The organization of matter is constantly changing. If Heraclitus was right it’s hard to even say which organization of particles counts as Heraclitus.

"Wen considered the nature of time and understood that the universe is, instant by instant, recreated anew. Therefore, he understood, there is in truth no past, only a memory of the past. Blink your eyes, and the world you see next did not exist when you closed them. Therefore, he said, the only appropriate state of the mind is surprise. The only appropriate state of the heart is joy. The sky you see now, you have never seen before. The perfect moment is now. Be glad of it."

- Terry Pratchett

(from Thief of Time - a remarkable book, IMO)

* / Wen the eternally surprised

I think that's exactly right. For the general sanity of the human mind, we make and share assumptions about our experiences.

We don't really agree on what makes a person in the first place. When does a person begin? In the US, that's a heated debate. When does a person cease to exist? If you account for feelings, a relative with advanced dementia, or being in a coma indefinitely often doesn't feel like the same person. Or when people discover something really unpleasant about their significant other. A person only exist in a frame of reference. In a legal framework too, for example, which again changes from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.

Some cultures theorize an essence of sorts, that's unique per person, so it can carry the identity of a person. Let's call that a soul. This makes it easy to think about another person, as they can inhabit another body, or even an inanimate object or even share a body with another, and yet still be unique and addressable.

The dilemma is not in search of a solution but instead it offers meaning exactly because of it's lack of resolution.

Kudos - excellent examination of implications / change of perspective / viewing from another angle.

The kind of thinking that, more seriously, really can be essential in developing insight(s) etc. ... and, finding (proofs by) contradiction(s) etc.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-09-13/yields...

What?! You mean Theseus didn’t have a contract?!

Let's take the more direct approach and move the ship entirely and replace it with a copy.

Have you stolen the ship?

I suppose legally you could argue you haven't. The registration etc still applies to the customers ship, and unless the customer could demonstrate some kind of emotional attachment, there would be no 'loss'.

It's like going to a shop, selecting a tin of beans, when you pay, the cashier swaps it for another tin of beans. Have your beans been stolen?

And so it is with Theseus and his Ship.

https://www.questdiagnostics.com/patients/blog/articles/do-m...

One of the most extreme example where this is not true, are the female gametes aka the egg cells. They are all created before birth and are never replaced. Quite the opposite of the male counterpart where the production of gametes starts 10+ year after birth and usually continues for the rest of the life.

To put it glibly, the Ship of Theseus problem goes away when you stop thinking of identity as discrete points and instead as a process of change and movement through time. I.e., We are not the same people we were as children, and that’s okay. Or Emerson: “I contain multitudes.”

Even within countries people have different ideas and have very different world views.

We can nonetheless generalise certain things.

Author, thou, of my inmost being, didst thou not form me in my mother’s womb? I praise thee for my wondrous fashioning, for all the wonders of thy creation. Of my soul thou hast full knowledge, and this mortal frame had no mysteries for thee, who didst contrive it in secret, devise its pattern, there in the dark recesses of the earth. All my acts thy eyes have seen, all are set down already in thy record; my days were numbered before ever they came to be.

— Psalm 139, Knox translation https://www.newadvent.org/bible/psa138.htm

The ship can shrink as much as it can grow. If you replace a wooden plank on it, the discarded wood is no longer part of it. And if you disassemble it entirely, the "event" is no longer happening, and the ship no longer exists.

It's analogous to any other "real event" you might think of. If you have a party, it starts when people show up and ends when people leave. Guests can come and go all the while.

The point isn't to define a strict beginning and end, however. It's to point out that the ship isn't defined by its original parts. It's defined by the confluence of parts that continuously exist and are recognized as being a cohesive entity.

They don't try to understand hard problem of consciousness and just try to strawman the whole thing down by tying it to mysticism.

Physicists like Penrose are not morons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness

I seriously doubt Westworld writers were aware of the hard problem of consciousness.

Do you also think the 30% of philosophers who also have this stance simply don't understand it? The only one calling anyone a moron here is you, and I don't think anyone involved in this discussion actually is. It's a cheap trick to discredit an opinion you disagree with.

> Do you also think the 30% of philosophers who also have this stance simply don't understand it?

Almost none of those philosophers accuse proponents of the hard problem of consciousness with dabbling in mysticism.

> The only one calling anyone a moron here is you, and I don't think anyone involved in this discussion actually is. It's a cheap trick to discredit an opinion you disagree with.

You equated people that find consciousness hard with people being scared of the conclusions. You are essentially saying that those people are not intellectually strong as you.

A hydrogen atom.

An STL file.

Maybe they're all the same Ship.

What if we're in a procedural simulation?

We ARE in a procedural simulation, with a random seed determined at The Big Bang.

Whether someone monitors the simulation or not is a different question.

(Which is not to say this tweet isn't uninteresting... but it's funnier than it is insightful)

>@[email protected] @wikipedia And yet, the Ship of Theseus page remains, thus proving a bird in the hand is worth two stitches in time.

It's a stitch in the bird is worth a pound of eggs off a duck's back, as everyone knows...*

* Courtesy of the excellent "Field Guide of Egregious Mixed Metonomies", soon to be published by Penguin Random House Simon Schuster Merriam Webster Britannica, I'm told

I still think I have the weirdest named article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qeqertaq_Avannarleq

I loved the movie. There is one actor by the name of Neeraj Kabi who lost a lot of weight for his role as a monk.

