...
imagine the case of severe amnesia... without return what is real you then?
Some good questions there Void. I would say that arguably, the former self would be deemed the real person in that case. I would stand with Tsuyoiko on this one; by far most works I've come across by neuroscientists and psychologists put the self firstly in the memory banks--explicit, long-term. Of course it would surely include other factors such as the hormonal content and tendencies, basal ganglia operation, and up-to-that-point learned firing patterns/networks, etc.
The movie
Memento in which a man who has lost his short-term (or working) memory, was said to have been inspired by one HM. (
Scientific American Feb. 2005, Making Memories Stick pp 58-65) At the age of nine, a head injury sustained in a bicycle accident left him with defilitating epilepsy. The only way to relieve his seizures was to remove part of his hippocampus and adjoining brain regions. Surgery succeeded in reducing the brain seizures but inadvertently severed the mysterious link between short-term and long-term memory--causing information destined for what is known as
declarative memory (people, places, events) to not be able to reach its final resting place in the cortex, for long-term memory. Each time he saw the doctor, which was on a monthly basis for some time, it was like meeting a new person. I would say that the real person had ceased to be after that accident, only if in the fact that his long-term memory never grew with his mental experience from that point onward. (and there are others)
I would still stand for trying to get a better grasp on what this
'consciousness' would entail--without, of course, going too deeply into philosophical treatsies. If the regions of my brain were damaged to the degree that I could not know what I had understood and known of myself up to the point in time of that damage, the 'I' up until then would have already died to that degree, I'd reason. I don't see how, at the moment, we could say for sure that full
prior consciousness would still be intact and operating inside
my head, but only unseeable or undetectable to those on the outside. But I'm still searching and looking. Also, I'll check out that site Pachipro san.