What is a person?

A Person is not matter. We are not hardware, even though existence without our hardware may be impossible.

• If I were to create and run an atom for atom accurate model of my brain on a computer, that would still be me despite the hardware/matter being entirely different from my original brain.
• As the individual atoms which make up me are exchanged for other atoms from my surroundings, I do not become less me.

A Person is software. A Person is a pattern. A person is not an empirical cluster in personspace. A person is the system which produces those characteristics. A system which reacts and changes to the environment in certain ways. A system whose internal patterns follow a certain rhythm over time or space. 

If a person is a pattern, what is he different between a person and any other kind of pattern? From stars to stones, all things follow a pattern. What makes something alive? What makes something a person? [Questions are entangled. People must be alive.[Maybe not? Emulated brain which is not running is still a person despite not being alive? No, it is a potential person. More rights than no person, less than an actual person.]]

I don't know what makes the patterns we call people different from other patterns. I'm not sure there is a meaningful difference. This seems to be one of the cases where reason doesn't work. Where a certain belief is hard-coded into our way of thinking and where thinking without it seems impossible. Maybe one day we can find a way to remove these beliefs from ourselves. I'd like to see what the world is like without this neural block clouding my thinking. Then again, that seems impossible given that without such a belief I would no longer be myself.