Quote:
Originally Posted by English assassin
No need to postulate an accident. Are you the "same" person as you were when you were aged 5? Will you be the "same" person as you are now when you are aged 75 ?

There's some differences though. That 5 year old will slowly evolve into whatever person he/his is today and will become in the future. Most would agree that it's still the same person.
As ever the words we use are slippery. There is a certain "sameyness" to you at 5, 35 and 75, but obviously also profound differences. If it was possible to put the three instances side by side, (or more realistically, to describe their characteristics one after the other without stating their relationship) no observer would say they were the same. On the other hand I obviously feel some sort of connection with my 75 year old self, or I would be quite happy to comtemplate having the old so and so working as a caretaker 'til he drops, rather than paying into my pension now. (You might also conside the thought experiement, would you agree to have your five year old self horribly tortured, (by a time travelling alien, presumably) in return for £1 million now. You yourself would not experience the torture, other than as a memory, but I think most of us would still say no.)

Possibly the answer is that it isnt valid to look at a person at one point in time, and the thing that is "me" is me from 0-75 all at once.

The same would then apply to the pre and post accident states: although they differ, we might deny that it is a valid question to contrast the two and say which is the "real" you. This might be like asking if an acorn or an oak is the "real" Quercus robur. The answer is both, or neither.

Or to put it more general, is your mind and soul "trapped" in your body or can it be moved around freely?
Originally my view on this was that it must be "trapped" in your body. If, as I feel, whatever you might call a soul arises from the processing of information on a particular system (in this case the human brain) then "obviously" the soul cannot exist independly of the processing of the information. Laterly though I begin to suspect my understanding of the meaning of "information" (and "processing") is far too naive to say this for sure. I still cannot see how the soul could exist independently of the system that created it but I am now agnostic on the issue.

What about reports from people who have been dead for some minutes? Can we believe anything from them or are they all lieing as part of a big conspiracy?
Well. You could devise a falsifiable hypothesis that we can test that would distinguish between a world in which these people genuinely have out of body near death experiences, and one in which they are simply halucinating, so the question is worth asking. The trouble is that its hard to see how the hypothesis could ethically be investigated. Foir me these storues are filed in the same place as ghost stories, ie, mostly nonsense, a few that might give pause for thought, but nothing approaching any sort of "proof".