According to research, a typical human being is completely reborn every seven years.
This is when every cell in the body has been completely replaced. So you could say that you're a new you after seven years. Ofcourse that happens in a period of time, and while that happens, another new you is being made in the process.
Yet is it not intriguing that while your body continually dies and reincarnates, you're still you -- the personality, the memory, everything. Yeah there will come a time that brain cells would die by the thousands everyday yet, in effect, nothing really changes the way people perceive you as.
That brings me to a situation. When a person dies, people would grieve. People consider the body as the wholeness of the person who is identified with it. But can we really consider the body as the person knowing that the spirit has left it (this is for the purposes of a belief in body/spirit)? We also consider the spirit as a representation of the person. But then, if we put the two side by side we consider the spirit as the identity of the person instead of the body.
Queer. Is it simply because the spirit is capable of movement or communication (again, assumption based on general belief)? That an inanimate body cannot be an accurate or believable representation?
Let's take a different approach. Consider a person. His arm has been cut off. We can't say that the arm is the 'person'. We consider it to belong to the 'part' that can still speak and move. But let's say we cut off the head. And the head can still speak (but can't be capable of mobility). I'm pretty sure we'd consider the head to be the person and not the body. Even if the body could move on its own, we'd still consider the head to be the 'person'.
This brings me to a point that, as to where the mind resides, that would be considered the full, if not whole, representation of the person. We consider the ghost as the person, we consider the head as the person. Perhaps it's more of question of where sentience resides.
We've come a long way from being one-celled organisms that just split and duplicate. Ah well, I refuse to think that hard. I've got work to do.