Bob Everlasting
Is your higher, observer-self independent from your body?
Let’s take a look Bob. Bob was in an accident as a child and had all four limbs replaced. He adapted well, and as he grew older, Bob, like many of his peers, had other parts replaced: hip, knees … heart valves. When medical organ farming came into its own, Bob had most of his internal organs replaced. Like everyone, Bob had inserts placed in his brain so he could go online, check his calendar, and script his own dreams.
Over time, Bob’s entire body is replaced with machines or externally harvested biological parts. More and more sections of his brain are replaced with efficient machine inserts. Now his memory is perfect and his cognitive skills match any supercomputer. When Bob is 187 years old, he looks back at his medial history and realizes that some time in the last 10 years, the very last original body part, the lining of his nostrils, had been replaced. And yet, there was continuity over his lifetime in his self-awareness, and he knew he was alive, that Bob was still Bob.
The truth is that Bob had been physically replaced, many times over, before most of his medical interventions. We all exchange molecules with our environment, and the atoms making Bob up at age five were not the same atoms that newborn Bob was made of. And by age 10, all the atoms making up his five-year-old body had been replaced…
