are you your body? well, kind of, right? but, is there a linewhere this stops being true? how much of yourself can you removebefore you stop being you, and does the question even make sense? your physical existence is cells,trillions of them, at least ten times morethan there are stars in the milky way. a cell is a living being, a machine madeof up to 50 thousand different proteins. it has no consciousness, no will,no purpose; it just is,
but it is still an individual. together, your cells form huge structuresfor jobs like preparing food, gathering resources,transporting stuff around, scanning the environment,and so on. if you extract cells from your bodyand put them in the right environment, they will continue tostay alive for a while, so your cells can exist without you,but you can't exist without them. if we take all the cells away,there is no "you" anymore. is there a line wherea pile of your cells stops being you?
for example, if you donate an organ,billions of your cells will continue to live on inside someone else. does this mean that a part of youbecame a part of another person, or is this other bodykeeping a part of you alive? or, let us imagine an experiment: you and a random personfrom the street exchange cells. one at a time, your bodygets one of their cells; their body getsone of your cells. at which point would they become you?
would they ever, or is this justa very slow and gross way to teleport you? let's make this more complicated! the image of ourselves asa static thing is untenable. almost all of your cells have to dieduring your lifetime. two hundred and fifty million have diedsince the beginning of this video, alone, between one and three million per second. in a seven-year period, most of your cellsare replaced at least once. every time your cells' setup changes,you are slightly different than before, so a part of you is dying constantly.
if you are lucky enough to become old, you would have cycled through roughlya million billion cells, so what you consider yourselfis really just a snapshot, but sometimes, cells are brokenand don't want to die questioning the very natureof the unity of our bodies. we call them cancer. they cancelthe biological social contract and become basically immortal. cancer is not an outside invader; it's a part of you thatputs its own survival over yours,
but you could also argue that a cancercell becomes another entity inside us; another being that just wants tothrive and survive. can we blame it for that? a chilling cell story is that ofhenrietta lacks, a young cancer patient who died in 1951. usually, cells only survivedfor a few days in the lab, making research very hard. henrietta's cancer cells were immortal. over the decades, they were multipliedover and over again
and used for countless research projectssaving countless lives. henrietta's cells are still aliveand overall have been grown to at least 20 tons of biomass, so there are living parts around the worldfrom someone who has been considered dead for decades. how much of henrietta is in these cells? what makes one ofyour cells "you," anyway? maybe the information contained in it,your dna? until recently, it was believed thatall the cells in your body
had basically the same genetic code, but it turns out this is wrong. your genome is mobile,changing over time through mutationsand environmental influences. this is especially the case in your brain. according to recent discoveries, a singleneuron in an adult brain has more than one thousand mutations in itsgenetic code that are not present in the cells surrounding it,but how much "you" is your dna, really? about eight percent of the human genomeis made up of viruses that once
infected our ancestors and merged with us. mitochondria, power plants of the cell,once were bacteria that merged with the ancestors of your cells.they still have their own dna. an average cell has hundreds of them,hundreds of little things that are not really human,but they still kind of are. it is confusing.let's backtrack a bit. we know that you're made up oftrillions of little things made from more little thingsthat are constantly changing. together, all those little thingsare not static, but dynamic.
their composition and conditionis changing constantly, so we might just be a self-sustainingpattern without clear borders that gained self-awareness at some pointand now has the ability to think about itselfthrough time and space, but really only exists inthis exact very moment. where did this pattern start: with your conception,when the first human arose, when life first beganconquering our small planet, or when the elements that make up yourbody were forged in a star?
our human brains evolvedto deal with absolutes. the fuzzy borders that make up realityare hard to grasp. maybe ideas like beginning and end,life and death, you and me, are really not absolutes, but ideasbelonging to a fluent pattern; a pattern that is lost in this strangeand beautiful universe. (shifting to the voice of cgp grey)the problem of who we are isn't just a question of ourselves,but it's also a question of our minds. just as our cells can be divided andseparated from us, so can our very brains be divided and separated from uswhile still in the skull.
click here to go to my channeland watch the next part. okay, so now, go watch cgp grey's video. if you're not yet subscribedto his channel, you should really change that now. subtitles by the amara.org community
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