From the Vault: The Ship of Theseus

An ancient ship rots in the harbor and so we restore it piece by piece until nothing of the original ship remains. Is it still the same ship? Join Robert and Joe as they discuss one of history’s more mind-boggling thought experiments. (Originall published Aug. 21, 2018)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. In It's Saturday,
time for a vault episode. This classic episode of Stuff
to Blow Your Mind originally aired August one, and it's
our Ship of Theseus episode. Yeah, this one's This one
is a lot of fun, Like this one gets to
It's essentially grounded in a thought experiment, A very old

(00:26):
thought experiment, but one that remains interesting, especially when implied
when applied to things that that seemed hard to break
up into constituent parts like the like the self and
the mind. Yeah. Like here we are revisiting this episode.
Uh you know what A what a year down the line,
a little over a year having replaced parts of our
bodies being slightly different people as we unveil it once more.

(00:53):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot Com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
My name is Robert lamp and I'm Joe McCormick. And Robert,
I know you're not a big fan of air travel,
so I've got a I've got a question for you,
all right, if you wanted to go to, say somewhere

(01:15):
on the other side of the world. You wanted to
go to China or go to somewhere in Europe or something,
and you still hate air travel as much as you did,
And I offered you the chance to go there instantly
via a real life teleportation machine that would scan your
body and figure out where all the atoms are and
then rebuild you in a teleporter pod on the other

(01:35):
side of the globe wherever you wanted to go, and
you could be there instantly. Would you do it? Oh?
This is a fun one, right, because what happens to
my my old body is it just destroyed and it's
just incinerated on the spot. Well, in incinerated has such
negative vibes. I mean it's not incinerated, it is turned
into its atomic constituents, all right. And then I can't

(01:57):
just keep both though, I can't double sleep and have
have have one of me here in the States and
the end the other me is is in Asia somewhere.
I don't know. That seems like it would lead to
bad sci fi action movie scenarios where one of you
must eliminate the other on the commands of the moon King. Well,
you know, it's it's tempting still just to to cut
out all of that air travel, because air travel can

(02:19):
be taxing, it can be exhausting. Um and yet at
the same time, by virtue of being taxing and exhausting,
I'm never quite the same person when I reached the
other end of that flight, especially if it's a long flight, right,
because I may enter into the flight being like a
little anxious, but maybe on some level like looking you know,

(02:42):
looking forward to that you know, long period in which
I can just listen to music and read. And then
on the other side, then I am I'm potentially tired.
I'm potentially you know, blust out from you know Xenix
and Steve Roach albums, um, you know, three hours plus.
But I'm not quite the same person, right, I'm I've
changed a little bit, so I might as well be

(03:03):
this teleported other self. That is, that is a diversion
from who I am now. I don't know, when you
get to the end of a flight, even if it's
been unpleasant, do you really have the sensation that you
have died? Uh, it depends I guess how much turbulence
I have to endure. I mean, that's always the question
about the teleporter machine, right, I mean, it's the question

(03:23):
that everybody had to start wondering about Star Trek. I guess.
I guess there was probably a blissful period early in
Star Trek history where nobody wondered if the teleporter machines
killed you, But pretty soon people had to catch on, Right,
is it just is it just killing you and then
making a copy of you somewhere else that will continue
with your behaviors, but your life ends when you step in. Yeah,

(03:47):
And it's just everyone's gotten to the point where they're
cool with it. They just don't think about it. Then
they just step into the teleporter and let's suite annihilation
wash over them. I'm just I'm ready to die, make
a copy of me somewhere. I don't know, it does
seemed like people would be like that. I mean, most
of the time, people have the sensation that their experiences
are continuous and they want it to continue to be continuous.

