What do you mean? What are these different types of physical change to which you refer?
Skin cells shedding for example.
If you argue only things that change our personalities count, then you are a new person every day because your new experiences change who you are.
Secondly, your example of Phineas Gage argues that one must maintain a constant personality in order to retain one's identity. If this is so, then you return to my problem of experience.
Employing the term radical implies a set limit on change to qualify. I find this standard arbitrary because it is impossible to delineate the precise moment where one crosses the line.
1. How is it absurd? On what basis do you argue that this is not possible?
Secondly, in postulating your theory, you suggest that it is possible to have such an entity as 'half a soul.' I don't believe that's possible, like splitting a magnet into magnetic monopoles. Souls are indivisible. That's one of the reasons why people only suggest a soul sometime after conception, and not before.
Where does this intrinsic property come from? If this property is emergent upon conception, then it isn't intrinsic. If it is intrinsic, then it exists prior to conception, and we're left with the infinite recursion of souls.
The intrinsic capacity comes from this union, and so long as the union remains the capacity is inherent in the zygote.
Where do souls come from?
Well, that's a rather deep question. But now we're getting into theology.
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