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The name alludes to the Ship of Theseus, a thought experiment where, over the course of many repairs, every piece of a ship is eventually replaced. Given that,

• samvher 6y ago
  From a comment by raggi below: The goal appears to be to design an architecture that supports in-place updates of most components due to them having tightly constrained state management and inter-component dependencies. Maybe that explains the reference.
  • cgh 6y ago
    Yes, after watching the presentation linked in another comment, it appears the building blocks of Theseus are small code units called "cells", which correspond 1:1 with Rust crates. These can be swapped out because the dynamic loader ensures there are no memory boundary overlaps.
• Blikkentrekker 6y ago
  It's such a silly “thought experiment”. The simple answer is that “identity” is pseudoscience and does not exist; it's a man-made delusion created by the human mind to simplify reality and deal with it more easily. “identity” does not even apply to truly atomic particles, because there is no way to say that they aren't “different” in a next instance of time. There are far too many “thought experiments” and “quæstions” that simply arise by trying to treat as rigorous man-made delusions and distinctions such as this one. “Is the glass half full or half empty?” — that is a non-distinction created by men, not by nature.
  • milgrim 6y ago
    Why is it a silly thought experiment? It makes us aware of exactly what you are describing.
    • Blikkentrekker 6y ago
      That's a fair point, but I have rarely seen it interpreted as such. I have usually seen extensive arguments and debates for whether the ship remains the same identity or not, and rarely do I see the opinion “The quæstion does not make sense, and the concept of “identity” is one of men, not nature.” You can see in this comment tree already that many are defending the concept rather than admitting it's incorrect nature.
  • Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
    By that logic you would need to call like half of all useful phenomena that most people's lives consist of and depend on, as "man-made delusion". We still need to interact with our lives, and many of the abstractions help us do that. BTW if you just replace the word "delusion" with "abstraction" you'll probably see how it makes a lot of sense. Every abstraction is a delusion by definition, is it not? Because the abstracted thing doesn't really exist in the same way as source observation?
    • scotty79 6y ago
      Are they really useful or are they just easy to copy and to rember? Staying power of memes in culture has little to do with their usefulness. Whole lot of popular narratives distract us from the nature of reality rather than helps us interact with it. I would gladly see introduction to particle physics that doesn't show a single sharp rigid sphere.
      • Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
        Being able to refer to my car, or ship, or other vessel, as an identified single object, regardless of what parts have been changed - yes, I would say it is very useful thing for living with it and operating it. > easy to copy and to rember That's a very important, useful and valueable property of an abstraction, yes. Though certainly not the only important property. Or do you want one that takes you hours to understand and that you have to remind yourself of it and re-learn every week?
      • Blikkentrekker 6y ago
        This is also an argument that is worth considering. Many such distinctions that cannot be made rigorous that stick in various cultures but never existed in others simply exist because a man copies his fellow man, not because they are useful in achieving any goals. Though, as I said, they exist to simplify reality. I assume he human brain works so it does, simply to conserve energy and admit an inaccurate though usually useful enough solution. The problem is when such fuzzy logic is mixed with actual rigorous logic and attempts are made to analyse the former with the latter — that I find a futile waste of time. There is a very good reason that no clear answer has been found to the quæstion raised in The Ship of Theseus even after millennia of contemplation — there is none, and the quæstion is bereft of sense.
  • ganafagol 6y ago
    Considering philosohy "pseudoscience" is what's silly. Without the human mind, there is no meaningful concept of "reality".
    • Blikkentrekker 6y ago
      I made no claim as to the entirety of “philosophy”. I made a claim as to the dealing in identities and the assumption that they can actually be reasoned about. They have no definition and it's merely fuzzy human gut feeling what is and isn't a different identity and different men can't always see eye to eye on it either. One thing I remember well is that I watched a television series as a child that had an magical object that turned everything it touched into gold. It eventually landed on a ship, and the ship turned to gold, and sank. It defied my intuition, from where I sat only the plank on which it fell should be turned to gold, not the entire ship, for if the entire ship did, apparently it's power could transfer simply to objects pressed close enough to that which it touched, and that was inconsistent with past portrayal. Clearly however the ship as an entire identity satisfied the intuition of the script writers, but my intuition felt that the plank was a single identity, not the ship. There are no definitions and rigor here — it is simply every man's individual intuition.
      • danbruc 6y ago
        You are using identity yourself all the time. You just mentioned philosophy, this TV series, gold, that ship and that plank, and on close inspection there would probably be a thousand more cases in your last post where you relied on identity. Identity is one of the most fundamental concepts, without it you would have a hard time splitting the universe into more than one distinct piece in order to reference and talk about them. You can only refer to this TV series because it is an entity with identity, equal to itself and not equal to any other thing in the universe. And yes, it is a very hard problem, as Theseus illustrates one can not simply define identity using the atoms or some other kind of parts something is made of in the general case to define identity. But that just shows the difficulty of the problem, not that identity is a useless idea. I am not a philosopher but it seems to me that without a notion of identity or equality you can not have more than one distinct thing. Well, probably someone has spend his entire life thinking about that, so maybe there are alternatives to identity and equality?
  • sedatk 6y ago
    It's funny that your comment is fading out due to downvotes, as if disappearing from the existence. It reminded me of Douglas Adams' quote from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: "There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened."
    • sumtechguy 6y ago
      One thing I have found interesting about this concept is lets say I take all the parts and put them back together. Now I have 2 things. Which one is the 'thing'? Clearly both are and are not. It is a weird quirk of some logic items. They can be both true and false at the same time. Such as things 'this statement is false' which is both true/false at the same time. Is one such example of that. However, sometimes it is clear our test is lacking. With the 'ship' you could say as soon as you switched out anything it was no longer the original thing. What happened to the original thing? Well it went to the same place as when I created it. Which creates its own set of questions.
  • kleiba 6y ago
    “identity” is pseudoscience and does not exist I'm going to try that argument with the customs officer next time I travel.
  • ikurei 6y ago
    > It's such a silly “thought experiment”. > The simple answer is that “identity” is pseudoscience and does not exist; it's a man-made delusion created by the human mind to simplify reality and deal with it more easily. I agree, identity doesn't exist really, not in the physical, natural sense of existence... Which is what the "silly thought experiment" is pointing at. He wouldn't have taken it that far, but the philosopher was trying to make a point in that direction. Just because you reached such a level of enlightenment without silly thought experiments is no reason to be dismissive of the ladder that takes others to enlightenment. /s
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • falcor84 6y ago
    Being man-made doesn't make identity any less real. As a particular example, there's a big semantic difference in Python between `foo is bar` and `foo == bar`, with the former based on the interpreter's memory allocation and the latter allowing a custom class to decide its own answer. And the former is actually really implementation-dependent, with the following being True in cpython for any integer in the range [-5, 256]: `a = 257; b = a*1; a is b`
  • globular-toast 6y ago
    Why is it silly to think about things that are man-made? You've clearly thought about it, otherwise you wouldn't have been able to write your comment.
• Igelau 6y ago
  Theseus also slayed the Minotaur of the labyrinth. Maybe they want to kill a monster.