(04:10):
I guess in track, as long as there's not an afterlife,
you're good, right, So just never know, it's just blind
leap of faith, right, And of course, I mean we have,
as we've talked about on the show before, we have
no idea how the say the baton of consciousness is
handed off from past self to present self, to future self,
and from one moment to the next. I mean, maybe
maybe it's the case that every time you go under

(04:31):
general anesthesia, you die, and then a different person wakes
up with all of your thoughts and memories. Maybe you
are the copy that woke up after the last time
you went under anesthesia. Maybe that happens every time you
fall asleep. You'd really have no way to know. Yeah,
that that is certainly a point when the curtain drops
and who who knows exactly what's going on with the set, right,

(04:51):
or at least what's going on with the set is
is very much an area of interest to uh, to
scientists who study consciousness. Now here's another question for you, Joe.
What if you were able to get ahold of a
time machine. I'm not talking some sort of a realistic, uh,
you know, time machine like we've talked about discussing, you know,
black holes and whatnot. I'm talking to a causality wrecking

(05:14):
Hollywood time machine, travel to the past machine, time cop
travel to the past machine. That is rough. So if
if I were to go back in time and meet
a younger me, is that younger me really me? Is
this to means? Because the younger means not physically identical
to me, it's mind and personality isn't identical to me.

(05:35):
So if if a Jean Claude van Damme were to
spin kick me into my past self, would I even
melt into a screaming pilot jelly? Well no, I don't
think so, because I don't think travel into the past
as possible. But even if it were possible, I assume
that if you went into the past, you would just
be like another person, like an identical twin, And identical
twins don't melt each other into jelly when they collide,

(05:57):
at least at least as far as I know, I
don't know. We've never seen it happen. Now we have
a lot of wonderful of science fiction to utilize when
we we tackle these these questions of identity and self
and change, But they haven't always been around. In the
old days. You had to do depend on listen more
traditional stories uh and myths for your your thought experiments.

(06:21):
And in fact, one of the oldest thought experiments is
that we had that we have is uh is very
much in this vein the ship of theseus the ship
of theseus. Right. So this is one of the most
classic paradoxes in the history of philosophy. And it also
goes to a thing that I think, for some reason,
it seems the Greeks were particularly interested in, which was

(06:42):
the nature and identity of things? I mean, of course,
the nature and identity of things is always a topic
for philosophers to investigate, but the ancient Greek philosophers seemed
really concerned with what made a thing itself? What were
the properties or the essences of a thing that gave
it its identity? How did you know that you were

(07:03):
really Robert? How did you Robert know that you earned
that you had the merit of being called Robert? Why
why wasn't something else Robert? And so they had these
ideas of essences and forms and all this stuff is
deeply concerned with what makes something itself and when you
can call it what it is? You know, this makes
up an interesting side question here. Do you think of

(07:25):
yourself as Joe? That's a good question, and there are
actually a couple of ways to answer it. I mean,
I would say in when I step back and think
of myself, I do I guess I think of myself
as Joe, as a self. You know, there's some there's
some soul Joe out there that is the core of
who I think I am and my main qualities and
all that. And of course you're not always the best

(07:46):
judge of yourself, so other people could probably describe that
person better than I could. But there's there's another sense
of how you think of yourself in which I don't
think I think of myself as Joe moment to moment.
I think of myself as the most recent contents of
my consciousness. So I'm just a moment to moment. I'm

(08:06):
not Joe. Moment to moment, I am whatever I'm thinking about.
That's a good way of putting it. Well. When I
try and answer the question myself, I think, well, I'm not.
I don't only think of myself as Robert. I think
of myself kind of as the me. You know, I'm
just I'm just this I in in a given scenario.
Unless I am like you're you're saying essentially becoming the

(08:27):
thoughts that I am having. And then I'm even further
away from this. When I when I'm forced to think
of myself as Robert, it is because Uh, the external
world is is making me do it, because that is
what they call me, and that is what I continue
to be called because I just, I guess, don't feel
passionately enough about it to change it. Well, one of
the reasons we wanted to talk about the idea of

