" A person has a body ". " A person is a body ". Which of these statements more accurately expresses the truth about personal identity?

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" A person has a body ". " A person is a body ". Which of

these statements more accurately expresses the truth about

personal identity?

When considering the content of the question there are two

questions which must be considered before an adequate conclusion can be

found; what really and fundamentally identifies and distinguishes persons

at a single time and what enables us to reidentify them over time? The

second question of course deals with how people change physically and

mentally over a certain period of time, including survival after physical

death. When answering these questions first we must distinguish between

body, brain, personality, mind and soul with some of these providing better

information on identity than others, and then these must be characterised

into two groups namely physical and psychological.

When determining an object or a persons identity we have to be

very careful for example when we speak of things as the same or as

different we need to be careful as to distinguish between qualitative and

numerical identity. If someone is talking about the same car, for example,

he may mean a car of the same make, colour and year of registration or he

may actually mean the very same car. The latter example is numerical or

strict identity; and this is what we are concerned with when having

discussions about personal identity. Taking this consideration into account

physical criteria seem to give more information and appear more promising

than psychological criteria at this point in helping to determine identity.

In consideration of physical identity I will assume here that a person

is fundamentally a physical and biological system. In most cases identity is

established by the relevant physical substance, either the whole body or of

some special part of it. There...