[feoren]

> I think you'll find discussions significantly more straightforward if you don't make up the other person's side of the conversation

You never specified your "obvious" definition, so I had to reverse engineer it from your examples. I wouldn't have to make up your side of the conversation if you just actually said what it is. You're still using "obvious" and "clearly" as meaning obvious to you, based on every iota of experience you've ever had, but totally failed to justify why exactly your "obvious" opinions should be obvious to anyone else. Either you have a hard and fast definition that can definitively determine whether that thing is or is not part of a body, or it's not obvious. Unless your rule for determining whether something is part of a body is: "just ask filleduchaos, and he'll tell you whether it obviously is or obviously is not."

> And your gut microbiota is very clearly considered to be a _separate_ organism from you

"Very clearly" again. It's considered a separate organism because it has different DNA than your germ cells. But so do your mitochondria. So does a chimeric twin. Is a chimera "obviously one" or "obviously two" bodies? Tell me which one of those is so obvious that I'd be completely stupid to believe the other one, please. I suspect you'll say it's obviously one body, but then you have a problem with gut bacteria being obviously not part of your body.