(08:48):
identity in the Ship of Theseus is that the external
world is increasingly going to be forcing us to think
about questions like this because of new technological capabilities that
are coming online. So this has yet another conversation that
we're having, sort of in the wake of a conversation
you saw in New York this year at the World
Science Festival. But this is a great topic that's worth
exploring from the bottom up. So I say we go

(09:10):
all the way back to Theseus and then work our
way to the technological and scientific questions. All right, well,
let's start with theseus. Then, who was a gimme Theseus?
He's essentially the flash Gordon of mythology. You know, he's
always the most important, but the least interesting character in
a given story. That's my initial response anyway. But he

(09:31):
also went into the maze and fought the minotaur. Right, yeah,
not only thought the menotor, but but what is he
is the slayer of the minotaur, solver of the Manillan
maze as well. Solver. That's the corporate speak idea, right,
he didn't slay the minotaur. He solved that problem, right,
He was able to execute on on his strategy. Yes,

(09:51):
but then he also escaped from the maze right by
by virtue of string if I remember, Oh, that's right. Yeah,
that's a good part, because it's one thing to kill
the minotaur. I mean, that's pretty impressive in on itself,
but you still have to find your way out of
the Manoan maze. How many minimally counterintuitive elements does the
story of theseus and the minotaur have? Well, we have
the minotaur for starters? Is that it is that the
only part? Well the maze I suppose I suppose there

(10:15):
could be a real maze or is there something magic
about the maze? Well, that's kind of the if I'm
remembering correctly from past episode on on mazes and labyrinths
um one of the things about the maze is that
depends on depends on which telling you're looking at. If
you go back far enough, it's less of a maze.
It could be something else, something less extravagant. But as

(10:35):
the tradition builds, the maze becomes this, this fabulous, fabulous
dungeons and dragons dungeon scenario, you know, which I love.
But but I guess that's always something to keep in
mind with with these tales, is this not it fits
in with what we're talking about here today. Mythological story

(10:55):
is not this one thing that hasn't passed on. It
is a thing that is built upon on a thing
that changes over time. Ah well, well, that brings us
to the central concept, right the ship of Theseus, so
to quote from Plutarch in his his Lives, he wrote
you about the lives of illustrious men, And so Plutarch wrote, quote,
the ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned,

(11:17):
had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down
even to the time of Demetrius. Hilarious, for they took
away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new
and stronger timber in their place. Insomuch that this ship
became a standing example among the philosophers for the logical
questions of things that grow. One side holding that the

(11:40):
ship remained the same and the other contending that it
was not the same. So there's your classic dilemma on
the Ship of Theseus. They have a ship. The ship,
of course, like all ships, rots and falls away over time,
so you've got to replace parts of it. Now, if
you maintain this ship for so long that you've eventually
replaced every original board in the ship and no original

(12:04):
parts remain, is it the same ship? Is it still
the Ship of Theseus? Or has it become something else? Yeah,
the hokey version of this is, or the hokey variant
is is Grandfather's Acts, which imagine a number of our
listeners have heard as well, why is this hokey? It's
just it's like it only has two parts to it, Like,
there's so the Grandfather's Acts as the idea. Hey, here's

(12:26):
Grandfather's Acts. But the handle rotted away. We had to
replace that, and then also the blade brokes we had
to replace that. Both parts of this two part tool
have been replaced. How can it possibly be Grandfather's Acts? Well, actually,
don't think that's a hokey example, because I think that
kind of thing really comes through when when you think
about say, artifacts in the museum, A lot of historical

(12:49):
artifacts in a museum are not going to be exactly
the same material constituents as when the artifact was first forged,
or especially a lot of like things that are not
so much an artifact you can pick up in your hand,
but like buildings and installations, a lot of these things
have been restored long ago in history. So you might

