Are 'you' your flesh, your physical form? If so, would 'you' still exist if all your fleshy parts were incrementally replaced until you were wholly something artificial? Would you still be a person?
Are 'you' your sentient mind, your own self-consciousness? If you brain, or whatever system we were left with from the above experiment were to be split in two in such a matter than each half functioned independently and was self-aware, would 'you' still exist, or would 'you' cease to exist as we were left with two new 'persons'?
What makes one a person? What makes a person an individual?
This is a great question.
Consider that you do not have a single atom in your body that is the same as the atoms that were in your body ten years ago.
So are you nothing more the sum total of the atoms in your
body?
Apparently not.
You are the unique combined information that takes these atoms and makes them into you.
Living creatures are EVENTS, the combined sum of the informed interactions of the atoms of their body.
And, if you can wade though the weird world of string theory, it appears that ALL MATTER is really as much a WAVE as a PARTICLE.
Now if that made no sense to you, take heart.
Very few of us have minds that are really designed to think outside the perception limiting box that we are designed to live in.
We are designed to thrive and perceive the Newtonian universe, not the Einstienien (or beyond) universe that our physicists and mathematicians are currently investigating.
But consider what it REALLY MEANS if life is but an event...
Among other things that really does mean that we are just part of the event chain of life on this planet.
Now I know that might offend the fundmentalist believers here, but speaking from my believer's POV, that makes perfect sense, really.
All life is but an continued wave that is part of the
life event, and that event is really not all that much different than the existence event of all inanimate material.
Its not that we are thinking beings in a universe that is the mystery of being.
The universe BEING is the
real mystery.