Comment by tsimionescu
Comment by tsimionescu 2 days ago
You are not replying to my core point. Do you believe that a person with severe late stage Alzheimer is the same person they were before the disease reached that point? Do you believe that their old mind and personality still exists at that point? If so, why?
For many other neuro-psychiatric diseases, we know that moments of psychosis are reversible, at least to some extent, with drugs and therapy and the kindness of others. The same is manifestly not true, tragically, for dementia: everything lost is gone forever.
You are not the same person you were when you were nine years old are you? Literally all your cells that you had then are gone and replaced. You’ve also had new experiences and that’s changed self-concept as well. We are not one continuous person that something like Alzheimer suddenly changes.
It’s because we associate so much with our experience as memories that makes us think that that is what we are. Are people with Alzheimer’s the same person? No, they’re different people. This is why we’re not allowed to just go around killing people with Alzheimer’s and dementia.
The thing that makes us alive is the constant change and activity in the body. If you say, someone does not change, that someone is the same throughout their whole life. That amounts to calling something dead, still, unchanging, lifeless.
These people with dementia, they still have a personality don’t they? I know my friend’s mother does. And my friends, father who died a few months back with Alzheimer’s. Yes, he was angry and had outbursts that were 100% uncharacteristically not like his old behavior. But behavior does not dictate who you are is signals that we still have a consciousness. And that is who we are. We are not our memories. We are not our current form of expression. We are our consciousness. Because our consciousness loses the function of accessing memories does not make us any more us.
You are not your memory. You are consciousness. You are the thing that reads memories.
But again, this drifted so far from the point of the article. This man killed himself not for his current suffering, but for his perceived future suffering. He was afraid of change he was afraid of what that change meant. He wanted people to see the same dead person That people saw him in life. A constant unchanging perception.