Fun stuff. Let's do this, Seldiora.
I won't be addressing specific definitions in this debate, though I will define some of how Pro's world works further in.
As for Burden of Proof, that's pretty basic: Pro's world has to outstrip the status quo world for him to win. I am under no similar burden. If Pro fails to breach that threshold, I automatically win this debate.
1. The Nature of A Soul Mate
Pro claims that these would be individuals
who they are perfectly compatible with on every level and would be precisely
the same age. Assuming his world somehow accomplishes this automatically (it’s
unclear how an entity would determine that two people are fundamentally and
totally compatible), there’s a litany of associated problems.
First, people change over time. My
emotional, physical and intellectual state are not the same as they were when I
was 16: they are all malleable.[
https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-psychology/chapter/early-and-middle-adulthood/] So when Pro says that people are matched based
on compatibility, he means compatibility based on these traits when they are
16. This world builds someone up to be your exact match, but even if you meet
them at 16, that compatibility can diminish or disappear as they grow. This
static designation is rendered malleable, but the perception of it stays static,
and people who fail to form strong relationships with their soul mate would find
themselves spiraling into depression failing to form a bond with such a person.
Second, what if you don’t have a
soul mate? We’re talking about a perfect match here, but human beings are such mixed bags that finding a perfect match will exclude many. Some people are going
to be left out of this. Pro talks about loneliness but imagine being among the
small subset of students who knows they don’t have a soul mate.
Third, however compatible a
person may be, human attraction isn’t built on algorithms. You interact with
this being who was perfectly suited for you, find that you don’t like or even
actively despise them. Maybe they misused your body, or you’ve gotten to meet
them and you just don’t hit it off. Again, imagine the loneliness of being a
person whose objective soul mate failed to meet expectations.
Finally, as this is something
decided by the universe itself, it would result in revelations that even the
person themselves may not be aware of. Haven’t had a chance to explore your sexuality
yet? Too bad! Time for you to learn you’re gay, and now that the universe has
outed you, you’re far more prone to suicide and self-harm.[
https://www.thetaskforce.org/why-outing-can-be-deadly/]
Privacy practically disappears overnight, and so do some of the most intimate
secrets we keep, practically guaranteeing widespread depression.
2. Sabotaging Relationships
Essentially, this is like an
arranged relationship where the universe itself is telling you that any other
relationship you choose to form is wrong. That’s going to affect any other
potentially loving relationships you try to form. Any relationship established
before the age of 16 is basically doomed. The moment you wake up in someone
else’s body and its not the body of your high school sweetheart, you know destiny
is working against you. Perhaps even worse, you know that every relationship
going forward that you have with someone else is doomed to fail. Every relationship
you build with someone else can only ever be compared with the perceived
perfection of the soul mate. For those that can meet their soul mate, that
might not be terrible, but for those without the means to travel to another
continent where their soul mate lives, they and their soul mate may be forced
to live in what I will call “relationship purgatory”: regularly experiencing
the life of someone perfect for them while trying to make another objectively worse
relationship work. And if you aren’t swapping bodies, then you know that no
soul mate exists for you, dooming them to an existence with no possibility of
finding a soul mate and leaving them to always feel as though they are settling
for second best.
However, this doesn’t just
sabotage other relationships; it disrupts the entire process of building a
relationship, which is integral for forming the bonds that make a relationship
strong. Pro appears to view this as a positive, arguing that “Many days and
months pass by within dates before you are able to” say the dreaded words “I
love you”. Pro never attributes a harm to this length of time, but the benefits
are striking: longer periods of time spent dating lead to longer, stronger
marriages.[
https://www.businessinsider.com/how-long-you-should-date-before-you-get-married-2017-10]
Essentially, you lose the strength that comes with building a relationship by
not dating ahead of time. Your personal attraction to one another and the
strength of your bond aren’t and cannot be decided by the universe. They are
baked into the process of building a relationship.