(13:10):
see a thing in a museum that at some point
somebody replaced parts of long ago. So are you seeing
the real original thing? Yeah? You know, this makes me
think of the Parthenon, which of course is in ruins
and has been in ruins for a little while. Now
should we rebuild it exactly? But if you rebuild it,
then yes, you make it look like the thing that

(13:31):
once was. But then, like you think, the thing that
wants to think that think, and then you have to
choose which era you want to recreate. You know, there's
certain eras that they're certainly not talking about recreating. But
but then, yeah, once you've restored it, then you also
lose the the iconic ruins that exist today that then
in that in a way are more i guess you

(13:52):
could say, honest reminder of what was there before. Well,
in a way also the ruins are part of what
the Parthenon is is. I mean, the Parthenon is a
thing that exists over time, and if you take away
the ruins, you have in a way destroyed the Parthenon,
even if you take them away to rebuild it. I
think of that. It makes me think of the Colossi

(14:12):
of Memnon. We discuss which to remind everybody, these were
These were a pair of of ancient coloss i. One
of them fell over in ancient times. But then what's
also restored poorly in ancient times? Uh so what do
you do? Do you get up you decide one day
that you're just gonna restore them both to how they
may have once looked? Do you restore them both to

(14:34):
the ruins? I mean there are these are all a
part of the essentially the life cycle of these statues
over time. Yeah, so this question is actually meaningful. If
you want people to be able to experience history, what
is the thing that gives them the most authentic experience
of history? Is it the decayed version as it stands
or is it a restored version? And the same thing

(14:55):
is true of the ship. If you want people to
be able to see the ship of theseus because it
has this great historical significance. Do you replace the rotting
parts or do you just let it rot? And if
you just let it rot, does it eventually disappear? Of
course it does. I think that's one of the reasons
I like the Ship of Theseus more than I care
for a grandfather's acts, because it's more gradual. There's so

(15:17):
many more parts involved. There's more of a question of
at what point, uh, you know, is it more new
than old? At which point in this gradual process does
its lot? Does it lose its identity? Yeah? I see
what you're saying. It's sort of incorporates the paradox of
the heap into the question of whether a thing that
is replaced in the same way as the original thing,

(15:39):
because you're you're you're asking is there a transition point?
At what point is you know, if fifty percent of
the mass of the ship has been replaced, now, is
it no longer the Ship of Theseus? Like it's a
dollar bill, you know, do you have more than half
of it to have it be worth a dollar? Yeah?
Like this this comes up some more scenario comes up
when we start thinking about species and does speed ceation?

(16:00):
At what point does this cease to be one species
and truly become a different species. Well, this just highlights
the idea, the fact that species is sort of an
artificial distinction. I mean, it has some utility for biologists,
but it's a species, not a thing you find in nature.
It's just sort of a useful concept, a useful concept

(16:22):
to describe something that is an ongoing process, which you know. Ultimately,
one of the questions who are asking here today is
to what extent can the same be said about identity? Now,
of course, lots of philosophers have explored the idea of
the ship of theseus. You know, philosophers get real worked
up about whether something is what it is. So Plato's
Cradlest Dialogue in some ways deals with this concept um

(16:44):
and Thomas Hobbes dealt with it too, right, that's right
English philosopher Thomas Hobbs, who have fifteen eight through sixteen
seventy nine. He added another and in my opinion, very
fun level of complexity to this thought experiment. He said,
what if you not only gradually replaced all of the
part of the ship of theseus, but what if you
also took all of those old parts and use them

(17:04):
to assemble an identical boat. So you took the rotting timber,
you replaced that with goodwood, and then you took the
rotting timber and made a new boat out of it. Right,
And at this point, which is the real ship? Now
one is remodeled, though other is reassembled. They're both the
same same ship, and yet clearly they are not the
same ship. That is a good variation. I've also heard

