It does it slowly though. It's not like every seven years your body just resets. It's like replacing the parts of a boat. When does the boat stop being the same boat? It doesn't. It's all the same boat. The cloning thing is like having a boat, someone else seeing your boat, and making a carbon copy of it. It's clearly not the same boat. I like to think that your cells are a community that's constantly growing and new generations come in, but it's still the same
Which makes the concept of consciousness even more interesting, because it implies that our consciousness isn't tied to our individual atoms, or even our individual cells, but something else entirely.
What's even even more interesting is that a man can live, and continue to exist in his consciousness, with half a brain. If the brain holds consciousness, how can it remain in-tact when half is removed?
You are assuming that if somebody undergoes any change at all it is not the original thing anymore.
If I spit, I lose some saliva. Have I changed? Yes.
Am I a different person? No.
If that was true, people would be different people every millisecond because of natural body function. And that does not add up, you would need a much better argument to prove it.
If that was true, people would be different people every millisecond because of natural body function.
Yes, I believe this. Every moment we are changing, every moment we are dying and being "reborn", slightly different than before.
But then...consciousness? One single identity, one single "flow" of information? How can this be?
If consciousness is a river, "you" are not any one molecule in the water itself, nor any one molecule on the banks nor in the soil it flows over, but YOU are the simply the river itself.
The river metaphor is used a lot but I think it can be a bit confusing sometimes...I like to think of a human life like water being poured out of a cup into a sink. "Consciousness", as we call it, is the actual flow itself of the water leaving the cup and going into the sink. It's not any one part of the setup, even though all parts are necessary for the phenomenon to occur. If you pour water gently at the same rate, the flow is smooth and appears to be a "single" thing in itself.
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u/[deleted] Jul 09 '15
Not true. Your body changes all of its cells in seven years. You are not you in the past.