So, what does Pro’s world lose? It’s
not just dating, but also the slow process of understanding and opening up to
one another. Intimacy isn’t a one-step process for any relationship in our
world, but Pro compacts intimate understanding of your partner into 24-hour
chunks. If you’ve been in a relationship, you know how awful this sounds. Intimate
interactions build at different rates with different couples, but usually, you
wait a while before you leave the door open to the bathroom while you’re on the
toilet. That admittedly gross experience comes after years of building a life
together, but Pro’s world places us directly in the body of our soul mate for
24 hours, meaning we will be performing all the intimate acts that we would
normally be exposed to more slowly and from a distance. You can read every private
message, know every intimate detail of their bodies, and do it all with someone
who is a complete stranger.
3. Didn’t Do the Crime(?)
Pro’s argument for why this would
reduce crime comes with absolutely no warrants beyond, essentially, “love
conquers all”, linking having a soul mate to reduced loneliness or depression.
There are so many problems with
this. First, Pro presents no correlation between this or any other feels of
connection and a reduced propensity to commit crimes. Crimes are committed for
a wide variety of reasons, including a wide variety of biological,
psychological and sociological causes that do not include knowledge of a soul
mate.[
https://online.maryville.edu/online-bachelors-degrees/forensic-psychology/why-people-commit-crimes/]
The notion that it generates a form of sympathy or understanding is entirely
theoretical, and it is impossible to determine the psychological impact of this
interaction, much less how that will affect interactions with others. Second, a
soul mate relationship is not necessarily one without troubles, and “people in
troubled relationships are three times as likely to experience depression as
those who aren’t.”[
https://www.relate.org.uk/relationship-help/help-relationships/mental-health/relationships-and-depression]
If relationships like this are troubled – and the experience of having oneself
laid bare is bound during one of the foundational moments in our growth is
bound to create some problems – then depression could become more common, not
less. Third, this assumes that everyone is more likely to build a relationship.
If anything, knowledge of a soul mate who may live very far away from you, not
speak your language, come from a family that is outright hostile towards you,
etc. can lead to strong feelings of isolation. People may feel that all other
relationships pale in comparison, functionally increasing their loneliness by
isolating them from those around them in search of “the one.”
But Pro ignores the biggest
problem with criminal activity in his world: how is criminal activity done in
someone else’s body prosecuted? Chiefly, this regards what someone might do
with someone else’s body, whether based in perversion, greed, masochism or
sheer morbid curiosity. And it’s not just a question of whether we call death
murder or suicide. Who dies if the body dies with someone else in control? Is
the other person now stuck in a body that isn’t their own? Similarly, if
someone goes into a coma, then who has the coma when they return to their
original bodies? It’s also possible that they locked themselves in their room
or even bound themselves before this occurs. Are they not responsible for keeping
someone bound and gagged without food or water if that person is still wearing
their skin?
These questions are fundamental to
how crimes would be perceived by the justice system, and each could
dramatically affect an individual’s willingness to commit those crimes. As Pro
has left them unclear, we should assume that the legal system is utterly
incapable of addressing this dimension of crime in Pro’s world. There is no
precedent for this, and Pro provides no means to know whether someone actually
did change bodies, so someone could commit crimes and play it off as though
another person was in control at the time. Pro is creating a Purge-like
situation where people can claim insanity every month to justify the worst crimes
imaginable, and you’d never know if they were telling the truth.
“Rational mad man” what does this have to do with that?
Pretty sure this has more to do with Your Name than Freaky Friday.
Of freaky friday or what?
Speaking my language, and I’m a fan of the movie, so let’s do this.
this will be a highly detailed debate with a lot of points of contention and depth to each rebuttal so it's not really my type of thing.
yes, easily, because everything you say will be better is not only based on pure guesswork/conjecture but is going to come at a price of something that Con can prove is worse.
Now... do you think con can win THIS one?