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The solution to the Ship of Theseus is obviously that there is no Ship of Theseus. All things are just events in time, long moments where matter is organized in
by deadbabe 3y ago
The solution to the Ship of Theseus is obviously that there is no Ship of Theseus. All things are just events in time, long moments where matter is organized into some structure for a while and then breaks apart again, and we assign names to those events. Some happen so quick that naming them is pointless and others are so slow to dissipate that a name becomes useful.
- procgen 3y agoThe ship is a pattern that persists in time.
- AlecSchueler 3y agoNot if the overall design is completely altered through the work done on it.
- winwang 3y agoThis hilariously sounds like a possible "defense" in court after being caught stealing said ship. Was it really Theseus's ship?
- tiffanyg 3y agoNow that is the kind of "modern problems require modern solutions" thinking I like to see! 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.
- philwelch 3y agoHere’s a real mystery for you. You’re a worker at a dry dock where you are maintaining a ship. You periodically remove perfectly good parts of the ship and send them away, replacing them with new parts and making falsified records claiming spurious damage that needed to be repaired. At a second facility, the pieces from the original ship are reassembled. Did you steal the ship, or has it been sitting there in drydock all along?
- trevyn 3y agoInsufficiently specified. Clearly depends on the details of the repair contract. What?! You mean Theseus didn’t have a contract?!
- benj111 3y agoNo. 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?
- winwang 3y agoSomething something no-cloning theorem prevents this (/s, since of course, we could 'teleport' the ships's quantum state onto the 'new' ship (/s)).
- spopejoy 3y agoEven better: get a loan to buy a ship that's collateralized with the ship itself, destruct the ship to sell for parts, and default on the loan! https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-09-13/yieldstreet-missed-a-boat https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-09-13/yields...
- willis936 3y agoAnd so it is with consciousness. People place mysticism on consciousness because the idea that we are simply matter capable of knowing it is matter is disturbing. Season 1 of WestWorld used Anthony Hopkins to make this point well.
- zeristor 3y agoA sentient Ship of Theseus?
- deadbabe 3y agoYes!! :D
- cscurmudgeon 3y agoNot really. Your stance is something that people take when they don't understand the Hard Problem of consciousness. 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness I seriously doubt Westworld writers were aware of the hard problem of consciousness.
- willis936 3y ago>Your stance is something that people take when they don't understand 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.
- cscurmudgeon 3y agoMaybe you should reread your first comment? > 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.
- echelon 3y agoSome structures are quite repeated. The 16S rRNA genes. A hydrogen atom. An STL file. Maybe they're all the same Ship.
- deadbabe 3y agoNope. The time and space in which they exist acts as a unique identifier.
- echelon 3y agoWhat's the unique identifier, what's the resolution, and how many bits of information is it? What if we're in a procedural simulation?
- selcuka 3y ago> 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.
- prometheus76 3y agoSo are you saying that an identity cannot persist beyond the original physical elements that composed the identity?
- mankyd 3y agoThe opposite. It's identity is really an "event" called the ship of Theseus. The effect continues to happen regardless of the specific matter.
- makeitdouble 3y agoThat's fine to define a start event, but where does it end ? Is the universe the ship of Theseus at some point ?
- prometheus76 3y agoWhen no one remembers the name of the ship.
- mankyd 3y ago[Disclaimer: I am not a philosopher] 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.
- ARandomerDude 3y agoIf that assertion is true, I can’t even respond to the person who typed it. The “event” that typed the comment has passed and “you” are already gone. The organization of matter is constantly changing. If Heraclitus was right it’s hard to even say which organization of particles counts as Heraclitus.
- tiffanyg 3y agoI believe the solution was given by the great philosopher Pratchett*: "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
- jamiek88 3y agoWhere to start with reading Sir Terry? I’ve been intimidated in the past. Do you nave to read the others to understand this one?
- Lastodon 3y agoGoogle discworld reading order, pick a storyline that is similar to genres you like (the guard books are copper fiction, the Lipwig books are inverted heist novels, the Rincewind books are classic fantasy by way of Oxford University culture, etc.)
- Kavelach 3y agoStart with the City Watch series of Discworld. If you like Guards! Guards! then you'll like the next books. After reading a couple of them I'd start branching into other series.
- account42 3y ago
- goopthink 3y ago“The Silent Transformations” by RANÇOIS JULLIEN tackles this head on by highlighting western thought’s roots in ancient Greek concepts of determined forms of being and Aristotilian logic, compared against the fluidity of non-Western thought and emphasis of change over time from ancient Chinese philosophy. 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.”
- michaelsbradley 3y agoBut, you are you, from the moment you were conceived in your mother's womb through to the end of your days. 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 https://www.newadvent.org/bible/psa138.htm
- enasterosophes 3y agoTo regard Western and non-Western thought as distinct is to again indulge the fallacy of determined forms and non-fluidity. Going back at least to the time of Alexander the Great before 300BC, there were was constant cross-polination of ideas between Indian and Mediterranean cultures, so that Ashoka used Greek Buddhists to spread the dhamma, and there is some suspicion that Nagarjuna was influenced by Pyrrhonism.
- benj111 3y agoYou could say the opposite and say there's no such thing as western, or eastern thought. Even within countries people have different ideas and have very different world views. We can nonetheless generalise certain things.
- elif 3y agoThat is simply a one sided reduction of the ship of Theseus dilemma. In it's reduction, it necessarily negates the essence of ontological meaning, including the meaning of the statement you are making. The dilemma is not in search of a solution but instead it offers meaning exactly because of it's lack of resolution.
- Vt71fcAqt7 3y agoThe Ship of Theseus was originally proposed as a paradox, not a question of where subjectively to draw a line between the identity of objects. Like most paradoxes it is the result of a flawed assumption. Here the assumption is that there is a Ship of Theseus. If we assign a definition to "Ship of Theseus" then the question of whether a given object is a Ship of Theseus is trivial. But the paradox assumes there is a Ship of Theseus object on its own rather than a definition of Ship of Theseus. The subjective question of "when, generally, should we consider the Ship of Theseus to be gone" is a separate and arbitrary question.
- guerrilla 3y agoThis is the Early Buddhist position.
- ordu 3y agoThe solution is to treat the Ship of Theseus not as an object but as a process. I believe it is what you are saying just with different words. It is no help to claim that there is no Ship of Theseus, because it is. Or at least it was. Or some says it was.
- escapecharacter 3y agoyeah but how can you be sure things are different if they share the same name?
- Too 3y agoWow, someone took yesterday’s article about event sourcing way too seriously. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38664412 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38664412
- deadbabe 3y agoI missed that one but generally I think event sourcing is pretty great too :)
- toasterlovin 3y agoThe solution to the Ship of Theseus is that telos, not atomic physics, is how the vernacular We identify and organize the contents of our existence. I am the same me as the me of 10 years ago, even though we have zero cells in common, because we are iterations of an ongoing physical phenomena the same root cause: my conception. And so it is with Theseus and his Ship.
- pkulak 3y agoYou still have lots of cells in common. But point still taken.
- yMEyUyNE1 3y agoI think they are refering to the phenomenon of "Each and every cell of our body is replaced after a period of 7-10 years which means we renew." https://www.questdiagnostics.com/patients/blog/articles/do-my-cells-really-change-every-7-years https://www.questdiagnostics.com/patients/blog/articles/do-m...
- noxer 3y agoIts a common myth that our cells all die and are replaced by new ones, but that is not actually true, it is true for the vast majority of cells tho. 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.
- thiht 3y agoIs that Event Sourcing applied to philosophy?