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    Carmelics

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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
    Made withinDC&Austin
    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that Personal identity under counterfactual origin scenarios admits of degrees or partial overlap rather than a strict yes/no answer.

    ?Set your confidence on the premises below to see your aggregate.

    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 1 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Numerical identity is a logical relation governed by Leibniz's Law: it is necessarily all-or-nothing, admitting no degrees.
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    • 2.Psychic or psychological overlap describes qualitative similarity, not numerical identity, and conflating them commits a category error.
      ?

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    • 3.Kripke's modal essentialism establishes that an individual either originates from a given sperm-egg pair or does not—there is no metaphysically intermediate case.
      ?

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    Reason for 2 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Parfit's reductionist framework, which grounds degrees-of-identity talk, entails that personal identity itself is not what matters—undermining rather than supporting degree-based identity claims.
      ?

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    • 2.If identity admits of degrees, transitivity fails, generating contradictions: a series of overlapping creatures could chain Jones to a numerically distinct individual.
      ?

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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
    ?
    • 1.A creature created from slightly modified sperm and the same egg would have had a kind of overlap of psychic constitution with Jones.
      ?

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    • 2.Overlap of psychic constitution admits of degrees, unlike strict numerical identity.
      ?

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    • 3.Therefore, whether Jones would have existed is not a binary fact but a matter of degree.
      ?

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    Statements
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