Ship of Theseus... and oh shit the nature of being, whoops

[Jason Tandro]

Alright, I ain't about to touch any of the potential debate topics for this hellhole of a timeline we are living in, so let's discuss an old philosophical one.

Where do you stand on the Ship of Theseus? If you don't know what I'm talking about hurry on to Wikipedia to discover the secret behind this ancient thought experiment, for I am too lazy to deliver a poorly worded recreation.

For me personally, my views about identity fall in line with my concept of personhood. I don't believe in a soul, per se, but I feel like if you remove a key component of who I am, I cease to be me. This can be something as simple as just if I go brain-dead I stop living and stop being a person. But also if my personality undergoes a dramatic change, do I stop being the old person.

I like the Buddhist concept which - again poorly worded explanation, I'm sure - states that we exist in a sort of flow state of being, where we are and are not all iterations of ourselves. I am still the JT who was an asshole teenager and dumb little kid, but I am also the JT I am now. These prior states of being are not me, but they are, and the concept of identity can fluctuate.

And yet, I think this works only up to a point. I can't exactly draw the line at when it happens, but I believe that functionally an object stops being what it was when you replace enough of what it used to be. I feel like a different man than I was in my childhood, but I'm still me. If you upload my consciousness to a computer I won't be me anymore, I'll be a digitized simulacrum of me. That said, I don't believe this is possible in any sense of the word no matter how advanced technology gets, so maybe I believe in something more... oh god I can't be having a crisis of lack of faith in the middle of a paragraph like this.

POINT IS: I think when all the old components are replaced, the Ship is no longer the ship. Personally I think there is a point somewhere before the last plank is replaced. Some point when it becomes "The Recreation of the Ship of Theseus, with some of the original materials". But where I draw that line, I don't know.

This one got away from me a little.

[psychokind]

I heard about that recently in a youtube video, maybe the algorithm got us both?

however, for me, this problem is long solved. in germany there is the Straßenverkehrszulassungsordnung ((German) Road Traffic Registration Ordinance), in which § 23 regulates the approval of a car as an oldtimer.

there are very complicated rules regarding this, some of which are explained here: https://www.tuev-nord.de/explore/en/explains/what-is-an-old-timer/

so basically, if the object would fit the criteria of the § 23 Straßenverkehrszulassungsordnung, it's still the same object.

if you have a problem, and germany has a law for it, you can bet your non-german ass that there is no more detailed, unnecessary complicated and overthought abstract solution the human mind can come up with.

[Jason Tandro]

psychokind wrote:

Straßenverkehrszulassungsordnung ((German)

First off, did not need the language clarification.

Second, every time I see a German word over 15 characters I am 50-50 on whether or not you people are taking the piss.

= = =

Back on topic: That is actually a kind of fascinating way of tackling the problem and I look forward to diving deeper into this concept.

Now my Teutonic TerraEarthian friend, where do you stand on this problem as it relates to human beings? When do you stop being you?

[psychokind]

now this is getting scary I think I know which youtube video I saw that talkes about the Ship of Theseus, it was a ghost in the shell review I randomly watched. they used it as an analogy for the cyberisation of humans in the GITS universe.

in our timeline we're nowhere close to really make replacing human parts an issue in terms of losing your original identity, so it's hard to say.
my father has the immune system of an israeli man which helped him survive his leukemia. I gave my immune system to an english man (who unfortunately did not survive very long) the same way. who now has a cold, my father or the isreaeli man? the english man would still be alive if he had given up (this can't be done willingly of course) a part of himself to replace it with someone elses.

I think the closest we get is people with dementia (amnesia is just too unlikely). my wifes grandmother has dementia, and she often forgets her relatives, who is who and that she was married etc. before the dementia, she always said she wanted to die as fast as possible to be united with her husband again in heaven and was overall pretty unhappy and depressed. since she has dementia, she mostly forgot about him and is often just happily living her day.

sometimes she (propably) thinks she's a young woman again, and insists her twin(!) brother living next door is not her twin brother because he looks so old (he is 93, just like her). she is a pretty different person now than when I first met her 15 years ago. but I'd say she's still her. there are core values and behaviours you likely can't get rid of, which keeps you from becoming another person.

what do you think?

