You're not the same after, say, an incredible love affair that went very well or a love affair that went bad. Or something that happens to your health, or something that happened to somebody else's health, that is close to you. Or something that happens professionally.

In the heart of consciousness is subjectivity, this sense of having a self that observes one's own organism and the world around that organism. That is really the heart of consciousness.

To me, body and mind are different aspects of specific biological processes.

I think it's possible to a certain extent to make those comparisons. The problem is the detail with which the comparison can be made. Of course, the first place to make such a comparison would be to ask for a testimony from different people and have people report on what they experience.

Scott Fitzgerald said famously that "he who invented consciousness would have a lot to be blamed for." But he also forgot that without consciousness, he would have no access to true happiness or even the possibility of transcendence.

What happens [in a coma] is that you lose the grounding of the self, you no longer have access to any feeling of your own existence.

There are ways in which you can make that distinction objective to a certain degree. For example, by looking at responses that could be generated in the brain to exactly the same stimulus and there could be differences there.