Question Here is a question. Say I want to live forever and constantly move my brain from one body to another, so I never age. I also replace non functioning parts of my brain with new ones made with stem cells. Eventually after living for a long enough time my brain is no longer anything like the original except for its collective memories. Would that thing still be me? To take it a step further I create clones of myself and each of them has a small part of my originals brain. Would I still exist? Or I created a collective consciousness in which I am able to communicate to each of my clones and we are able to share our experiences in one big cloud. What does that even mean for me? Am I even the same person or something completely different? These problems have been really bugging me and I am just trying to see if anyone has any answer.

Accepted:
February 16, 2017

Comments

Often with questions that are

Often with questions that are composed of multiple further questions ("Here is a question", you write . . . - it's not - I count four question marks!) it helps to take just one, and deal with it carefully, before moving on to the next. Of course some of the sub-questions will generate further questions, but that simply means that some patience is required. For example, 'I move my brain from one body to another, so I never age.' Why does it follow that you never age? If you retain your memories (line 3) and add to them, then you are changing and aging, psychologically. So you must mean that you don't physically age. But the brain does age. And why is it that 'I never age' follows from 'I move my brain from one body to another'? That seems to assume that who you are is a matter of having the same brain. Is that right? And if it is, then if as you say 'after living for a long time my brain is no longer anything like the original' then you are not after all the same person, so the question goes away. A quick thought to end, and to encourage you to continue with the problems you raise on your own, till they stop bugging you. If I sneeze, it is not the case that my brain sneezes. So I am not my brain. Questions like yours are common in the philosophy of mind, and there are lots of things to read and think about. The right place for you to start might be with fission ideas in the work of Derek Parfit. For him if I fission, the answer to the question whether I survive is indeterminate. You might also look at the entry "Personal Identity" (the section on fission) in the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Good luck to you, and to your brain, whichever gets there first.