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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   31201 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 28, 2025

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If we can agree on that basic premise (and avoid debating what "I" am, I'll stipulate that I'm just a brain which is itself composed of matter, I'll exclude the concept of souls for this conversation), then we can say that I own my body, and I can exclude you from control of it, as a pure matter of fact, for all practical purposes.

Nope. You're confusing owning with being. Ownership is a right. As a right, it's not real, but an agreed convention, an abstract human construct. If I say you don't own your bike and take it away from you, you have no clear right of ownership unless you can prove that you do have the right. What if you stole it from me last week, and I'd bought it 2 months ago?

So, that's 4 working pieces: you, me, the bike, and your right of ownership. In your "I own my body" there's at most 2 working pieces. The scenarios are not comparable, even if you allow for the distinction "I" as separate and distinctly identifiable from "my body".

To compare the bike scenario, in which ownership is obviously relevant, to our relationships to our own bodies is a category error: several of them, in fact. The two are not analogous. This isn't just splitting semantic hairs: no one "owns" their body. Everyone IS their body (and mind, or even soul and spirit, too, if you like.) This isn't merely "logical" (although it is logical). How can you detach from yourself to form an attachment that could be construed as "owning" yourself? It's just a figure of speech that doesn't correspond to the reality of the matter. On the other hand, a comparable analog to you owning your body would be the bike owning itself. You can talk that way, but it's sloppy and implies things that simply are not the case.

How can you detach from yourself to form an attachment that could be construed as "owning" yourself? It's just a figure of speech that doesn't correspond to the reality of the matter

I guess this becomes dicey when we get close to the brain. But certainly a person exists detatched from their limbs (is amputation death?)

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