does not make her her body, this simply makes her existence dependent on her body.

well actually your friend said nothing about not being their body...you are the one that is making that claim ....so everything can be cleared up if you stop avoiding the question

here's the same question for the third time

explain what the system is that will transfer you to be duplicated by the processes that gives rise to you

Of course. She was simply a means of illustrating the fact that we agree that dependency doesn't imply identity.



I don't claim that such a system will ever exist, but I don't discount the possibility of its existing.

Ahhh I know... Free Will!

I missed this post till now, but there's not much here worthy of a response. Hypotheticals have been used in the conversation to show the error of oversimplified false dichotomy - it doesn't mean that the whole conversation was hypothetical. This is the logical fallacy of 'composition' - one which you have used elsewhere.

Peter_Pan .... woudn't the fact that you are stuck in your body means you lack "Free Will"? ....

massagetrade...quit being scare and just say that you believe in reincarnation

Very weak, Funches. Do you believe that I believe in reincarnation? On what basis do you reach this conclusion? Is this indicative of your general ability to deduce, without jumping to conclusions?

How does that have ANYTHING to do with free will. All free will is we can do anything we wish. Dieing and or getting out of this mortal body isn't an action we "take" other then committing suicide, which anyone can do. Again death isn't an action one takes, just happens.

massagetrade...below is what you posted


I've asked you 4 times to explain that statement ...still waiting

Cowboy...since suicide is an action...that makes death an action...people have the choice to kill themselves ...which means that death can be a choice ...it's just no way around that

also if you are not your body....then use your "Free Will" to leave it ...if you can't...then that proves you have no "Free Will"

Maybe you are going about it the wrong way. I know a lot of people are very responsive to your trollish methods - when they see someone else twist their words around, they trip all over themselves in an effort to clarify.

I think the first thing to do is clarify the basic fact that another party is twisting my words, and then address the issue of why the other party is twisting my words around. Its more important to me to address these issues than pursue lines of thought that I consider tangential to the issue. The fact that there might be "a remote possibility that I might be transferred to system which duplicates the processes that gives rise to 'me'." isn't tangential - but the mechanism by which this might occur is tangential (from my POV).

I wonder if you are simply curious, and are not inclined to say "hey, thats interesting, I'm curious".

So you want to know what hypothetical mechanism might exist for the hypothetical possibility of a 'identity' transfer? As I often do, I try to acknowledge the limitations of my knowledge and my imagination - there could be many dozens of possible mechanisms that are inconceivable to me, because of our shared cultural circumstances. "Any sufficient advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." We can only imagine based on what we currently know...and from what we currently know, I could imagine that one day we might identify all of the processes (within this body upon which I depend) that give rise to the sense of 'I', and set up an obscenely complex computer simulation of those same processes - a simulation so thorough, that the simulated identity would be 100% certain that they are the 'real' version of 'me'.

Or, this may never come to pass, and our senses of self may be forever dependent on our bodies. It doesn't matter. The fact remains that our bodies are not our bodies' processes, and that 'I' am not my body.


Oh, and for completeness: we might also discover that I'm wrong about the nonexistence of a soul that survives death with identity intact, and that the Christians are right.

so do this mean that you only have a hypothetical belief that your body is not hypothetically you and that it's a hypothetical remote possiblity that you may be hypothetically reincarnated ...of course I'm only speaking hypothetically

I still think that it is not knowledge in a general sense that is the issue,,but the EGO, which tells us we are better or worse, wiser or dumber, than others (or even equal to God) which is our undoing,,,,,

No, not at all. As before - don't confuse the use of hypothetical to expose a false dilemma with other statements, which are not hypothetical.

I am not my body, and this is obvious because the difference between a live body and a dead body lies in the kinds of processes that body engages in - not the materials it comprises.