Face Transplant - Thought Experiment
Philosophy : Thought Experiments What was it to be the same person from one day to the next? Well, most had held that it was all to do with the mental side of things - if you thought you were someone and had their memories, then you were that person. That was what let you be the same person at age ten as at age eighty, even though you looked radically different, a different height, weight, stature, hair colour (or lack thereof) and so forth. Yet the volunteer for the face transplant was still nervous. If they looked like someone else, would their personal identity be eroded? The face is such a powerful part of our identity that if others just started treating him as a different person, perhaps in fact the person whose face their new synthetic one was modelled on, would it even be worth having the operation, or were they changing their very existence through going through with the procedure?
Questions about thought experiment:
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