Waar was ik toen ik er niet was? Een filosofie van persoon en identiteit

Where are you when you under general anaesthesia? Are you simply lying on the operation table, temporarily unconscious, or is the 'real' you not there at all? To answer that question, you have to know who you are, ultimately: who or what is the 'real' you? Many people feel that psychological characteristics are more important for their identity than physical characteristics – there are their minds rather than their bodies.
In Where was I when I wasn’t there? Monica Meijsing shows where those intuitions come from, but also that they aren’t correct. We are ultimately living organisms – case studies of people with serous neurological disabilities make that clear - , but it is precisely organisms that can have consciousness and self-consciousness. Whether we are also persons, is not up to us. Only when we are accepted in an existing human community van we become a person. You are only a person in relation with other persons.