The Ship of Theseus is a thought experiment first posited by Plutarch in Life of Theseus. It goes a little something like this:
A ship goes out in a storm and is damaged. Upon returning to shore, the ship is repaired, with parts of it being replaced in the process. Again and again the ship goes out, and again it is repaired, until eventually every single component of the ship, every plank of wood, has been replaced.
Is the repaired ship still the same ship that first went out into the storm? And if not, then at what point did it become a different ship?
Now, say you collected every part of the ship that was discarded during repairs, and you used these parts to rebuild the ship. With the two ships side-by-side, which one would be the true Ship of Theseus? Or would it be both? Or neither?
There’s no single answer to the problem, no correct one, just the looming question: what is the intrinsic thingness of a thing? But the thought experiment has captured my attention because, even though it is thousands of years old, it’s still relevant today. It’s given me a new way to look at some of my favourite bits of pop-culture, some of the technologies used in science fiction, and by extension, a valid frame by which to look at some of the technologies we may be using in the future.
Mad Max: Fury Road opens with Max overlooking a vast dead vista, with only his haunting memories and Ford V8 Interceptor for company. The car will be familiar to anyone who’s watched any of the Mad Max films—it’s served Max across the decades, and across countless miles of post-apocalyptic desert road. But while Max is busy trying to outrun his memories, something else catches up to him—a War Boy patrol. In attempting to flee, Max’s car is wrecked, flipping side over side, coming to a stop on its roof, chassis mangled, axles likely bent or broken, engine mounts the same.
We cut ahead some indeterminate time later, and Max has been turned into a blood bag for ailing War Boys. Strapped to the front of a pursuit vehicle, Max spies something familiar beside him: the Ford V8 Interceptor.
The Interceptor has been rebuilt—the rear suspension has been raised up, Max’s extra fuel barrels have been removed to make space for weaponry, and the paint job has been cut back to bare metal for that “shiny and chrome” look. Still, Max sees his car in this altered beast—whether it’s the long sweeping shape of the coupe’s body, or in some other, indefinably spiritual aspect of the vehicle. Or perhaps Max simply knows he’s dead without a car, and the rebuilt Interceptor is a familiar set of wheels—any port in a storm.
For another example of the Ship of Theseus paradox from the same film, take Furiosa. Her left arm ends just below the elbow, and for much of the film she wears a prosthetic made from metal—but at no point does the film suggest that the intrinsic nature of Furiosa is defined by this prosthetic limb. Scrapping in the dirt with Max upon their first meeting, Furiosa’s prosthetic arm hangs from the side of the War Rig, but she is in no way hindered by its absence, fighting brutally to protect the women under her charge. This might sound obvious—of course Furiosa is just as fierce, just as much herself with or without the arm—but things aren’t always so clear.
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A Chain Across the Dawn
In Return of the Jedi we see the Ship of Theseus rear its much-repaired face yet again. Luke Skywalker and the Force ghost of Obi-Wan Kenobi debate the humanity of Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader, and in making his point, Obi-Wan states that Vader is beyond redemption because he is “more machine than man.” Whether it’s simply the loss of Anakin’s biological body, or some other change that has happened to the man, Obi-Wan sees Darth Vader as a different person, separate from Anakin Skywalker. As far as Obi-Wan is concerned, too many planks in the Ship of Anakin have been replaced. Luke argues otherwise—that despite the fact that Anakin has lost his limbs and needs to rely on a life-supporting suit of armour, he is at heart, the same man.
Now, Luke himself lost a hand at the end of Empire Strikes Back, and had it replaced with an organic-looking robotic prosthetic, but Obi-Wan doesn’t appear to have any issues with the altered Luke. So apparently, according to Obi-Wan, somewhere between replacing a single hand and replacing four limbs, a person may cease to be their true self.
In Richard K. Morgan’s Altered Carbon, the society and justice system seem to hold that a person’s digitised consciousness—which is able to be swapped between bodies for a price—is their true self, regardless of what body it may be sleeved inside. Even so, within the world of the book (and television series), there is a Catholic sect that holds that a person’s soul cannot be digitised, and as such, after the death of the original body, a person cannot truly be shifted between bodies—that despite a consistent personality and memories, the person’s soul is not present, and without a soul it is not the same person.
Say I had a heart transplant. Would the presence of that foreign tissue somehow alter who I am? Would I be somehow less “myself,” whatever that means? Or, if a person uses a prosthetic limb, which self is more “them”: the self with four limbs, one of which is prosthetic, or the self with three limbs? I would argue that in terms of a person’s essence (again, difficult to define, but the thing that makes you you), there is no difference. I think that no matter the changes made to a person’s body, if their mind is still functioning in whatever is their own version of “normal,” then they would remain their intrinsic self. Anakin Skywalker became Darth Vader because of his choices, not because of an arbitrary amount of flesh being replaced with machine parts (which is likely the argument Obi-Wan meant to make, but is not the one he actually made).
