If humans cells are constantly dying, does that mean we humans are constantly dying

O the joy of identity theory !

Start simple with an ocean wave. In what sense does the "same" wave travel from A to B, since the water particles are moving vertically not horizontally, and do not travel "with" the wave ?....

....The implication of "same" implies the existence of "an observer" who can judge contiguity in space and time. And what is true for "a wave" is true for "a human".
(Look up autpoiesis for a discussion of structure and function).

Beam him up Scotty!

Functions are what structures do.

If humans cells are constantly dying, does that mean we humans are constantly dying, yes or no? I don't see how identity has anything to do with it maybe I am wrong?

If the student body of a college is constantly being replenished does that mean the identity of the college is changing ?

Of course we are constantly dying. Anything that's alive has parts of itself which are shucked off and either replaced or never needed again.

All the plants in your apartment are doing the same thing we are.

The skin you are wearing today you were not wearing two weeks ago.

~~~
On a lighter note: My grandmother used to tell us grandkids that she had a 100 year old hatchet. Yes. It had been in the family all those years and in all that time it had only had one new head and two new handles

Joe(golly)Nation

The key issue here is the Gestalt concept that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Thus macrosystems like humans, colleges etc encompass microsystems like cells or members. But an aspect of the macrosystem replenishes its microsystems and thereby continues to function. The "success of the functioning (viability) is judged/observed by an even larger macrosystem (society etc) which assigns to it (the human) the concept of "persistence" or "identity" with respect to its own (society's) functioning.

Thus the fact that "cells are changing/ dying" is irrelevant in itself with respect to the fact that "humans are changing / dying", because levels of functionality/identity operate according to the Gestalt principle.

All cells are constantly being replaced as well. If you eat only hamburger, does that mean that you will become hamburger?
(This is all part of the MacDonalds evil plan to take over the world.)

But if we become hamburger won't we then also become McD's next source of product protein??

Joe(Wait a minute......that IS their plan!)Nation

So like, if we evolved from monkeys, how come we aren't BORN monkeys?

Answer that one.

You ask me "If human cells are constantly dying, does that mean we humans are constantly dying, yes or no?"

Yes AND no. Our components are constantly changing but our general patterns "persist" (i.e., change more slowly) .

Even the functioning form that the parts constitute gradually changes and deviates over time, as well as the psychological patterns. One at the age of 40 is hardly who one was at the age of 5. Since both minor and major memory loss is possible, as well as alterations creeping in from its duplication to shifting storage areas, these incremental deaths of developing stages seem to need more than just memory to integrate them as the same individual (or an appeal to such).

Time as presentism, where only a fully distinct and objective "now" is real, as the whole universe is annihilated and born anew in a sequence of replaced moments, chains everything to a similar problem. Skepticism can be engendered because the evidence that each replacement state of the cosmos is still somewhat similar to the one that preceded it is grounded in judgements dependent upon personal and environmental memory (a circularity of memory verifying its own reliability to not only itself but for the entire situation).

As recognized long ago (not by the uninterested majority of commonsense but those with a passion for asking if reality truly does hang together well), some manner of eternalism is needed to anchor existence in general -- not just the supposed persistence of the same human particular. That is, the reality offered by changing experience, when taken either as is or reified to "aphenomenal" physical entities, tumbles into being suspect as a wildly malleable slash inconsistent dream or process floating on its own (with emphasis on "wildly malleable / inconsistent").

This eternalism solution need not be a block-universe or related. The ancients also offered an intelligible world, the forms of which today could be corrupted into any number of hybrids and chimeras (and already have been).

Berkeley reduced people to immortal minds participating in a mutual world distributed by a God version of The Matrix.

Leibniz rescued unconscious rocks, trees, and the like by correlating such appearances to primitive monads too "stupid" to discern their pre-installed, unfolding representation of the universe.

Kant discarded what he considered Leibniz's speculative / unwarranted panpsychism of even the lowliest monad containing an internal representation, by introducing the unknowable "thing in itself".

Back in the '70s, some hippie physicist of Fred Allen Wolf's clique might have interbred the quantum wave function of objects with the intelligible form, producing some concoction that eternally contained all the possible states of a particular human body, house, moon, etc. (including the universe).

The latter ventures just being a round-about way of pointing out that maybe a block-universe or some newer model of spacetime wasn't so bad in comparison.

The answer is arbitrary depending on your definitions of "dying" and "what it means to be human", but to avoid being pedantic, I'll say the short answer is "No", based on the idea that a human being is not thought of simply as the cells the make us. IMO the thing that most people think of as the person, is like a wave moving through a medium of some sort (like water).

This is a post is to anyone.

So it depends on the definition of dying there is no universal answer?

Are cells changes and are identity changes. Just because cells die and it is replaced it doesn't mean that a human dies. Or because a human changes personality wise or identity wise it doesn’t mean a human dies.

Death defined from Merriam Webster dictionary
A permanent cessation of all vital functions: the end of life
So when the organism permanently can no longer act. Or be an organism. It doesn't say you have to stay the same it just says when there is no longer an organism.

So Am I right? Or is there no universal definition? Also can you try to keep your answer simple I am not the smartest person.

The question about cells dying does raise another good question.

I think most people will agree that I am the same person I was seven years ago. I am the individual who responds to that particular name, and in the memory of anyone who knows me, there are specific incidents that relate to my identity; I did this, I said that. I am that person, same as I was seven years ago, even though every cell in my physical body has been changed since that time.

So what is identity? Who are you? Are you your body? What makes this entity that I call "me" a reality?
I think it is obvious that it goes beyond mere physical appearance. It involves personality. But what makes up my personality? Is there a soul that contains the individual identity of a person, or is identity just an arbitrary function of social co-existence?
In my opinion, these are very interesting questions, and not easily answered.

Not to muck up a good thread, but it's my understanding that the nerves of the central nervous system may die, but are never replaced. For that alone, I'm holding out for constant identity.

Do you mean that identity does not change even if changes to the central nervous system change the personality of that individual?

Yes, identity is a function of social co-existence.

I believe that too. Strange to think that my notion of "me" is a result of social conditioning...