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Personal Identity

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Submitted By SUPREME
Words 2652
Pages 11
comJess Ramirez
Professor. Williams
Philosophy 180
9.18.12
Personal Identity.

What am I? A mind or a body? Between both my mental and physical realities my true self is found in my mind. An intangible but highly influential, very private set of thoughts construct the perception of how I allow the physical world to experience my being. My body is a physical representation of the collective effort of thoughts and experiences of my mind. In essence our body serves as a vessel or shell for our very soul. The question, “what am I?” could also be “who are you?” What constitutes an individual’s identity? I believe between the two options of physical and mental realities that my prolonged mental consciousness gives me my identity. My memories are who I am. Without my memories I am just a body a tabula rasa all over again. This idea of memory serving as our identity can be seen with the example of Alzheimer’s patients. Alzheimer’s is an autoimmune disease that even with today’s modern medicine is still misunderstood. The patient suffering AD experiences a slow wipe out of their memory. Even though, still unclear to how or why this happens to millions of people worldwide we are able to see first hand years of life disappear into nowhere and how destructive this is to families, loved ones, and an individuals identity. They exist physically as a shell and nothing more. Their connection and relationship to the physical world is of no use without the mind. For the record I am by no means stating that an AD patient’s life is of lesser significance.

Now, what if we were able to transfer someone’s brain and memories into someone else’s body, what would happen? The most realistic idea I came up with is the idea of brainwashing. Feeding your thoughts to reconstruct another person’s way of thinking and perceiving the world. By seeding your thoughts into someone else’s mind

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