Now, what if we take this problem into the future. How would an uploaded digital consciousness fare against the Ship of Theseus problem? If my mind was recreated perfectly in a digital format, would it in fact be me? What if my fleshy meatsack self was still alive? Would that change your answer? What if me, in this current body had to argue with my digitised self to decide which me was the real me? Is that a debate I could win? Is that a debate that either of me could win?
What about teleportation? If my body was broken down at Point A and transmitted instantaneously to Point B where it was reconstituted, is the person at the other end still me? Or is it some new person who simply looks like me, acts like me, and indeed believes itself to be me? If the me at Point A and the me at Point B are indistinguishable from one another, then does it matter? If you believe in the concept of the human soul, then can the soul also be broken down and reconstituted post-teleportation? Or does it travel the distance itself in its own unknowable way? Or is the person at the other end a soul-less recreation of the original, now dead, person? And most importantly—how would you know?
What about clones? We’ve been able to clone sheep and other animals for a while now, but what if you cloned a human embryo, and brought both embryos to term? Even if you raised both children as if they were identical twins, would one somehow be lesser than the other? If the clone lived as their own person, would they still be a hollow recreation of the ‘real’ person born from the original embryo, or would they be a person with their own intrinsic, indefinable nature? I’d argue that each Ship of Theseus was the real Ship of Theseus, and each was also something else.
Lastly…what makes you you? Is it your body? If so, what happens when you grow older and things don’t work quite as well as they used to? Is it your memories? If so, what happens when some of those memories fade? Is it entirely arbitrary? Is it somehow indefinable? In what ways could you be altered and changed without it affecting your inherent sense of self? These are the sorts of existential questions that philosophy has me thinking about. Thanks, philosophy.
Shows like The Good Place, Westworld, and Black Mirror make it obvious that they’re posing philosophical and metaphysical questions to the viewer— but if you start looking you’ll find various philosophical conundrums hiding in all sorts of places, giving your favourite bits of pop-culture whole new layers of meaning and depth. Where else have you found philosophical paradoxes hiding (or not) in pop-culture? And what other examples of The Ship of Theseus have I missed?
Note: I have to give credit (blame?) where credit is due: my entire philosophical education is the result of watching The Good Place, and reading the work of Damien Williams and m1k3y. If you also want to occasionally trigger an existential crisis while thinking too deeply about science fiction, and also delve deeper into philosophical concepts without hurting your head too much, I highly recommend you check them out.
Originally published in May 2018.
Corey J. White is a writer of science fiction, horror, and other, harder-to-define stories. He studied writing at Griffith University and is now based in Melbourne, Australia. The Voidwitch Saga—Killing Gravity, Void Black Shadow, and Static Ruin—is available from Tor.com Publishing. Find him at his website and on Twitter at @cjwhite.
Obi-Wan’s line about Anakin/Vader, as I recall, was: “He’s more machine now than man; twisted and evil.” I always thought the “twisted and evil” part was what made him view Vader as beyond redemption, more than the “more machine now than man”.
Great article! There are some actual ship examples I thought you might ponder.
In Solo: A Star Wars Story, Lando’s Millennium Falcon is arguably a fundamentally different ship than Han’s because (a) it suffers all the physical damage that renders it recognizable as the ship Han (like fans) knows and loves; and (b) it’s only with the download of L3’s database and sentient personality that the ship acquires its “character.” “She may not look like much, but she’s got it where it counts.”
The Doctor’s TARDIS remains the Doctor’s TARDIS despite its numerous “desktop refreshes” and, most recently, even after its total destruction (one assumes?) and subsequent reappearance as “the Ghost Monument” in the Thirteenth Doctor’s first series. (And, of course, the Doctor is a Ship of Theseus problem that can make the head explode.)
The “refit” NCC-1701 from Star Trek: The Motion Picture through Star Trek III is so different in size, it strains credulity a little to treat it as the same ship that completed a five-year-mission under Captain Kirk. Yet I am emotionally affected by seeing it careen into the Genesis Planet’s atmosphere in flames every time.
No deeper point to make right now… just some more examples to toss into the mix.
Excellent article but I think that, ultimately, society, if not science fiction, needs to rely upon Descartes – cogito ergo sum – I think therefore I am. You, be you biological, electronic, or something else, are what thinks you are you.