(17:27):
a variation of this where you like gradually steal some
sort of masterpiece a piece at a time and replace it.
So if you were just wanted to steal, to say,
the ship of Theseus from a museum, and you still
it piece by piece, you know, swapping out for a
counterfeit piece, then do you ultimately do what do you have?
Did you actually steal the whole ship or and replace

(17:49):
it with a counterfeit or is that still the ship
in there? I just got an awesome idea for yet
another remake of the Thomas Crown affair. They steal the
painting one centimeter at a time with razor lads. Yeah. Now,
and and you know another detail that's often thrown in
as did theseus ever actually stand foot on this ship?
That ends up playing into the identity of it. But

(18:10):
back to Thomas hop so yeah, he's he's saying, you
know what, have you took the old pieces and you
just reconstructed the ship. But if you you could take
that principle and extend it to other scenarios, less less
contrived ones. Yeah, yeah, I mean he he ends up
pondering this a bit more too. He says, wouldn't this
also mean that nothing can be the same? A man
standing would not be the same as he was when

(18:31):
he was sitting. Water in a vessel would be another
example of this. It's in the vessel and then you
pour it out. I mean, clearly it's the same water
or is it the same water? Based on on this question,
he says, quote, wherefore, the beginnings of individualization is not
always to be taken either from matter alone or from
form alone. And all this gets down to is this

(18:54):
idea of identity over time as opposed to identity in
a single moment, you know, whatever a single moment is.
And there's a lot of philosophical thought on this topic,
more than we can possibly summarize in this episode. Well, yeah,
but I do think it's worth exploring the idea of
thinking about um maybe there. Maybe what these paradoxes are doing,

(19:15):
like the ship of theseus and Grandfather's acts and the
water in a vessel, is highlighting some fundamental flaw in
our metaphysics. It's showing you, hey, you're generating paradox is
because there's something wrong with the way you categorize things
in the world. It's the same way you might know
there's something wrong with your physics theory if it's requiring

(19:35):
you to divide by zero or something. You know, something
went wrong somewhere along here. Well, it really feels more
and more like it's a situation where our metaphysics is
largely about figuring out real time events, like you know,
the soldier is running at me, what should I do
to avoid him? But then we we end up extrapolating

(19:56):
that via mental time travel and memory. We're taking it
into the future. We're taking it into the past, and
we're considering knees and hiss and situations that are not
identical to the present. That's a great point. But more
than that, what would it mean for a thing to
be identical to the present? I mean, is there such
a thing as an identical moment to the president or

(20:16):
the identity of a thing. Even so, I want to
talk about a cool article I saw. This was published
in aon magazine in November seventeen by Kelso vay Era,
and it's called which is more fundamental processes or Things?
And it's just a quick, nice little explainer on the
difference between what's known as substance metaphysics and process metaphysics.

(20:37):
Now metaphysics. Of course, it's just our attempt to understand
the most basic level of reality or existence. It's the
set of principles that's underneath physics. So physics, for example,
might be able to tell to you that a thing
is a certain mass and a certain velocity and so forth.
Metaphysics might ask what does it mean for a thing
to exist? Or what does it mean to have a

(20:57):
property like mass or velocity? What are properties? And so
to quote from Vora's article, quote, Western metaphysics tends to
rely on the paradigm of substances. We often see the
world as a world of things, composed of atomic molecules,
natural kinds, galaxies. Objects are the paradigmatic mode of existence,

(21:20):
the basic building blocks of the universe. What exists exists
as an object, That is to say, things are of
a certain kind, They have some specific qualities and well
defined spatial and temporal limits. And so you might use
the example of like a cat, your cat, Robert, Now,
your cat has existed for a certain amount of time.

