There must be a level of knowledge at which one intuition or the other (or perhaps neither) is vindicated by the facts.
Yes. And when an intuition is confused enough, I generally conclude that the facts (once they are fully understood) will vindicate neither it nor its negation.
That said, I agree that many questions about identity will (and do) ground out into choices about what to identify with and what aspects of ourselves to value (although we're not always able to implement those choices unaided, any more than I can easily choose what flavors of ice cream taste good to me), and that not everyone will (or does) share those choices.
I'm currently trying to convince my parents to sign up for cryonics.
The problem is that they are completely opposed to the any form of life extension and/or immortality (and that’s without even mentioning something as "strange" as cryonics). Unfortunately, being their child, I have the intrinsic property that I can never know more about life then they do. The only thing they will believe are scientific studies from respectable scientists (a respectable scientist being someone who only says what they want to hear and is not me)
I have the arguments I gathered from Less Wrong and the Alcor Library. I’m focusing on my mother since my dad is impossible to convince without her support.
Her argument is that when you live for a very long time/forever wars are almost guaranteed to occur at least once in your lifetime and she doesn’t want to live through those. I asked her when, given that we could perfectly predict the future, we would know a war would break out tomorrow she would commit suicide today. Her answer was yes, as she couldn’t bear losing any of us and doesn’t want experience a war. I pointed out how I would feel if she died but she just dismissed the entire thing as crazy.
My parents aren’t religious at all, so that’s one less bridge to cross but for all the rest I would greatly appreciate anything that might help convince them.