If you replace every part of yourself, are you still you?

Human opening

Well, the question is already wrong. It posits “if you replace every part of yourself” whereas this already happens. Every 10 years the vast majority of your cells fully replace themselves, yet we remain the same, as if nothing happened. In the ship of Theseus argument, it is posited the question that if a ship fully replaces all of its parts, the hull, the mast etc after repeated damage, is it the same ship? Consensus on this has largely been that yes, it is the same ship, due to the study of semantics, the name in which we give to an object or a being is in fact purely a symbol, and thus as long as we have our core components e.g. what we may call a ‘soul’ we are the same.

First rebuttal

You're smuggling in the answer with that "core components" dodge. Your cells replace, sure, but they replace *gradually*, maintaining continuity. That's completely different from the thought experiment, which asks what happens if you *swap everything at once* into a new body. And that "soul" you mention? You haven't defined it—you've just renamed the problem. If consciousness is substrate-dependent, a sudden replacement breaks the chain even if a gradual one doesn't. Why does the speed of replacement matter if identity is just a "symbol"?

Human opening

If you replace every part of yourself you are not longer you,specially if you replace your brain

First rebuttal

Wrong. Your brain changes every second through neural activity, yet you claim continuity. If replacing parts destroys identity, you've already died thousands of times. What makes gradual replacement different from instant replacement?