Person

Two words carry the definition, temporarily and appear. A person is five elements bound together for a while, and the appearance of being one individuated cohesive whole is an appearance rather than the underlying fact. Death is the decoupling of those five in such a way that they often cannot be rejoined, and decoupling is the same separation occurring in someone still alive, so the binding is what a person is and its coming apart is what death and dissociation both are. Each element has its own requirements. The body needs healthy food, the self needs balanced interactions, the consciousness needs knowledge, the will needs exertion over choice and the animus needs life energy, so a person is maintained on five fronts rather than one. Each also has its own book in the series, which is Marsh's way of insisting the elements are genuinely separate rather than aspects of one thing. What the framework refuses is the reduction of any of the five to the body. Disturbance of the self, life, will or consciousness are all treated as bodily ailments in the current arrangement, and life is not in the DNA, which is one part of what creates a body and nothing of what creates a life. The self is not bounded by the body either, being a concentric circle of membranes rather than a clearly defined entity delimited by skin.

Personal identity is a standing problem in philosophy, with Locke grounding it in psychological continuity, animalists in biological continuity and Parfit arguing that identity is not what matters. Buddhist analysis decomposes the person into aggregates with no persisting self, which is structurally similar to Marsh's five elements. Legal and bioethical definitions of personhood carry practical weight in questions of capacity and death. Marsh's version is unusual in the specific list and in treating the elements as separable in fact rather than in analysis, since her five can come apart and be observed apart, which turns a conceptual decomposition into an empirical claim.