If you can copy your “you” thoughts to another entity, then there are two “yous” which will immediately start to diverge as their experiences diverge (immediately at the quantum level, if nothing else). Each “you” will hence become a separate individual.
I find the exploration of this concept in science fiction works fascinating.
Nick Chopper in the Oz books was slowly replaced with tin, including his head. In one book, he found his old head in a cupboard, still alive, and they debated which was the real Nick. Tin Nick was frustrated at what a jerk the old Nick was and left him in the cupboard. Stubborn and backward old Nick was satisfied to stay there.
Funny, I just finished watching something that deals with this. Spoilers for Rooster Teeth’s new mecha show, Gen:Lock, below…
The character Chase, a fighter pilot, is critically injured in the opening episode, a battle between the Polity and the Union. We are reintroduced four years later. Although his body could not be fully healed (nanotech complications), he was a top candidate for a new technology that essentially allows “brain uploading”, and became the first test case.
The protagonists repeatedly encounter an enemy Union mecha they dub “Nemesis”, which appears to be obsessed with Chase in particular.
Eventually Dr. Weller tells Chase the truth: on one of Chase’s early combat missions after entering the gen:lock program, he was captured by Union forces. “Our” Chase cannot remember this because he is not the original Chase–they never managed to rescue him. He is a digital backup of Chase’s mind from before that mission. The original Chase, broken by the Union through some means, is now Nemesis, determined to kill his “copy”.
I started it with a friend after we finished the latest volume of RWBY. Pretty good, although only one short season so far; I bet many of the TOR staff would be interested. Some surprisingly well-known actors like Michael B. Jordan and David Tennant, and a diverse main cast (don’t think I’ve seen someone explicitly identify as genderfluid on a show before).
The Discworld series delves into the Ship of Theseus question repeatedly, usually with questions of authenticity among the dwarfs. The usual solution is, “whichever the community agrees is the true one”.
@@.-@ Yeah Baum had some interesting concepts that can be interpreted along this route. Jack Pumkinhead’s Head continuously spoils and necessitates replacement but he’s treated as the same Jack and retains his original memories. Creepily he buries the spoiled heads and marks their graves. Some pumpkin’s can apparently even increase his intellect. However Roquet drinking the Water of Oblivion may reset him to an innocent state, butjust reverts to his old bad nature in time without his old memories. Speaking our Tin friend and his counterpart Captain Fyter, there’s Chopfyt a Frankensteined amalgam of the two’s leftover parts. Baum implies he’s his own individual but the fact that Nick’s head retained it’s personality would throw that into question and you’re left wondering what effect the amount of parts from each had on the whole. Then there’s the Mangaboo’s, those plant people from Dorothy and the Wizard, who are planted when they are killed and grown back as a new person.
I would posit that it wasnt so much that Obi Wan simply held the mechanized Darth Vader to be evil by virtue of mechanization, but his closure/coping mechanism for having to kill his posessed friend is Darth Vader is the renewed form of the “demon”. He simply took creative liberties in telling the story (I dont think he ever specifically mentions it was him who cut down Anakin/Vader). Obi Wan seems fairly ambivalent to technology friendly otherwise. But then, considering his interactuons with Vader and Grievous, maybe he dies have a line separating good person and evil Borg.
“what other examples of The Ship of Theseus have I missed?”
The military is full of them. Any old regiment that’s been around for 100+ years. The original soldiers are dead and buried, all the original equipment has long been replaced, the Regiment itself may be on a different Base, but it’s still the same Regiment.
Post-humanism would posit this answer: you are never the same person for more than a moment. In fact, don’t consider the question “who am I?” but instead “who am I being?” The key distinction here is reflected in the grammar: the on-going mood of the Imperfect verb. You are not the same person as you were when you started reading this comment. How could you be? Physically, your cells have replaced themselves and your body has aged; mentally/emotionally you have consumed new information. Take, for example, a bowl of ice cream. Before you eat it, you are a person who has not eaten that bowl of ice cream. While eating it, you are a person who has eaten some amount of ice cream; when finished, you are a person who has eaten some different amount of ice cream. Your age, bodily make up, blood sugar, etc have all changed.
So who are you? You’re changing.
Stargate SG-1 “Tin Man” is a great example of the problem. O’Neill, Carter, Jackson and Teal’c have their consciousness copied into mechanical bodies and each of the pair starts living their own separate lives. Each believe they are the original until proven otherwise. In that universe, the sense of self can be copied without anything seeming to be lost.
It’s actually an important principle of physics that one can’t identify an individual proton or electron (if there were a way to track an individual proton or electron, they wouldn’t follow Fermi statistics, and chemistry wouldn’t work). But if we can’t identify individual protons or electrons, is it meaningful to identify an atom composed of them? At what level do things start to even have an identity?
