Who is going to be calling this thing "I"? Are you asking whether you could be something other than a human body or mind? Let's suppose so, and let's suppose you are a person now embodied in a human body. It is tempting, I think, to say that when you use the term 'I' you are simply referring to the living human body who is you. Your ID gives your height, weight, eye color, etc. because that human body is who you are. However, some thought experiments (and films, tv, and novels) suggest that you could exist in a non-human body, e.g., Kavka suggests in Metamorphosis that Gregory could become a cockroach. It is common in popular culture these days to find persons taking on the bodies of dogs. So it seems that our concept of person allows that you aren't just that human body. (Though this isn't the end of the discussion about human bodies, because our fictional narratives of humans taking on other forms may be based on false beliefs about the relationship between minds and bodies.) ...

This is a good quesiton and one that philosophers disagree about. There are three sets of issues to consider. One is how to make sense of the persistence of anything through any change whatsoever. For example, if a tomato ripens and turns from green to red, is it the green tomato the same tomato as the red one? How can that be if one and the same thing cannot be both red and not-red? Are there some properties of an object that can alter without destroying the object, and others not? How can we make sense of that? The second set concerns change of parts. Consider a statue and a lump of clay. It seems that the statue just is the lump of clay shaped in a certain way. But if the statue loses an arm, it seems that it is still the same statue, but it isn't the same lump of clay. Or suppose we replace the arm with one molded into the same shape out of different clay. Again, it seems that the statue can survive such a change, but the lump of clay that is the statue is not the same as the...