[Jason Tandro]

I think the difference comes from interpretation of what it means to be "human". In your demonstration, a transplant, I consider those more mechanical. I think you can give up a lot of, or perhaps even lose most of your individual body parts and remain "you". Perhaps you lose a core part of your capability to be yourself if that happens - a runner who loses their legs or a violinist who loses their hands for example. But I think the instincts and behaviors - as you say - don't really leave you.

And this is the really frustrating thing about being an atheist, because there is a core something to humanity that exists beyond the body and I feel like limiting it to "the mind" is a bit reductive. The brain can undergo incredible changes - you yourself even listed dementia as an example - but if THAT doesn't change a human fundamentally then there is another X thing that makes us human and if it's not a soul or a divine spark than what is it?

(Not any closer to re-believing in a God, but I'm open to the idea of there being SOMETHING else out there as long as it doesn't try to tell me how to live my life outside of just "try to be a good person".)

So you transplant a limb - are those not just your own "oak planks"? But then we run into the complication of identity of objects verses the identity of human beings. An object that is created is self-identifying: its purpose its its identity and vice versa. A ship exists to sail on the water, and anything that sails on the water is a ship (not in all cases but just as an example).

Humans - and all forms of "life" - exist without express purpose - according to my belief structure, I realize others think differently. I believe what makes Humans what we are, and the thing that makes our life worth living, is the search to find our own meaning. That we have the ability to choose what matters to us and how to use the gift of life (I'm 95% to just dropping the WHOLE Pokemon quote). So this question may not be a one-to-one, and perhaps the very suggestion that the Ship of Theseus problem has anything to tell us about humanity may itself be flawed.

Good fuck I am a blathering pedant in my middle age.

[SoulBlazerFan]

I'm going to use Star Trek as a guide here, and spoilers for the TV series Picard and the whole franchise.

Data is killed in the film Star Trek Nemesis. He had uploaded his memories into another Soong prototype Android named B4. This was 2003.

Picard Season 1, Picard actually dies. Through sci fi mumbo jumbo, his brain is copied and he's uploaded into the cloud as it were, where he meets a digital clone of Data from the data (confusing sentence I know) uploaded into B4. They begin to have a conversation about the nature of life and death, that this Picard would be uploaded into a "gollum," which is an almost human android, but this Data wanted to die so he could experience death, because, I'm Datas own words, "a butterfly that lives forever isn't really a butterfly at all."

This Picard wakes up, and fulfills this Datas wish- he allows him to die.

Season 3, they find yet another Data, this one with the memories of B4, Data,Soong, Datas daughter Lal- he is able to integrate all these personalities and becomes, essentially, the human Data with emotions and human qualities the original Data was incapable of.

Data was an android, through and through. He was his experiences and his experiences were his memories and his memories were data, that was replicated and moved to a new body.

The question is, even though the entire show everyone treated this Picard as if he were Picard, is he actually Picard?

But what is a person if not the experience and memories they have?

I look at the 12th Doctors final episode of Doctor Who: Twice Upon a Time. He thinks he's facing this enemy who stole a soldier from out of time, when it turned out this group, called the Testament, took a person in their final moments of life so they could record their life for future generations.

The thesis of the episode ends up being a person's memories are who they are, and it doesn't matter what vessel they take.

I think ultimately both tell stories that suggest people are their memories, but I've always leaned into the mindset that people are what their original material was, and unless you are transplanting a brain, a copy is not the original.

There is another version of this thought experiment about an axe- you replaced the handle, later you replace the head. IMO it's not same Axe, not the same ship, and not the same Captain Picard.