Also worth noting is a recent piece of pop culture, the game “Soma” by Frictional Games that came out in 2015. You play as a digitized copy of an individual who died of a brain disorder hundreds of years ago that wakes up in a radically new environment at the end of humanity’s lease on life. The game’s progression repeatedly confronts the Ship Of Theseus problem as your character struggles to survive, or prioritize the survival of various incarnations of individuals you meet throughout the game. The existential dread of being forced to provide imperfect answers to this question mesh very well into a game presented as survival horror.
“And what other examples of The Ship of Theseus have I missed?” Here’s one, from John Dies At The End:
“Solving the following riddle will reveal the awful truth of the universe, assuming you do not go utterly mad in the attempt.
Say you have an ax – just a cheap one from Home Depot. On one bitter winter day, you use said ax to behead a man. Don’t worry – the man’s already dead. Maybe you should worry, ‘cause you’re the one who shot him. He’d been a big, twitchy guy with veined skin stretched over swollen biceps, tattoo of a swastika on his tongue. And you’re chopping off his head because even with eight bullet holes in him, you’re pretty sure he’s about to spring back to his feet and eat the look of terror right off your face.
On the last swing, the handle splinters. You now have a broken ax. So you go to the hardware store, explaining away the dark reddish stains on the handle as barbeque sauce. The repaired ax sits undisturbed in your house until the next spring when one rainy morning, a strange creature appears in your kitchen. So you grab your trusty ax and chop the thing into several pieces. On the last blow, however – Of course, a chipped head means yet another trip to the hardware store.
As soon as you get home with your newly headed ax, though… You meet the reanimated body of the guy you beheaded last year, only he’s got a new head stitched on with what looks like plastic weed-trimmer line and wears that unique expression of you’re-the-man-who-killed-me-last-winter resentment that one so rarely encounters in everyday life. So you brandish your ax. “That’s the ax that slayed me,” he rasps.
Is he right?”
I highly recommend Dennis Taylor’s “We Are Legion (We Are Bob)”. It doesn’t make this question of “Bobhood” as he puts it, the entire point of the book, but he does cover it pretty well. In my opinion, internally “mehood” is fairly straightforward, “Cogito ergo sum” but determining that for someone else would be difficult.
Deep Space 9’s “Life Support” went after this pretty head on, as pieces of a character’s brain are gradually replaced by positronic prostheses.
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One of my favorite films, The Prestige, digs deep into this question from two surprising angles. On one level you have two men who move interchangably between their two lives. One is the magician, husband and father while the other is his trusted friend and loyal retainer. In one scene the magician tells his wife he loves her, and she responds that today he means it, but that’s not the case every day. The two men are impossible to tell apart, but she senses the difference between them: only one truly loves her.
On another level this question comes into play because the magician’s rival has a custom box made (by no less than Nicolai Tesla!) which can produce a replica of anything or anyone. The rival can’t have infinite copies of himself walking around so every night he vanishes from the stage and “reappears” as his replica emerges from the back of the auditorium, and the version of himself from the stage falls into a glass care full of water and drowns. He never knows, he says, if he’s going to be the man in the water or the man who steps out of the box. Who is the real one though? The end implies that the real one is defined by the rivalry – the relationship – between the two magicians. Who we are has more to do with our relationships than our physical bodies.
The other work that proposes, if tangentially, an answer to the question is The Dispossessed, Ursula K LeGuin’s classic. At one point her main character states that you can go home again as long as you realize that home is a place you’ve never been. From this vantage Theseus’ ship is always new. Even without serial repairs and replacements, it would age, take on new microbiota, new crew, new cargo. The repairs are almost incidental. You are you, yes, but you’ve never been *this* you before.
Wasn’t this question also explored in the Buffyverse? If you are turned into a vampire, ar you still you, but with added vapire-ness? Or are you dead and is the vampire just a monster walking around with your memories of having been human?
Who can forget Trigger’s broom from “Only Fools and Horses” for which he won an award for keeping so long, which had seventeen new heads and fourteen new handles. He had the best answer to the conundrum too, really.
And in cars they do say that as long as the VIN plate survives, then the car is the same no matter how many new chassis, rewirings, or replacement shells it has had. As long as there is some continuity between parts, an unbroken chain through the replacements to the original. In the collectibles market it is called provenance. As long as you can demonstrate the provenance then it is the same.
All of the various iterations of the anime, “Ghost in the Shell” are a great example. In a time when you can create an entire body artificially and an artificial brain, and digitize consciousness and put that inside the brain, one could potentially have a multitude of bodies – one after the other or all at once – and be a digital copy of a copy of a copy, at what point does one remain the “same”? At what point is one something else? Are they still “alive”?
