Say you have a car that's in bad shape. In tinkering with it, over the course of decades, you manage to replace every single component of it. Not a single washer, wire, or drop of oil was actually part of this car when it left the factory.
...is it legal to not change the licensing, taxation, and insurance information on it? Could you conceivably pass it off as the same car you bought? I mean I know every car has a VIN visible through the windscreen, printed on that inaccessable part of the dashboard, but if you replace even the frame of the car...but it takes so long that each little fix and change would be minute and barely noticeable, if at all. I mean is it the same car? Perhaps, if you took into account the amount of time each replacement part spent among components of the original vehicle you could claim that the spirit of the original was carried, by varying degrees, in the replacements. But then it gets all blurry and metaphysical.
If you replaced the odometer I think it would make it ineligeable for legal resale.
I'm trying to figure out at what point it becomes a different car. To use another example, when I was a kid my dad bought a computer. Over the years we replaced the memory, the disk drives, the motherboard, all the wiring, the OS, all the software, the keyboard, the mouse, the printer...even the Monitor, before we scrapped the tower and its components and replaced them. But the keyboard, the mouse, and the monitor are all the original replacements which worked with the old tower--under the old regime, if you will. But when the tower changed, it was a new computer.
What do you have to replace to make it a new car?
Or in a person. Your cells refresh constantly. Over the course of a decade all the cells in your body will have died and been replaced. Except maybe the brain cells--nobody's ever really given me a straight answer about that. (The brain grows with the head when the body grows, and it is constantly being fed with blood, and you continue learning and making neurological connections every day, and yet people will tell you that when you kill brain cells, they're gone. That your brain is constantly boiling away whenever you take drugs or smoke cigarettes (though interestingly nobody ever mentions pollution in this equation.) I have a hard time buying that. If that were the case then how could adults get brain tumors (and how could carcinogens be to blame for this?) And moreover, people do recover from head injuries. The concussed are not always doomed. Folks can have their ability to read knocked out of them, but it can come back. People can forget and re-learn. To imply that the brain reaches a levelling point and then just dies off from there is folly. Or a bold-faced lie.) But if every component of you is replaced, does that make you a new person?
I think so. I think people's personalities, habits, and appearances change at about the same rate as their overall cellular refreshment. Some people call this "maturing" but i've known many people who have "matured" into assholes. I think once a person's entire self has renewed, they should get a new name. New social security number, new driver's license--everything. Because they've changed. Calling someone by the same name after they've transformed like that is the equivalent of showing up on Manhattan Island and wondering why nobody is wearing wooden shoes and speaking Dutch. (er, well, why nobody who isn't talking to themselves in gibberish is wearing wooden shoes.) The city has changed. The name has changed. It is no longer the same thing.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
To the car thing I say that replacing the frame makes it a new car because of the VIN. You may be using your old cars parts to build your new one, but the new frame means new car.
Also, you are the same person because you still remember everything from your life in the first person and you have the same DNA. I'd venture to say the "DNA" of New York is about the same. Its just gotten a new look and learned a few more languages... and doesnt bathe often.
The real issue is personal flexibility and acceptance of change. This is why I dont expect my high school friends to have the same likes and dislikes they had in high school.
As far as the brain goes: there are two general types of cells, the gray matter (your neurons that make the connections and do all the thinking) and your glial cells, which just sort of support them, surround them, help get them nutrients, etc. That's why you hear people throw the fact "We only use 20% of our brains" around like it actally means something. We use 100% of our gray matter. With the gray matter, we have a finite number of neurons. They do continue to grow and branch and make new connections, but if a neuron is dead, it doesn't get replaced, unlike skin cells, say. If a brain damaged person does suddenly come out of their coma and start talking, it's because the neurons that are still alive have managed to make new connections around the damaged area, taking up the slack. I assume a tumor in the brain would probably be caused by a glial cell going haywire.
This has been more about the brain than you really wanted. Hope California's treating you well. I'm looking forward to freezing my ass off in Chicago. Take care of yourself.
That's very, very interesting. I took my grade-school education on brains, multiplied it by the axiom "Everything an adult tells a child is a lie, in whole or in part", and concluded that something important about neural function hadn't yet been communicated to me.
so a neuron is like a little tree--it grows, it develops, it branches out...but if you cut it down, unlike a starfish, it won't grow back into two identical neurons. Eenterestink.
Hope Chicago treats you well! Have you talked to Tracy lately?
Post a Comment