(21:41):
It has certain features that you can list that describe
it physically, the color of its fur, the color of
its eyes. I don't know how much it likes to
jump up on the counter, how much it obeys you
when you tell you to do something. I don't know
how much cats ever do that. That's probably not part
of cat identity. Yeah, she's not much for obeying. But
ve Era argues that perhaps substance metaphysics is just not

(22:05):
the best way of thinking about the world, and it
actually leads to confusion and paradox And so he gives
this example of the question of the you know, you know,
the classic do you see this glass of water is
half empty or half full? But about that glass of water,
Veera writes, quote, but what if the isolated frame a
glass of water fails to give the relevant information? Anyone

(22:26):
would prefer an emptier glass that is getting full to
a fuller one getting empty. Any analysis lacking information about
change misses the point which is just what substance metaphysics
is missing. So he articulates the view of process philosophers,
people who believe that the fundamental constituents of reality are
not things but processes. It's not that a thing exists,

(22:51):
it's that a process is in a particular state at
a particular time. As the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead put it,
we should think of the world as a collect s
of occurrences instead of things. And this resonates with me
a lot. I actually think about this view fairly often,
especially when I'm reading about fundamental physics. But speaking of

(23:11):
the Greeks that I mean this also has a there's
a long tradition of this kind of thought. If you
go back to hero Clydas, who propounded the principle of
panta ray. Everything flows. Existence in a way is like
a river, and you can't step into the same river
twice for multiple reasons, not just because the water of
the river has flown past and and changed, but because
you've changed when you step into the river again. And

(23:33):
I think the important thing about this thing about process
metaphysics is that this doesn't have to change anything about
our understanding of the physical laws of nature, and as
far as far as I can tell, it's totally compatible
with them, and some would actually say more compatible with them.
It's also certainly more in keeping with our understanding of biology,
which tells us that they're not actually fixed kinds of

(23:54):
animals or plants or bacteria, but there's instead this process
of change over time, and that the change produces frequencies
of different alleles as its cycles through ever changing states. Yeah,
and then of course you also think about the various
chemical reactions that are are necessary, the various um, you know,
all the things that that that affect our mind stated

(24:16):
even any given point of the day, you know, when
we try and decide who we are, or essentially trying
to like pick out what is the ideal version of
me that they manifest at any given point in the
you know, the currently or in the near future or
the near past. Is it the you know, is it
the I haven't finished my second drink or I'm on

(24:37):
my second cup of coffee? You know me that that's
that's the only version that I'm going to account that
I'm going to count. What's the platonic form of Robert?
You're trying to seek out some ideal form of yourself
that you've created as an abstraction that doesn't actually match
who you are or what you're doing at any given
moment in time. In fact, try to think of an

(24:58):
object that you can identify that has an identity that
does not fundamentally change its former nature over time. A
seed turns into a sapling, and then into a tree,
and then it dies, and then it rots and goes
into the ground. And this is the case of every
biological thing you can think of. But then, of course,
on a longer time scale, other things are like that, stars, asteroids, planets,

(25:21):
black holes. You know, things change over time. Even even
black holes evaporate over time. You've got hawking radiation. Well,
just I think too about the very stones that we
build our monuments and our grave stones out off. We
build things out of stone because it makes them more permanent.
You know that that that it will live on after
we're gone. And that's true. These things tend to exist

(25:44):
on a scale that goes beyond the limits of of
our biology, of pure mortal existence. And yet at the
same time we change the stone to make it into
the graves gravestone, and any walk through the cemetery will
remind you that these things to fade uh and and
and are eroded or are shattered when when tree limbs

(26:07):
fall upon them. Uh so yeah, everything spoiler, everything changes.
It's great to walk backwards through time in a cemetery,
to start with the fresher graves that have the pristine stones,
and then walk back through time to the older and
older graves, which often they tend to just disappear into
the ground. They turn into nubs. You can't read what's
on them anymore. There there there will maybe be just

(26:29):
a kind of rock marker and that's it. Yeah. And
then the sun starts going down and the ghouls come,
and then you realize you've really been wandering in the
graveyard too long and you have changed into a delicious meal.
Uh No, I guess the ghouls prefer grave flesh, don't
they do? They eat live people, you know, it depends
on the interpretation, but the stories I like, I think

