Death without Dying

[LukeMC]

Excellent points. Of course I'm working in the framework of myself. The choice of the word death may be imperfect, but it's the best word for it. So what it comes down to is this, I'm Jackie (My real name). I'm an atheist, I remember loving cats and going to conventions. I have specific things in life I enjoy doing, people I love, philisophical beliefs, etc... I get into a car accident, I can't remember that life, and what I enjoy changes. I hate my nickname so I go by my full name Jacqueline. Friends who I used to love annoy me. I don't like cats anymore, can't stand anime, I become a Christian and decide I love fashion and want to become a fashion designer. Jackie, that was an atheist, that loves anime and cats and her friends, is dead at the very least to herself, and it's Jacqueline who is alive and since in the materialist mindset there is no afterlife, just nothing. So as far as Jackie is concerned, there's currently nothing, she is dead, gone forever, just as if her body had completely died. Does this make sense?

Absolutely, in the same sense that 8 year old Jackie is probably quite dead, as is 4 year old and 2 year old Jackie. Those personalities had changed and meandered leaving a (23?) year old Jackie with a very different set of traits to her former construct. As with the car accident, the person survives but the personality is lost forever. And like downbeatplum said, the only difference between a car accident and aging is the speed of the change.

Now I wanna put forward a few situations to consider.
When you are drunk, are you the same person?
When you get so drunk that you wake up not remembering last night (memory loss), is the person who experienced those memories "dead"?
Does a person with temporary amnesia suffer a temporary death and slowly come back to life? At which point are they the same person? How many of their memories must they re-acquire to be the same person they were before an accident? I think the line is very ambiguous, but nontheless interesting.