Here is the trailer: https://youtu.be/tzw1ezTTVEY?si=NfsG9sY1R1JjmbVV

I was reading about the hb1ac test, and it is a long-term test that analyzes the percentage of your blood hemoglobin chemically linked to sugar.

It is "long-term" because your blood cells have a life span of about 4 months.

(If you manage your blood sugar well, you have to do it for 4 months so that new cells won't be affected and a later test will show improvement.)

so, I wonder how many other cells turn over? You are not you, repeatedly.

Slowly keeping rotting wooden ship alive is probably same ship.

But let's take desktop computer. CPU, GPU, RAM, MotherBoard, Case, Powersupply, A disk. What if I replace each of these components over a year with exactly same model. So exactly same CPU for exactly same CPU. And then finally I clone the disk to new disk, but to exactly same model of a disk.

Some serial numbers have changed, but it operates the same, has the same data and software on. And I could even change the license key of software like OS.

Is it same computer or not? And somehow I feel it is not the same.

With regards to computers, I have different things in my mind. For the feeling part, the computer's role is what matter. "My main desktop computer", "My main server computer", "My work laptop". I can know that they are not the same, but they feel similar enough, because they play the same role for me, so for the most part, I don't make a difference.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Permalink/1154003

TBH, the same is probably true of most Wikipedia articles which were created early in the site's history. It took a while for editors to settle into the writing style that's now characteristic of the site.

> According to an ancient Greek legend, Theseus had a warship that was preserved as a historical relic by the Athenians. Some of its boards rotted and had to be replaced. After many, many years, many such replacements occurred. Eventually, none of the original boards were present. Philosophers could then debate whether it was the same ship that Theseus had used, and if not, when it had ceased to be so.

versus the current version:

> The Ship of Theseus is a thought experiment about whether an object which has had all of its original components replaced remains the same object. In Greek mythology, Theseus, the mythical Greek founder-king of Athens, rescued the children of Athens from King Minos after slaying the minotaur and then escaped onto a ship going to Delos. Each year, the Athenians commemorated this by taking the ship on a pilgrimage to Delos to honor Apollo. A question was raised by ancient philosophers: After several centuries of maintenance, if each individual part of the Ship of Theseus was replaced, one at a time, was it still the same ship?

While the story of the ship illustrates the problem nicely, it is not as important, as the ship is merely a vehicle to get the point across - and Theseus too, presumably.

Which is what the deflationist explanation from the page seems to allude to?

Another submission currently on the front page might help answer that! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38670845

You go down to the docks, you see a half assembled ship, you ask about it, and they tell you that’s Hector’s ship. It’s not a ship yet. It’s a promise of a ship, and idea.

It’s still Theseus’ ship until he loses it gambling, and whether it continues to be a ship or is sold for scrap and becomes part of five other ships… well then the idea of the ship has died.

(I had to go back and see if I had embarrassed myself when I stubbed in an article back in 2004. Meh — but just as well I stopped contributing to Wikipedia.)

If we're feeling inclined to Greek philosophy, perhaps this is the Platonic form of the boards being replaced.

Nevertheless, the consonance of this 'weaker result' is still satisfying.

Bravo!

Whether something can be identified as a specific thing is a matter of social convention. A transformation of something is not a new thing but exactly the former: a transormation, but still that same thing. When does it become something new? Never. For it to be a different ship, it needs to be deconstructed first fully.

But what if you reconstruct it so that it is identical to the former ship? It's still a new ship because identity is defined at the time of construction, independent of relative comparisons. Similar to how your complete identical clone would be a different person.

Then you're admitting that there's something non-physical that defines the identity of the physical thing, is it possible to argue against that?

Or is identity itself meaningless? But it cannot be because without identity there can be no understanding of the universe. Thus, the non-physical is a requirement of the physical. One cannot exist without the other. But where, in what non-physical plane (is there a word for that? ideamension?), does the non-physical inhabit?

Or is "understanding" also only existent in the ideamension, not a requirement of the existence of the physical universe? But if not for understanding, why does the universe exist in the first place? Reason; yet another resident of the ideamension.

It's not a question of being physical but that of independently describable.

> Or is identity itself meaningless

Identity is how we frame and contextualize for the purpose of thought and communication. For the purpose of thought I might consider the modified ship the same as the one in the initial state but if the law requires you to rename and re-register as new when you modify so much of a ship then for legal purposes I will start identifying it as a new ship but the people that use the ship will probably consider it that same old ship because for the purpose of thought the independently describable object has not changed.

It is not identity that has no meaning but that physical objects themselves have no meaning to us unless framed in an independently describable context (i.e.: as separate from all other things in the context).

For a computer program, does the letter 'A' exist? It does if the program can decode a byte as such, but does its inability to describe the bits and bytes that way mean the letter 'A' does not exist? Maybe it is 0x41? Identity has meaning but only to those who are able to describe that identity and reason about the context.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ship_of_Theseus&o...

Every well-written piece of text is, in itself, a ship of theseus. And only a ship of theseus piece of text can float, having had all the leaky boards replaced.

https://wikis.world/@wikipedia also shows verified ownership of the Wikipedia homepage on the account page.

The field of change over a topic is itself a subject of study. It feels like a join over politics, Ontology and Epistemology.