What makes ‘you’ ‘you’, the ancient question with no answer, will one day in the distant future become a scientific one.

The thing we are all after as we pursue the sciences (medicine, with its forestalling of an inevitable death being the most obvious example) is the project to become god, in the words of Jean Paul Sartre.

Immortality. Is it possible?

Even if you are “immortal”, at any instant, a random boulder could crush you in such a way that would make you unidentifiable. Even to someone who was privy to each and every atom that made up your body over the course of your entire life. Your clone is not you. Similar to to the way that your identical twin is not you. As long as there is no transfer of your current consciousness stage to the next—similarly to the way it occurs between your disparate life stages—immortality will remain unattainable.