Hello, I have reached a conclusion that is quite dangerous to my health and could lead to a lot of trouble. I need to ask someone and see if they come to the same conclusion. My question is: are you the same person you were 1 year ago or even 5 minutes ago? I figured that the self changes over time, regarding both personality and physical appearance. As you gain knowledge and change your opinion, your personality changes and you seem to be totally different then you were before. your physical appearance also changes over time, the cells in your body completely replace themselves in about 7 years (I think). Although your memory really doesnt change over time, only how you perceive this memory does, and how you perceive the world around you. To further define my question: because we are constantly changing and are becoming a new person (except for our memory which ties our life together and gives us the illusion that we are the same person) should I be living completely in the present and totally...

Pinning down precisely wherein personal identity consists is certainly a thorny problem in philosophy, which has been debated for centuries and still seems quite far from a definitive solution. I can't promise to solve it for you, but here are a few considerations that you might find it interesting to ponder: 1. Let's look at the way you set up your question: "As you gain knowledge and change your opinion, your personality changes and you seem to be totally different then you were before ." You're using the same pronoun throughout, which is already enough to imply that there is just one enduring thing here to which this pronoun continues to refer. If you really believed that the things which existed in these different times really were distinct, wouldn't you refer to them in different ways? Moreover, you're attributing to change to something, but that too seems to imply an enduring identity. The very notion of change, the notion that a thing is now different from how it ...