"Personal identity consists not in the sameness of substance, but in the sameness of a continued consciousness."
What makes you feel that you and your self from 10 years ago are 'the same person' — is it memory, or some unchanged trait?
If a prince and a cobbler swapped bodies, where would 'you' be?
John Locke, an empiricist who believed the mind begins as a blank slate, redefined personal identity itself: not a fixed soul, but a stream of consciousness held together by memory.
In his 'Essay Concerning Human Understanding,' he argued that if a prince's consciousness were transferred into a cobbler's body, people would still call that body 'the cobbler' — but the consciousness carrying the prince's memories would be the real prince. In other words, 'you' reside wherever your memory continues, not wherever your body is.