I tend to believe that I remain the same person I was ten years ago. Even though the atoms of my body are completely renewed, this process is natural and does not affect my ability to perceive. Being an ordinary person, I can change my point of view on specific issues over time and abandon previous patterns of behavior. However, this development does not affect the set of characteristics with which I was born. My personality is storage of emotions, memories, and experiences that the renewal of atoms cannot erase. Thus, I can claim that even replacing atoms within ten years will not make a new person out of me.
Based on all of the above, I can assume that in an extraordinary situation of reconstruction of my body by a mad scientist, I will no longer be able to call myself the same person. Since the atoms of people in a global sense do not determine their thought process, a scientist will not be able to recreate my former personality from old atoms. Even having an identical external similarity, my character will disappear, and the unity of body and soul will be lost forever. The body alone cannot constitute me as a person, and therefore it would be wrong to say that I will remain the same.
This question is directly related to the Theseus ship paradox. This thought experiment raises the question of whether an object that has had all its components replaced becomes a new object or remains the same. The “continuity of form” makes people think that the replacement is the original ship, while the “continuity of matter” leads to the idea that the original parts are the original ship (Rose, et al., 2020). In this case, I am prone to believe that with the change of its parts, the identity of the ship also changed, creating a completely new object and leaving only the memory of the original vessel.
Reference
Rose, D., Machery, E., Stich, S., Alai, M., Angelucci, A., BerniĹ«nas, R., Buchtel, E. E., Chatterjee, A., Cheon, H., Cho, I., Cohnitz, D., Cova, F., Dranseika, V., Lagos, A. E., Ghadapour, D., Grinberg, M., Hannikainen, I., Hashimoto, T., Horowitz, A.,… & Grinberg, M. (2020). The ship of Theseus puzzle. Oxford studies in experimental philosophy, 3, 158-174.