Would someone recieving a bionic transplant still be the same person?

[Angrboda]

Is someone with Alzheimer's disease still the same person then?

If you were to wipe someone completely clean of everything they ever learned or experienced in life then they would be in the same state as the day they were born, so yes and no. Reincarnation/rebirth would be a complete memory wipe with a new brain. Though apparently some people can recall past lives past lives somehow.

Steven Sich gives a hypothetical in the book From Folk Psychology To Cognitive Science of a woman who is experiencing progressive damage to her brain which is primarily affecting her memory. She remembers the fact that "McKinley was assassinated," and at first understands that to be assassinated means to be killed. However, over time, her memory of what it means to be assassinated deteriorates to the point that all she remembers about assassination is that it is something very bad and frightening; she no longer remembers its connection to death and being killed. However, she still remembers the fact that "McKinley was assasinated." The question then becomes, does she believe that McKinley was assassinated even though she no longer has a sense of what being assassinated refers to?


The Buddhist point doesn't require going into reincarnation and such, and is, to my understanding, framed in terms of the doctrine of dependent origination (which you don't need to know either). The primary part of what Buddhists are saying with Anatta, or no self, is that no matter where you look in consciousness, there is nothing stable, coherent and permanent that can be recognized as a persistent self, or sense of self. Thoughts change and blend into one another, as do feelings, and reactions: nothing seems to serve as a likely candidate for an enduring ground or base that one would call 'self'. Only continual change from moment to moment. (Thich Nhat Hanh does a better job of explaining it. Maybe I'll scan something later.)