Fridays (or, in the case of the last few weeks, weekends) are Food For Thought Days. On these days, I drop the normal “here’s a solution” standard and instead write a “here’s an interesting question” post. My goal in these posts is hence not to provide answers, but to introduce good questions.
I have had several comments here recently about the “new focus” or the content on my “new blog.” This seems strange to me, for it feels like I’m writing about the same stuff I’ve always been writing about in the same ways that I’ve always been writing about them.
But it’s also got me thinking more about The Ship of Theseus. The Ship of Theseus is a classical philosophical puzzle about identity. I’ll give the quick version. (Note: if you’re a professional philosopher, you will not be happy with the quick version. But you likely won’t be happy with much of anything I write here, anyway.)
Imagine you have a wooden ship in your backyard 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 (should you decide to do so) and storing it in your garage.
Now, here’s part of the problem. When you remove each piece, it still seems to be (intuitively) 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?
A further wrinkle: 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?
A few options:
- The Ship of Theseus is what it is by the individual parts that make it up.
- The Ship of Theseus is what it is because of its structure.
- The Ship of Theseus is what it is because of its history.
In this case, the second you removed the first wooden plank from the Ship, it ceased to be. But the individual atoms in the wood are forever changing, with the result that the Ship is never itself.
In this case, the Ship remains the same ship throughout the change from wood to aluminum, so you have the seemingly inconsistent result that the Ship of Theseus is both an aluminum and a wooden ship. Furthermore, when you have two ships (as in the last thought experiment), they both have identical structures, so you wind up with the result that both are THE Ship of Theseus – meaning that two discrete things are one numerical thing.
In this case, the Ship remains the same because of its particular role in the history of the world. Parts come and go, but the actor remains the same. You’ll still wind up with the problem in the case of Theseus duplicates, because each share a relevant history with the “original” ship.
Now, the real problem is not at all about ships, but instead about that that makes us who we are. We know that parts of who we are changes from year to year, but we still think we’re the same people.
Is it because of our parts – i.e. the individual matter that makes us up? Breathe, and you’re no longer the same you.
Is it because of our structure? Lose a limb, or cut your hair, and you’re no longer the same person.
Is it because of our history in the world? Were you to be duplicated, you’d either have a existential twin, or you’d cease to be.
Is it because of our thoughts, feelings, and all the other stuff that goes on in our heads? Lose your memories, and you’re no longer you. Have a radical change of heart, and the person you were once before is gone.
Is it because of our souls? Souls could logically be duplicated and would run the same risks of the Ships. (Sidebar: soul talk, in general, is a way to understand what it is that is us through time. Our physical bodies come to pass, and theories of identity that posit spiritual existence before and after physical existence have to have some device to allow for identity through the different phases of our existence.)
So, despite the fact that I changed blog domains, concepts, and taglines last month, the core parts remained the same. What, then, makes it a “new” blog? (Note the trick: the question is not about the blog.)
If some material, structural, historical, or spiritual part of you, at some particular time, enjoyed this post, please consider subscribing to my feed, commenting, or sharing it on StumbleUpon, del.i.cious, or Digg by using the handy form below. Thank you for your time and support!
Photo Credit: Maggie-Me
{ 1 trackback }
Twitter: lovejodirenee
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
A decidely unphilosophic answer for you: the blog is YOUR THOUGHTS IN PRINT so it’s the same blog. Or arguably it has to do with the URL, the name, or the design, in which case it’s changed. But I’ll stick with the former argument.
You raise such an interesting dilemma and then apply it to something that, well, I can’t see how you’re asking your readers to apply it. But nonethless, it is always a challenge to decide what defines us and whether our core is the same, whether it doesn’t matter if the core is the same, how much we’re allowed to veer from how we once acted in the past, etc. Anyhow, food for thought…
Jared Goralnicks last blog post..Why AwayFind? To escape from email (quick clip from SOB Con 2008)
@ Jared: About the blog – that’s the interesting thing, for there are really compelling reasons to go either way with what makes this the same.
I’m really not asking my readers to apply anything – which is probably why you can’t see how I’m asking them to apply it. My (poorly executed) aim was just to give some idea of how I got to thinking about the Ship of Theseus – it wasn’t from what I’m working on in philosophy, but rather the mundane statements having to deal with my “new” blog.
Secondly, it’s a common philosophical tool to ask questions about things that aren’t really the issue, get an answer, then apply that to the core issue. If you ask direct questions, people often have pre-theoretical answers and won’t budge from those answers. That’s sometimes what makes philosophy so frustrating to people who don’t understand what we’re up to – for we ask questions in really oblique ways.
Great commentary (as usual), Jared.
Your post reminds me of the dilemma I face in wanting to connect and reconnect with old friends from certain distinct stages of my life. It’s a paradox because we’ve grown in different directions at different rates. We want to see each other when we’re all back in our hometown for holidays, because we like the memory who we were together, then. But we really don’t connect the same anymore, because we’ve grown into substantially different versions of ourselves, and we have mixed feelings about finding out who we’ve each become — would our memories and our stories about ourselves and each other be less valid if it turns out we’re not who we thought we were? They remember details of the past as enduring character traits of mine, and I’ve completely forgotten or outgrown what I did or said then. I think it takes a lot of energy to keep friendships intact over time, distance and experience.
Kellys last blog post..Gulf Coast Gothic
@ Kelly: You’ve touched on a very personal chord with me, as well. It’s very, very difficult for me to return to my home town and talk to old friends. Since the inevitable “what do you do” question comes up, it becomes very hard for us to relate to each other since our lifestyles are so very different. Yet I don’t want to not spend time with them just because we’ve gone separate ways. So we have awkward conversations about days gone by since we don’t have a lot of common points from the here and now to talk about. Hearts and thoughts, they fade… (Pearl Jam reference)
Great information thanks for sharing this with us.In fact in all posts of this blog their is something to learn.I wish I had found it sooner. Keep up the good work.