If you have an advanced enough AI, that’s indistinguishable from the coded versions of human consciousness, and you have that in one of those same artificial brains inside artificial bodies, is it alive?
What’s honestly the difference between the two at that point, what’s the difference between either of those and a human that was born?
@9 Except for regiments from the planet Tyss in The Regiment by John Dalmas. His regiments never recruit new members again. As its members fall in battle, it simply grows smaller to become a battalion, a company, a platoon, a squad until there are none left. Probably to avoid the ship of Theseus question regarding the battle unit. As an organization’s members change, it’s culture and traditions can change. “The HP Way” of computer company Hewlett Packard is no more.
As a philosophy major in college I tangled with these issues for years. Literature and pop culture sci find have hinted at these ideas. From Lovecraft with brains in a jar, to Trek and Spock’s brain running a complex to the reel to reel tape computer program sim of Dr Zola in Captain America: Winter Soldier. What makes up what we are? Are we just thought, and our bodies mean nothing? Take our mind and transfer it, but we are the same? But, are we really? So many questions and so few answers, but it’s the process of inquiry that makes all the difference.
What this theory tends to eschew is the nature of entropy. We grow and lose cells all the time, while slowly decomposing after a certain amount of growth. We experience life in unique ways which inform our own sense of selves. Are we the “same” now as we were then? This applies to every facet of existence, from galaxies to tardigrades. Can anything ever truly be a constant other than change? And by that virtue, by saying there is no correct answer, would that not imply the fault in the question itself, when the answer always changes?
All it proves is one constant: Marvel and DC are always afraid to kill off their mainstays. Because money money money money money money money money….
Is a reboot of a movie or TV show, or additional installments made by other hands, the same thing as the original one? It seems like a lot of fanboy angst boils down to a Ship of Theseus issue.
Schwarzenegger even tackled this philosophical question, at least in regards to identity and human cloning, in “The 6th Day.”
Tuvix,
In a Star Trek Voyager episode, Tuvok and Nelix are combined via a transporter accident into a new independent entity, sharing traits and memories from both characters. In the end Capt. Janeway orders the splitting of Tuvix back into the individuals Tuvok and Nelix. Was this murder? Or the saving of two lives from a preventable death. Maybe not a Theseus ship exactly, more like mixing a tug boat with a sailing ship to make a vessel and then taking it apart and building a tug boat and sailing ship from the parts.
In Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novel The Fifth Elephant, a dwarf shows the axe of his family, pointing out that, over the generations, every single part has been replaced… yet it is still a family heirloom, because its fundamental “axe-ness”, so to speak, has been maintained. The contention seems to be that its value exceeds the sum of its parts.
It answers no questions, but, as a previous poster pointed out, the accepted agreement by the dwarves seems to be that continuity of function has something to do with the axe’s value as an heirloom.
The problem with Descartes “cogito ergo sum” is that it ends up positing two different substances in the human person, which destroys the unity that makes the person to be one, and leads to all these conundrums about which is the “real” you. The real philosophical issue is that of personhood and soul. Classical -Aristotelian and Thomistic- Philosophy holds that soul is that which makes a living being to be a living being, it assumes the position of the form in a composed natursl being of matter and form within Aristotle’s Physics, Metaphysics, and de Anima. It is the life principle.
Yet, unlike Descartes, Thomism doesn’t say that the soul by itself is the person. Instead the person as an irreducible whole is composed of the soul and the [human] body. Without both, there is no human person. (In a similiar vein, Boethius called a person “an individual substance of a rational nature”) At death, when the soul is separated from the body -which then ceases to exist as a *human* body, undergoing substantial change- the person ceases to be as a complete person, and does not re-emerge until soul is (re)united with its body (at the General Resurrection, though at this point we have entered theology). In terms of teleportation or replacing, You can change the matter without destroying the person because the soul is immaterial, and thus has no extension or figure to worry about. However, if you put the contents of a person’s brain into an alternative storage device, and that assumes you can, which, since so much of Mind, memory, and imagination are immaterial I doubt can happen, the resultantint construct is no longer a natural body, thus not part of a person. Ar best, your have a Philosophical Zombie (like Data) unless you change the definition of person.
I recently read Ann Leckie’s Radch trilogy, and I submit that both the protagonist and Anaander Minaai showcase different facets of the same conundrum.
This can be seen as a kind of language ”spook’, of confusing the reality of a thing with our word for a thing.
