You would lose your self identity. Identity as a whole is more than just self identity. It’s an amalgam of self, social, familial, governmental identities. This matters even more with things. A car has no sense of self. However, if someone lovingly repaired and replaced the parts, it would maintain its continuity of identity through the changes.
Similarly memory is more complex than one term. I could lose my explicit memory (remembering my past) but keep my implicit memory (skills and muscle type memories). In that case, am I still me? What about the reverse?
At that point it is no longer a yes no question, but a lot of grey creeps in.
I don’t believe it’s possible to remember skills without remembering your past. muscle memory is, linguistically, not tied to the brain, so I don’t know if that’s worth discussing.
Given there are people suffering from exactly that. It’s also unfortunately common in Alzheimer’s patients. The classic example is piano playing.
Muscle memory is a short hand for changes to the low level reactions. It’s a mix of brain spine and muscle nerves. E.g. I can still do martial arts moves fine from reflex, even though I no longer have explicit memories of learning them. A large chunk of our personality is built up of implicit memory. They act in the same way, just internally. E.g. your maths skills are based on implicit memories. The memories that created the skills are long gone, but the skills remain.
You would lose your self identity. Identity as a whole is more than just self identity. It’s an amalgam of self, social, familial, governmental identities. This matters even more with things. A car has no sense of self. However, if someone lovingly repaired and replaced the parts, it would maintain its continuity of identity through the changes.
Similarly memory is more complex than one term. I could lose my explicit memory (remembering my past) but keep my implicit memory (skills and muscle type memories). In that case, am I still me? What about the reverse?
At that point it is no longer a yes no question, but a lot of grey creeps in.
I don’t believe it’s possible to remember skills without remembering your past. muscle memory is, linguistically, not tied to the brain, so I don’t know if that’s worth discussing.
Given there are people suffering from exactly that. It’s also unfortunately common in Alzheimer’s patients. The classic example is piano playing.
Muscle memory is a short hand for changes to the low level reactions. It’s a mix of brain spine and muscle nerves. E.g. I can still do martial arts moves fine from reflex, even though I no longer have explicit memories of learning them. A large chunk of our personality is built up of implicit memory. They act in the same way, just internally. E.g. your maths skills are based on implicit memories. The memories that created the skills are long gone, but the skills remain.