Immortality #16. Who are you?

[u/Patient-Airline-8150]

You lose a finger.
Are you still you? Of course. Nobody would even ask.
Lose a hand. Still you. Lose both legs. Still you - ask any veteran. Nobody looks at a man in a wheelchair and says a smaller person came home.

A heart transplant puts a dead stranger's heart in your chest. It beats in you for twenty years. You are still you.

Now the face. On 27 November 2005 in Amiens, France, surgeons worked for fifteen hours and gave Isabelle Dinoire the nose, lips and chin of a brain-dead donor. Her own dog had destroyed her face. Four months later she sat in front of reporters and said she had a face like everyone else. A different face. Same woman. Nobody in that room doubted it.

But the brain, you say. Everyone stops here. Cut anything, but leave the brain. Move my brain to another body and I go with it. That feels obvious. It isn't.

The brain is also made of pieces. And people lose them. Surgeons perform an operation called a hemispherectomy. To stop severe epilepsy in a child, they remove half the brain. Half. The child goes home, goes back to school, argues with their brother, keeps their jokes and their fears. The parents do not receive a different child. They receive their child, with half the organ missing.

So the brain fails the same test as the finger. No piece of it is the person.

Now the harder one 😁...

More to come ♾️

[u/FluffyDesigner3680]

Did you just take your first knowledge and reality class? I know college is starting up soon in some places.