Regardless of which car I drive, for ease of understanding I’ll refer to it as “my car”. If I replace it, I might temporarily refer to the replacement vehicle as “my new car”, but ultimately I’ll also call it “my car” because it serves the same purpose. If Car A undergoes repairs, I could legitimately call it “my repaired car”, but I probably won’t for reasons of brevity.
Likewise, when asking at what point Darth Vader ceased to be Anakin misses a vital point . There is an assumption in language that people remain constant throughout their lives, but this is not so. Moment to moment, we are each different people, as molecules and atoms are replaced, memories are formed and so on. This is a very granular process so is very difficult to recognise in ordinary life, but nobody would deny that a person is very different at ten years old compared to fifty years old.
Only by recognising that reality is not the same thing as our words about reality can this apparent paradox be resolved .
Another example is Lois McMaster Bujold’s Miles Vorkosigan novels. When Miles learns that he has a clone, the Vorkosigan family never treats the clone as anything other than his own person, Miles’ younger brother who just happens to share his genome.
A real-life example is the USN in the mid 19th Century, when ships were “repaired,” with just about everything replaced except the ship’s bell, but maintaining the ship’s identity. Another case is the human body, where cells are continually replaced, except in the nervous system, throughout life.
Then there’s the USN sailing ship Constellation…
The video game Soma explores this concept very effectively and poignantly. For it was one of the best short-form games I’ve ever played because of it.
For a classic SFnal example not yet mentioned, Rogue Moon by Algis Budrys. (Or Rouge Moon, depending on the edition.)
If one tosses out dualism as a semantic mistake from the get-go, and takes a person’s mind as an emergent property of body and experience, continually generated (until it’s not), a lot of these conundrums go away. Curiously, one of the few dialogues of Socrates as presented by Plato I ever read, long ago, has the Straw Youth trying to argue that a person is generated from his body as music from a lyre, which as far as modern science has shown is correct, and Socrates arguing him down. Even as a kid, I thought the youth was actually right. Put me right off Plato.
@27: It’s a surprisingly practical attitude, if you think about it. They could choose to not change any of the ax’s original parts, but sooner or later, they’d have to either stop using it or fix it, because otherwise it’d be pretty useless. In his own words, “[…] because it has changed gently over time, it is still a pretty good ax, y’know.”
Fun fact, there’s actually observable and statistically significant changes in behavior in organ recipients. The causal nature isn’t well understood for many transplants, but people forget that the heart is not just a pump, it regulates brain function (among other things.) Liver transplants can sometimes cause or cure depression. Even fecal transplants can have wide-ranging effects, including schizophrenia. Of course, diet can cause many of these things as well, so it’s certainly not unique, but it’s something doctors have to consider all the time, not just an abstract philosophical conundrum.
Or, in SF, say you had a _brain_ transplant. Who wakes up in the recovery room?
The third book has another example, Lieutenant Tisarwat. But a detailed discussion would be very spoilery.
Most of these examples seem to agree that self follows the mind, which normally follows the brain (aside from things like _Dollhouse_ and _Altered Carbon_), but what about when the mind is altered? Experience, learning and memory are forms of altering your mind that are conventionally considered to not replace you with a different person, but some F/SF has more drastic forms of alteration (including the dreaded “mindwipe”, in which not being the same person afterward is the entire point, from the attacker’s perspective; some authors treat it as morally on par with murder).
A slightly silly example is the “you’re not you when you’re hungry” line of commercials. We all recognize that hunger can be mood-altering, but normally don’t consider a hungry person to be someone else, any more than a drunk person. But there are other drugs that are deliberately intended to alter the recipient’s mind, for various purposes. Is “this is your brain on drugs” a mere slogan, or a recognition of a genuinely different entity (or phenomenon)? Drawing a line between a changed person and a different person may have an inherent element of arbitrariness to it.
One more example: Simon Illyan in the Miles Vorkosigan series, particularly _Memory_. He has a memory chip in his brain that gives him perfect recall in addition to his normal organic memories, until it mysteriously starts to malfunction and Miles decides he needs to find out why. Are Simon with a functioning chip, Simon with a glitchy chip and Simon with no chip all the same person? In one sense it’s true that Miles at the end of the book isn’t the same person as he was at the beginning. Is the same thing true of Simon in the same way, or in a different and somehow more fundamental way?
In Philip Jose Farmer’s “Riverworld” series, humans have a “soul” aliens call a “wathan” that animates their bodies and survives death, but is just a consciousless image of a person’s mind until it’s given a new body. The aliens give their collection of wathans new bodies on Riverworld, and everyone believes they are the person who had died.
