Obbe
Alan What?
[annoy my right-angled speediness]
Are you your body? Sure, at least in a way. But is there a line where this stops being true? How much of yourself can be removed or replaced before you stop being you, and does this question even make sense?
Your physical existence is made up of cells - trillions of them, and each one is a living being, a little machine made out of proteins. Your cells work together to form larger structures and systems used to perform various tasks like enabling you to breathe or eat food, or to read and understand these words. If we were to remove some of your cells from your body and kept them in a specific environment, your cells will continue to live on their own, at least for awhile. Your cells can exist without you, but can you exist without your cells? If we were to remove all of your cells from your body, "you" wouldn't exist anymore.
Where is the line where a pile of your cells stops being you? If you were to donate an organ to someone does this mean that a part of you becomes a part of this other person, or is this other body keeping a part of you alive? If you and a random person were to somehow start to slowly exchange cells, one cell at a time, would we reach a point in time where you become them and they become you?
The image of "yourself" as a static thing is untenable. Almost all of your cells will have died and been replaced by new cells every at least once every 7 years or so. We are constantly changing, growing, you are not the same now as you were in the past or how you will be in the future. We know that you are made up of trillions of little things, made of smaller little things that are constantly changing. Together all those little things are not static, but dynamic. Their composition and condition is changing constantly, so we might just be a self-sustaining pattern without clear borders that gained self awareness at some point and now has the ability to think about itself through time and space but really only exists in this this exact moment.
When did this pattern start? With your conception, when the first human arose, when life first began on our planet, or when the elements that make up our bodies were first forged in a star? The human brain evolved to deal with absolutes. The fuzzy borders that make up reality are hard to grasp. Maybe ideas like beginning and end, life and death, you and me are really not absolutes, but ideas belonging to a fluent pattern in this strange and beautiful universe.
The SEP article on personal identity is really interesting, you should read it.
I generally fall in line with Derek Parfit's thinking on the subject: there is no coherent definition of the self across time. In an instant we can describe ourselves as the set of material and structure necessary to pose that question (that is all biological system requisite for your particular instantiation of mind, with two spatially removed but structurally identical minds being distinct) but we can not say that thing ("you") survives across time. There are other minds, removed in the temporal dimension, that have certain properties and causal relationships with you (psychological continuity rather than identity) that compel you to work in their interests as if they were your own. It's not immediately intuitive or satisfying but it offers a robust solution to branching problems and substrate dependence which is more than you can say for just about any argument for personal identity across time.
Obbe
Alan What?
[annoy my right-angled speediness]
I'll look for that and give it a read. Let me ask you some questions Lanny. If I understand what you're saying, you are saying there is no coherent definition of "the self" across time. So do you still identify with memories of your past or plan for your future? If we entirely replaced your body and brain with synthetic replacements, would you still be you?
I don't "identify" with my past or future in the sense that I consider myself to share an identity with the organism we'd colloquially call me. Identity, taken in a strict sense, implies certain properties that I don't think the common notion of time-persistent self can satisfy (transitivity specifically). That's not to say I don't think I have any meaningful relationship with my past and future "selves", specifically I think I have certain entitlements and responsibilities inherited from what preceded me (I may not be the same Lanny as posted yesterday, but I'm still obligated to fulfill promises which that Lanny made) and I consider the interests of those beings which will follow me (i.e. those entities which fulfill the common concept of "me" across time) to be roughly as important as my own interests (by analogy parent's don't share an identity with their children but we usually wouldn't call them nuts for defending their child's interests even to their own detriment).
This looks functionally just like our common notion of self but it's significant because it allows us to give coherent answers to things like branching problems or replacement problems: if I'm cloned I should defend the interests of both my cloned self and the "original" as if both were my own. If enough of my parts are replaced I may not be the same thing as today, I may not share an identity with the parts-substituted me, but if it fulfills certain conditions (it has my memories, my mental structure, my soul or an equivalent one if such a thing exists) then I should regard it as having the same status as the thing that wakes up in my bed tomorrow with a lot more cells in common with me.
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Ajax
African Astronaut
[rumor the placative aphakia]
I am a soul occupying a body. A decaying body, at that. Once my soul separates from this body, or the body from the soul (or parts of the body from the soul), then the body is no longer considered "me." My person, as observed by other earthly beings, will cease to exist, and I will become unrecognizable.
Obbe
Alan What?
[annoy my right-angled speediness]
I am a soul occupying a body. A decaying body, at that. Once my soul separates from this body, or the body from the soul (or parts of the body from the soul), then the body is no longer considered "me." My person, as observed by other earthly beings, will cease to exist, and I will become unrecognizable.
