Verification Theory/Dualism Debate tangent

I started thinking about this in response to learning about the Vienna Circle and the Verification Principle and all that hogwash in philosophy a couple weeks ago. The idea - unless I'm totally off here - is that everything that is meaningful should be verifiable in reality - and since we can't verify things like the fact (or at least the possibility) that Socrates was wise (since Socrates is dead), we rely on reflection of him into the present to verify (i.e. dialogues as transcribed by Plato). Extrapolating that, the world in general is just as distant from us as Socrates is and we have to rely on reflections of it (i.e. senses) to make any statements about it. So when we experience things, we don't actually experience a "thing" but a collection of information that we interpret as such. Presumably, a "thing" would be too metaphysical for Ayer to deal with and would be classified as non-meaningful. There was a very lengthy discussion in class about how despite Ayer's best efforts, human beings did really see things as "things" and not as collections of data, and that when we talked about Socrates we really did mean Socrates and not our classics texts. For instance, say that a brown table that has sat in a room for years and years one morning is inexplicably painted white. Is it still the same table? (Supposing we know it was painted rather than replaced.) If what we perceive to be "things" are really collections of similarly related data, than where is there room for a table whose data actually changes when it gets painted? I realize that the gut reaction of everyone here is to shout "color is not in the cultural definition of a table! It is a construction that we even think of it as a table in the first place, let alone the same table!" but the fact still remains that by some rule we would classify it as the same table. It might be because we saw it being painted, or because the hole that I drilled in it with my mechanical pencil last semester during the section about Nietzsche is still there, but there is some criterion.

A while ago, completely unrelated to this, I had a short discussion about the philosophical implications of the two different forms of "to be" in Spanish - ser = to be permanently and estar = to be temporarily - roughly. They represent two types of ideas about definition - either that a person is something that changes from one minute to the next, or that a person is an unchanging core with attributes that change. They're not mutually exclusive, either. In Spanish, one would say "soy baja" (I am (permanently) short) and "estoy en la biblioteca" (I am (temporarily) in the library). But wouldn't it also be correct to say that you were temporarily short, since you might grow taller in the future, just like you might walk out of the library in five minutes? If you grow taller, does that indicate that you have become a different person because the things that characterised you permanently are different? Or, if height, gender, race, name, ect are not permanent characteristics by which we define each other, than what are? Is there some marker, like the hole in the table, that defines us from one state to another? If I were to amputate all of my limbs and get a sex change and extensive plastic surgery, I would still be the same person, no? What permanent characteristic remains to identify me to others - or more importantly, to myself? Clearly, there must be something - there really is an observer.