In Greg Bear’s “Eon” series, refugees on a transdimensional asteroid develop the technology to virtualize themselves, biologize themselves from their virtual selves, have children in virtuality, and the children born in virtuality can biologize themselves. What makes a person is the “mystery” that gives them life and cannot be copied. If you become virtual, your body loses its mystery and dies. If you become physical, your virtual image loses its mystery and dies. This is similar to a theory I had about Trek’s transporters in the original series. It had been established in TOS that the transporters can’t produce two living copies but it wasn’t explained. I figured that it was proof then of a soul and the soul (maybe through entanglement) was transported and could only animate one copy. Later, they changed the rules about transporters and made my theory moot.
Some philosophers would say there is no inherent “thingness”. It’s all just component parts with a familiar appearance and a storyline.
If any of the individual parts of you can be lost but you still remain (eg. hair, hands, cognitive function) then what are you?
Maybe just a name.
This conundrum is addressed directly in Buddhist philosophy: thingness is an illusion. Nothing exists independently, but all is part of a continual change. The water in your body may once have been snowflakes, and maybe part of the tissue of many different plants and animals before that.
Have you seen Jordan Peele’s Us yet. Without getting into spoilers, it is not quite a Ship of Theseus problem, but it sails in the same fleet.
NO science fiction, but current events.
Recently a man serving a life sentence donated his kidney….
Is this technically legal?
@@@@@ 30, Andy Wain:
This can be seen as a kind of language ”spook’, of confusing the reality of a thing with our word for a thing.
Regardless of which car I drive, for ease of understanding I’ll refer to it as “my car”. If I replace it, I might temporarily refer to the replacement vehicle as “my new car”, but ultimately I’ll also call it “my car” because it serves the same purpose. If Car A undergoes repairs, I could legitimately call it “my repaired car”, but I probably won’t for reasons of brevity.
Likewise, when asking at what point Darth Vader ceased to be Anakin misses a vital point . There is an assumption in language that people remain constant throughout their lives, but this is not so. Moment to moment, we are each different people, as molecules and atoms are replaced, memories are formed and so on. This is a very granular process so is very difficult to recognise in ordinary life, but nobody would deny that a person is very different at ten years old compared to fifty years old.
Only by recognising that reality is not the same thing as our words about reality can this apparent paradox be resolved .
“You cannot step into the same automobile twice.” Heraclitus
Single-celled animals make exact duplicates of themselves, all the time. Neither is the true original and both are. If a multicellular race were to do that, each divisor would have the same physique and memories of the original, and their society would have accommodations for many people being the essentially the same person on different paths.
Tom Siddell‘s “Gunnerkrigg Court” webcomic currently has the main character dealing with being duplicated mystically so that both of her are the real one.
We may now have the technology to make two versions of the same person who are both real, if someone were to cross an ethical line to do it. Researchers at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh were able to perform the “Wigner’s Friend” test in a real experiment where two observers unaware of each other collapsed the superpositions of entangled photons into conflicting results, essentially making two subjective objective realities. This can be applied to the Schrodinger’s Cat experiment, where conflicting nonlethal outcomes can result in the “cat” taking different paths and becoming two identical people.
@42,
Why would it not be legal? He’s a prisoner, not chattel to the state.
44: Why would it not be legal? He’s a prisoner, not chattel to the state.
The donor – a natural and legal person, with physical existence – was sentenced by a properly constituted court to a certain term of imprisonment. It could be argued* that his kidney is attaining early release from prison without the consent of the relevant parole authorities.
He is, in fact, conducting an illegal prison escape, on an instalment plan.
Justice demands that the sentence of the remaining parts of the prisoner should be increased in proportion (I would estimate that the kidney makes up about 0.2% of his body mass, and so a ten-year sentence would be increased by around one week).
*but only by a loon
On a meta level, this applies to series as a whole. Especially reboots. Is it at all, anymore, what it was to begin with, or did we subtly get misled into shifting our emotional attachment onto something that isn’t anything like the original in spirit / content / message by a long shot?
Nice article. Ultimately, these are not questions we can actually answer, at least not any time soon.
@3 – davep1: In that case, I am one of the owners of Microsoft and I want my money. I’m sure the bank will side with me. :)
@5 – montagohalcyon: Thanks for the recommendation, I am going to check out gen:LOCK.
@1 -. Silvertip: “head on”, indeeed. :)
@18 – James: I seem to recall that Buffy pretty much makes it clear that the lack of soul is what makes the vampire a monster with your faces and memories. Then, if you get your soul back, you’re a vampire but also you.