(26:50):
the ghouls will go for a live meal if they
can get it, you know, especially if it's somebody that
has become lost in the cemetery. And uh and the
sun is setting. It's like the kid who per furs
chicken McNuggets but will if they're forced to eat a delicious,
fresh cooked me a lot of produce and all that.
But yeah, so I was trying to think of an
example of a counter example, right, is there something that

(27:13):
doesn't change over time? And I was like, well, you know,
you've got maybe fundamental elementary particles. They don't really they
don't have characteristics, they're all identical, they're interchangeable. Maybe they
don't change over time. But thinking back to the entire
history of the universe, that's not actually true. Like during
the Plank Epoch at the beginning of time, as far
as we know in the local universe, quarks and electrons

(27:35):
hadn't been formed yet. This is a time of hot
condensed energy when we did not have quarks, and then
later you get quark glue on plasma and all that.
But so, I don't know, I don't know if you
can actually think of a thing that is an object
that has never changed and will never change. Even in
mythology and religion, you're often hard pressed to find that

(27:57):
one constant that doesn't change. I think probably, I guess
if you if you look at you know, Monotheistic Judeo
christian Um and Islamic interpretations of God. Then you have
something that is supposedly unchanging over time from the very
beginning to the very end. But in it's like most
other religions and cosmologies. You know, God's beget begot, God's

(28:20):
and and then they all have these essentially life cycles
that they're going through. Well, I would say even the
fact that monotheistic gods enter into narratives makes them not
exactly unchanging. You can't tell a narrative about something that
doesn't change. If it enters into a new covenant with
with humanity, then that's hopefully a change. Hopefully there was

(28:41):
some change in uh, in attitude there that we can
view as positive. I'm sure there are a million ways
of splitting that theological hair, but uh, but anyway to
come back to the idea of process philosophy, process metaphysics,
thinking of things not as objects. This is not a
world of things, but a world of processes going through changes.
How how should this change the way we think about
the ship of theseus, so Vieira writes. To explain why

(29:05):
things change without losing their identity substance, philosophers need deposit
some underlying core, an essence that remains the same throughout change.
It is not easy to pin down what this core
might be. As the paradox of theseus ship illustrates, and
then he explains the ship as we already have. But
he writes, is this the same ship even though materially

(29:25):
it is completely different? For substance philosophers, this is something
of a paradox. For process philosophers, this is a necessary
part of identity. Of course, it is the same ship.
Identity ceases to be a static equivalence of a thing
with itself. After all, without the repairs, the ship would
have lost its functionality. It would have become a ruin

(29:45):
or a shipwreck. Well, it just wouldn't be a ship anymore. Yeah,
uh so Yeah, ships change, parts get replaced, and that's
part of the process of the ship. There is no
thing ship. Ship is. A ship is an ongoing process
of change, just like you and me are. And Naviera
defends against the idea that processes are just transitions between

(30:06):
different fundamental substance realities by pointing out one thing we
mentioned a little bit earlier than the paradox of the heap.
Uh if you've never read about this before, the paradox
of the heap basically says, okay, you've got a heap
of sand. Now you remove one grain of sand at
a time, and every time you remove a grain of sand,
you ask is it still a heap of sand? And
at some point you will only have one grain of

(30:27):
sand left. That's obviously not a heap. But you can't
point to a moment where suddenly the heap was not
a heap anymore. The same thing happens with biological entities
and evolution. One of the great images that are Richard
Dawkins is used in explaining the history of an organism
is try to imagine your ancestors going all the way

(30:48):
back down the generations, where you hold hands with your mother,
and then your mother holds hands with her mother, and
it goes back like that forever. At what point, where
will you find the moment where mother gave birth to
a daughter of a different species than her. It will
never happen every At every point, the mother was giving

