Hey /sci/ I got a question for you.
If every cell in the human body replaces itself every 7 years. Am I not just an exact copy of myself with the same memories, and the old me is technically dead?
Discuss.
>>8034780
Not every cell, and that 7 years figure is a median at best.
And if you were an "exact copy" at any point, it would imply you learned nothing and had no cognitive activity in the intervening time. Thinking, forming memories, etc changes the organism on a cellular level as well
Look at autos (on for example the Game of Life). We consider moving and propagating patterns on the grid to be "things", even though they are just the same visual pattern made up of different blocks in a different place. They don't "move," or persist between timesteps
Consider the "self" to be a reproducing/propagating pattern or arrangement of information on a physical substrate, rather than the cells (or even molecules) themselves
So I'm not the same person i was 10 years ago when I raped my sister?
>>8034780
I don't think neurons do this
>>8034805
Do you even know what a median is???
And yes, every cell in the body is replaced in 7 years. It just means that the longest surviving cells in our bodies are around for 7 years.
>>8034780
Imo, you're not a copy because you have so many things can go wrong in your biology during that time that something /has/ to be different, but you're definitely not the same person
>>8034891
No, in fact most brain cells are never replaced; if they were we wouldn't suffer from neural degeneracy as they slowly wear those myolin sheaths out
The molecules in our cells are constantly replaced, but its just an identical part being put into the machine, you are not growing new brain cells to replace old ones
![squareillusion[1].png](https://i.imgur.com/yccu9sS.png "squareillusion[1].png")
It's simple. There is no self.
>>8034869
in the hippocampus some do, but that's that only brain area where this happens iirc
>>8034869
You're probably thinking of neuronal neogenesis, because the '7 year rule' applies to neurons as well.
That being said, the 7 year rule isn't really accurate. Take for instance the most tightly packed heterochromatin that is never expressed in an arbitrary selected cell. How in the name of fuck would all the atoms in even a single base pair at said location be exchanged?
>>8034780
I guess that depends on how you decide what defines you. It's incredibly hard (probably impossible) to define a person in such a way that you can say that a later iteration of said person is an exact copy of some earlier version of that person.
>>8034921
*tips fedora*
G-d gave us a self which is what makes us different to the animals which we were given dominion over.
>>8034780 (OP)
As has been mentioned upthread, 7 years is very inaccurate.
Cell death is very common for certain types of cells and very uncommon for others.
Beyond that, most molecules in any given cell will be replaced in an incredibly short amount of time.
So if you're just asking "at what point am I made of different stuff than I used to be", the answer is ... maybe a few hours?
And for future reference, you generally get better philosophy answers from >>>/his/
>The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned from Crete had thirty oars,
>and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus,
>for they took away the old planks as they decayed,
>putting in new and stronger timber in their places,
>in so much that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers,
>for the logical question of things that grow;
>one side holding that the ship remained the same,
>and the other contending that it was not the same.
>>8034854
You can't rape the willing.
Death is not real. Ironically, death is imaginary. Our society portrays death as a binary state of "hes alive" or "hes dead", although this is not true. Of course, cells die and replicate. Organisms die and replicate. If a human has no pulse, or eeg, but cells in his left foot are still alive, is the human alive? If not, at what point do we determine the human IS alive?
According to the sources of wikipediea, "The current definition is that organisms maintain homeostasis, are composed of cells, undergo metabolism, can grow, adapt to their environment, respond to stimuli, and reproduce."
