You always were a bastard

Are the aggressive remarks of a person with dementia expressions of real feelings, now visible only because a polite veneer has been stripped away? A careful understanding of the nature of personhood suggests otherwise. The self is an intricate story, constructed of causal encounters with the world, the conceptual categories with which we understand the world, and the meanings we then attach to our encounters with the world, all reworked and edited in light of our values. The person with dementia has lost control of the editing.