Question of identity
Ship of Theseus paradox
What makes you you? Such a simple question is surprisingly hard to answer.
The Ship of Theseus is a classical philosophical puzzle about personal identity. I’ll give the quick version.
Imagine you have a wooden ship and decide that one day you want to take it apart piece by piece. You go about taking it apart, delicately removing each part as if you were going to use those same parts to rebuild it later and storing it in your garage.
Now, here’s part of the problem. When you remove each piece, it still seems to be the same Ship. Removing one plank from the floor, for example, doesn’t seem to make it a different ship. However, if you keep up with the process, you will end up with all of the pieces of the Ship in your garage, but it will no longer be the Ship of Theseus, since, by hypothesization, you won’t have a ship – you’ll have a pile of wood that used to be a ship.
But at some point in your deconstruction, the Ship had to move from existence to non-existence, unless you want to say all the pieces in the garage is the Ship. At what discrete point did the Ship cease being the Ship?
But at some point in your deconstruction, the Ship had to move from existence to non-existence, unless you want to say all the pieces in the garage is the Ship. At what discrete point did the Ship cease being the Ship?
suppose that, rather than just tearing the Ship apart, you decide to replace every wooden piece you removed with an aluminum piece of the exact same dimensions. So, when you start, you have a completely wooden Ship, but at the end, you have a completely aluminum Ship. But, at each discrete stage of time, you only have a ship that is one piece different than it was in the previous moment.
An even further problem: suppose that you decide to use the wooden planks you removed in the case above to build another Ship which is materially identical to the original ship. At the end of that project, you’ll have two Ships, one aluminum and one wooden, that each have a claim to being the Ship of Theseus. They can’t both be THE Ship of Theseus, but it could be true that they both could NOT be the Ship of Theseus, but the problem becomes, when was the Ship of Theseus destroyed? This is ship of Theseus paradox and question of identity.
