But here again, this new Stella would become Stella little by little, slowly arriving at Stella-ness through study, application and performance rather than gross physical manipulation. The process of transition would be memetic rather than corporeal, but I have already acknowledged that the woman is not the cells. If I want to deny it and I do not wish to invoke a separate soul, I must say there is an essence of thinking Stella, a thing that is created in the body and constitutes the person, and that thing ceased when Stella died. But how then to distinguish the old essence from the new? By what criteria would they be separate? If identical in shape and form, in structure and function, would they be divided only by time, itself a mysterious quantity? If consciousness is a thing created in the lowest levels of matter, could I say in honesty that the same imprint with the same energy running through it was not the same person? If Stella had died during an operation to save her life and then been resuscitated, would I reject her as a different person?