What are you, anyway?

Three notions are regularly played with in popular, mid-level, and higher, academic culture.

1.     In the tradition of Plato and Descartes, you are your soul and your soul = your mind = your spirit = your intellect, a single non-material whatnot existing continuously over a span of time.

2.     In the tradition of Locke, anything that has your memories and your mental traits is you, though these change in varying degrees over time, anyway.

3.     In the materialist tradition, your body or at any rate your central nervous system is you.

As to the first, think Being Human.

As to the second, think Oblivion, Warehouse 13, or Eureka.

[And note that, for the attentive, Oblivion at least contains the refutation of this conception of personal identity.]

As to the third . . . . well, maybe you don’t see that a lot, in pop culture.

Can’t think of anything just now, anyway.

But that’s certainly the idea behind efforts to cryogenically preserve dead bodies until the day medical science is able to restore them to life.

Cryonics

Restore whom to life?

Why, himself, of course. Whosever body that is.

For any variant of materialism, a dead person is a dead body, and the latter is like a broken toaster.

Depending on how bad things are and on the available skills and resources, sometimes a toaster can be fixed and become fully functional, again.

A witty science fiction writer could make a very amusing Whozzat? story with such ingredients, playing these ideas off against each other.

As to materialism, the eliminative kind has the virtue of doing frankly what the reductive variety does surreptitiously.

That is, they both deny the data (pun intended) of experience.