If a prince's mind woke up in a cobbler's body, which one just woke up?
John Locke argued that what makes you 'you' over time isn't your body or an immortal soul, but the continuous thread of memory running through your experiences. To test this, he imagined a prince's consciousness, memories included, moved overnight into a cobbler's body: everyone would still call the man 'the cobbler,' but Locke said the person inside would genuinely be the prince. Critics objected that founding identity on memory alone leads to absurd cases, since memory itself can fail.
— John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book II, Chapter 27: Of Identity and Diversity — 1689
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