The big idea: If not the body, then what carries you through time? The most famous answer: your memory. The philosopher John Locke argued that what makes you you is psychological continuity — not your body at all.
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The Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid found a sharp problem — the 'brave officer'.
Reid's brave officer: It's one man at three ages of his life: first a boy, then a soldier, then an old general.
• As a young soldier, he could remember being beaten as a boy. • As an old general, he can remember being that brave soldier — but he has forgotten the childhood beating.
Apply Locke's rule (you are whoever you can remember being)
General = soldier
The general remembers the soldier, so general = soldier.
Soldier = boy
The soldier remembered the boy, so soldier = boy.
So general = boy?
Put those together and the general should be the boy.
But general ≠ boy
The general has no memory of the beating, so by the very same rule the general is not the boy.
general = soldier = boy, yet general ≠ boy
The contradiction: So the one man both is and is not that boy — a contradiction.
Go further — higher-level insight: The standard repair (from Parfit and others) is overlapping chains: A links to B, B links to C, so A and C are the same person even with no direct memory from A to C. It saves the memory view from Reid — cite it for a top-band answer.
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Some thinkers draw the opposite lesson from forgetting and change: maybe there is no fixed self to carry through time at all.
A view from India: no-self: The Buddhist philosopher Vasubandhu argued for anattā: look inside and you never find a permanent 'I', only changing thoughts and feelings. The self is a useful label for a bundle of experiences, not a solid thing. Centuries later, David Hume reached a strikingly similar view in Europe.
Checkpoint: Two families of answer now sit side by side: continuity (a chain of memory carries you) versus no-self (there's no fixed you to carry). A strong essay weighs them, rather than assuming one.