@46,
I can see the same loon arguing a prisoner who has an amputation should spend more time in prison. Or if the prisoner goes on a diet and lose 20% of the pre-imprisonment body mas
No no. If the prisoner loses weight then he is still 100% in prison. No bits of him have moved outside the prison. Similarly if he gains weight he shouldn’t get his sentence decreased. He hasn’t been sentenced to 7000 kilogram-years in prison or something. It’s just if his guilty kidney has broken out and is enjoying a freedom it doesn’t deserve that there is a legal issue.
I would also include the “Black Company” series. The soldiers and the chroniclers change, but the Company endure.
Anyway, the problem of the transformation is true for ourselves too: the “me” that goes to bed in the evening is not the same that wakes up in the morning, the “me” today is definitely not the same “me” of 20, 30 or 40 years ago, both metaphorically (accumulation of experiences, forgetting of memories etc.) and literally (with the exception of some body parts like teeth, if I remember well, most of the body atoms are replaced relatively quickly).
But, after all, “thingness” is nothing more than a cognitive shortcut that our brains take to classify and manage the world, kinda like attaching a key to a database entry.
Very useful in a practical way to deal with the unrelenting chaos of the universe, but we should be wary to attach to it any deeper meaning. After all, prejudices, stereotypes, superstitions, paranoia are all too kinds of cognitive shortcuts useful to survive in a savanna but that we should be careful to take for real truths.
Said that, SF is really the perfect venue to take our ingrained shortcuts and show how you can stretch them to the breaking point.
Countries would come under this as well; there is no one alive today who was a British subject in 1897, but treaties signed by the Crown in 1897 are still binding on the Crown today. There are even a few countries whose borders have shifted over the centuries to the point where there was no overlap in territory between current and previous borders (Poland is the best known example) but they’re still regarded as being the same country.
Ise Grand Shrine is torn down and rebuilt on a neighbouring piece of land every twenty years (next due in 2033). It’s always still the Grand Shrine.
London Bridge is in Lake Havasu City, Arizona. THE London Bridge, not a reproduction. It was moved from the Thames to Arizona in 1971. It was replaced with the London Bridge in London in 1973. The London Bridge in Arizona, called the “New” London Bridge, had replaced the “Old” London Bridge in 1831. The “Old” London Bridge was built in 1209, replacing the previous bridge that was built in 1163 to replace the bridge that was destroyed in 1136 by fire, which had replaced the bridge that was destroyed by a tornado in 1091 and been built in 1066 to replace a previous bridge that replaced a previous bridge, and so on, back to London’s founding by the Romans around 50 AD when the first London Bridge joined Camulodunum (Camelot?) to Kent and formed Londinium. They were all the real London Bridge and now there are two that can claim to be the real one.
Bicentennial Man is very much about this. When does the robot become a man?
There’s an episode of the original Star Trek where the transporter issue is explored. They try a new technique that sends a copy of Spock instead of disassembling the original, only the copy is mirrored back and they end up with two of him.
Yeah, this theme is everywhere.
StarTrek’s Dr. McCoy was very distrustful of the transporter. In one episode he said something like “I signed aboard this ship to practice medicine, not to have my atoms scattered back and forth across space by this gadget.” In the first episode of the Next Generation series he goes onboard the new Enterprise on a shuttle, still avoiding the transporter in his old age.
It is interesting how language shapes our thoughts. In Spanish there are two verbs that mean “to be”. One (ser) refers to who and how you are, the other (estar) refers to where you are both in space and time. To have a full picture of your being you then need to add all your past and future experiences across 4 dimensions. Looking at a single point in time and claiming that’s your true self is as limiting as pointing out the content of a cell in a spreadsheet and claiming that single figure captures the whole.
Using that analogy the different Ships of Theseus could be looked at as interrelated pages in a spreadsheet that change as parts are interchanged. Another analogy could be an inventory database that changes as parts are replaced. Funny how little philosophy I used in this post, I usually prefer to quote philosophers and fiction writers rather than talk about spreadsheets and databases!
The anime Cowboy Bebop is full of characters who raise Ship of Theseus questions, but the most prominent is probably Faye Valentine. She woke from decades-long medical stasis with no memories of her past life, in an unfamiliar culture, and built a hardscrabble life for herself there from scratch. Later, she finds her childhood home and regains some or all (the show isn’t clear) of her memories of her life before stasis. If continuity of mind is the essence of same-personhood, are pre-stasis Faye and post-stasis Faye the same person?
@56/Alan: McCoy was distrustful of all technology (“I’m just a country doctor”), but most of the time he used the transporter without hesitation. He only started avoiding it in his old age. He complained in “Obsession”: “Crazy way to travel, spreading a man’s molecules all over the universe”, but that was when Spock and Scotty had problems getting Kirk and Garrovick back after the antimatter explosion, not when he had to use it himself.