No, you would not.
Now if you had terminal cancer spread all over your body, would you accept a body transplant as a treatment option?
It's a body transplant.
We do now know nearly enough about the brain to understand what "identity" is for us to speculate on whether a brain transplant would mean losing part of it, let alone actually perform a successful brain transplant in a human.
I'm rather certain that we know enough about brains to confindently say that all the higher functions of the central nervous system quite definitely reside in the brain, and specifically in the neocortex, not in the spinal cord or anywhere else.
What I mean by identity is an understanding of how "you" as a person are formed by phenomena emerging from very complex biological system. For example, I have a very bad feeling in my stomach when I do something I am ashamed of. I'm 99% certain that the neurons in my stomach have little to do with this feeling and it's "all in my head," but we really know for certain how our brain chemistry, our mood, our reactions are shaped by the chemical and hormonal functions of the rest of the body? You are, afterall, combining two separate genetic lines, is there no possibility for a neural rejection like graft-versus-host?
Perhaps the new body does feed back some changes into the brain, but overall we still have a cortex with the original memories, etc as a starting point.
Do you have a link to the larynx transplant paper? That sounds fascinating. I was actually more thinking about very understood practical lines like I know my personality is drastically different (according to friends) on certain medications. With the role even common hormones like testosterone have and the various feedback loops that could come down to the genetics of body cell lines, I can't imagine a person's personality not changing, at least in a time/environment dependent way. Seasonal depressive disorders come to mind, as those seem to have partially somatic causes.
Another interesting question is to what degree does the body (i.e. muscle memory) assist or modify how memories are "pulled up" and processed? Perhaps there will be random unavoidable "corruptions" in the fusing process that result in the signals for stimuli changing (i.e. sensitivity to heat and cold is probably somatic) and the brain pulling up inappropriate emotions or responses?
Is it still your identity if chemical mismatches change your interpretation of your memories over the long term or are you now a hybrid that, due to the transplant, has the extreme fortune of experiencing life and even epistemology in an entirely different way?
If my brain gets seated onto a new body, you could say that my head was transplanted onto the new body, but it would be inaccurate to say that I received a head transplant.
http://biomed.brown.edu/Courses/BI108/BI108_2003_Groups/Hand...: "In addition, assessments should be made of their body-image adaptation after amputation, impact of amputation on their identity and relationships"
http://www.athealth.com/consumer/disorders/traumaeffects.htm...: "Survivors may have problems with identity when PTSD symptoms change important aspects of a person's life such as relationships or whether the person can do his or her work well."
http://www.nbmtlink.org/resources_support/spg/spg_appearance...: "Every time I look in the mirror, I see someone different than the person I knew during my life before transplant."
Is all of that in the brain? In some sense: yes, but bodily changes do change how you think about yourself, and that is one definition/aspect of 'personality' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity#Personal_conception_an...)
On the other hand, people with radical brain surgery still think they're the same person, putting aside cases like Phineas Gage.
On the gripping hand, even though transferring my brain and its shell to a different body will still maintain my memories, and continuation-of-consciousness and transferring everything neck-down won't, if the person with my guts-and-spleen acts more like me, and the person with my head on their shoulders acts more like the guy whose anus it's attached to acts more like them, perhaps it could be said that we really did switch, despite the memories.
So if I find my head atop a different body...why shouldn't I label it as a body transplant? For those currently in cryogenic cranial freeze and who successfully are revived, would we not think of them as having new bodies, rather than the bodies having new heads?
It probably is incorrect, though, as a head transplant would mean that the head would be assuming the identity of the person carrying the body. While amusing it seems a lot to ask of the person with the head.
Edit: even more people say "I need a brain transplant" https://twitter.com/search/realtime?q=%22I%20need%20a%20brai...
Worry about identity when someone invents a partial brain transplant or something crazy like that.
according to police database of fingerprints - not, according to DNA - depends of where it is sampled from and even after that - what would be a DNA say in saliva, blood?
Well. Moving right along.