I've mentioned before in various Threads here that "head transplant" research is ongoing and we might expect the first such involving humans to happen in the relatively near future. Well, in the more-distant future, we could imagine that the technique is perfected, which raises an interesting possibility that is relevant to this particular Thread....
Let's consider a hypothetical "Mary" who doesn't like being female, and a hypothetical "John" who doesn't like being male. Suppose they agree to get their heads swapped onto each other's bodies? How's that for a gender-change operation? Without actually being any sort of ordinary gender-change operation!
The preceding is even relevant to the Overall Abortion Debate, since abortion opponents typically spout the Stupid Lie that unborn humans qualify as persons. Even though the abortion opponents actually do know what persons truly are. Because in the above transplant scenario, we might imagine Mary changing her name to "Mark", and John changing his name to "Joan" --or can we? If abortion opponents are correct, their bodies represent their personhood, which means that John must take the new name of "Mary" (because his head is now attached to that body), and Mary must take the new name of "John" (because her head is now attached to that body). OR, if abortion opponents are wrong (and of course they are!), persons are minds, and that means the minds of Mary and John are free to change their names to whatever they want.
And, of course, since unborn humans are merely mindless animals, they cannot possibly qualify as persons!
At first glance, your post seems far-fetched, and science fiction like. But if we really give serious consideration about "persons
are minds" and "bodies are represent personhood", I find that description to be a reasonable way to define what a "person" is. One might also see the body as a vehicle for the mind. I have to agree that the mind is our person.
Another example of that would be if Stephen Hawkin's head could be removed from his already dead body and connected to a technology to provide a life support system for his head. And he continued to use the current technology that he uses to communicate, the essence of who Mr. Hawkin is, or if you prefer, the living "person" we know as Stephen Hawkin, would still exist. In that state of existence, if someone purposely turned off the life support without his consent, Mr. Hawkin, the person, would die, and I believe that act would be considered as the murder of "a person". To take it a step farther, if only Mr. Hawkin's brain could be placed in some type of life support system, which included a means for Hawkin to communicate, the person of Mr. Hawkin would still exist. The brain, in advanced stages of development, allows for the manifestation of "person" to occur. The same argument made using any other part, or in whole, of Mr. Hawkin's "body"...wouldn't hold up that the person continues to exist.
Over the course of my life I've been to a number of funerals of people close to me. When I saw a body lying in a coffin, I didn't see "the person" that I knew, but rather an object, which represented the "person" I once knew. In other words, the biological component that manifested and maintained the existence of the mind, which can be the only true identifiable link to the actual "person", also died.
The "person" (or the mind) is only capable of giving credence to Aristotle's phrase, "The Whole is Greater than the Sum of its Parts". Our minds, our person, is the only capable part of our existence, which makes us able to be more that what our physical selves are capable of. Some might see this as our ability to create ideas and objects beyond our physical selves. This ability make us more than than the sum of our parts.