(31:08):
birth to something that was pretty much the same animal
she was. But these changes accumulate over time, and you
can't if you zoom in, you'll never see the change.
I mean, at some point, the thumb is no longer opposable.
I guess that that might play a role. Well, but
it's not going to be a transition from opposable to
not opposable. It'll be it'll be a gradual transition. That's

(31:29):
something that maybe is not even noticeably less opposable, but
does just slightly less and eventually it just becomes a
fist bump. Oh, there you go. Can't hold hands anymore,
You just fist bumping mom all the way back to
the protozoa. But that can't be right, right, because the
fist bump is the thing you arrive at, not a
thing you came from. Fist bump is the future. But well,
but who's to say. Who's to say that the fist

(31:51):
bump wasn't the predominant mode of greeting in among archaic humans.
They might have even done the explosion, who knows, Yeah,
or the snail. That's what all those hands on the
cave walls are the explosion. Alright, On that note, we're
going to take a quick break. But when we come back,
we will summon the swampman. Than all right, we're back.

(32:15):
So we've been talking about the ship of DC. Is
the question of what determines the identity of a thing.
If you take a ship and you replace all of
its parts over many years, is it still the same
ship even if no original part of that ship remains.
And one of the ways that this becomes actually relevant
to the real world is when we start thinking about minds, right,

(32:37):
because we have this thing we call experience, the experience
of experience, and you have the sensation that your experience
is continuous, or at least I have that sensation. I
assume everybody else does. Everybody else acts like they do,
and like they want their experience to be a unified
part of this continuous, ongoing thing that is identifiable as itself.

(32:59):
You don't want to suddenly be somebody else who is
no longer you. Those certainly people do have, and this
becomes a question, like, to what extent do they legitimately
have this moment of just profound change in their life,
you know, at a moment of revelation or salvation, you know,
a road to damask this kind of thing. To what
extent is it a true change or is it a

(33:22):
or are we like forcing the change upon ourselves. We're
saying that we changed, but on on some other level,
we're still thinking of ourselves as a continuous movement. Well,
even then, people tend to put the value of their
change in terms of themselves relative to who they used
to be. So if you have had this road to
Damascus moment where you know, I'm a different person now

(33:44):
and I'm so glad I am, you tend to think
of that as being valuable relative to whatever kind of
creepy were before, right, I mean, any if you have
a good redemption story, you've got to get into what
what came first. Yeah. And also if every personal change
or improvement for the better was like the Artrek teleporter
that just kills you and makes a newer, better copy
of you, would people really go for it? I don't know. Yeah,

(34:06):
It's kind of like, you know, occasionally there'll be a
story where somebody, like generally they've read a book or something,
but they've made this phenomenal change that used to be
a terrible person and now they're a good person, and
they're out there preaching the word about how everyone should
be a good person too. And it makes you think
at times, well, I was never a terrible person. How come?
How come Terry Gross isn't talking to me? You're the

(34:28):
brother in the prodigal Son story exactly. I never This
isn't fair. Yeah, I was good the whole time. Where's
my uh, where's my celebration? Ain't that life where jealous
creatures aren't? But anyway, so, yeah, we we need to
talk about the swampman, Robers. We've put the swampman off
for far too long. So the swampman is a variation
on the ship of theseus idea applied to the human mind.

(34:52):
And this is originally a concept that was introduced by
the philosopher Donald Davidson in a presentation called Knowing One's
Own Mind, originally, I think in the Proceedings and Addresses
of the American Philosophical Association. The version I found was
reprinted in the American Philosophical Association's Centennial series from but
the original one was back in the eighties seven, and

(35:14):
so Donald Davidson was raising this question, what is the
relationship between the identity of a thing in the history
of that thing. Are you ready to go to the swamp, Robert,
let's to the swamp? Okay, Davidson says, suppose lightning strikes
a dead tree in a swamp. I am standing nearby.
My body is reduced to its elements, while entirely by

(35:36):
coincidence and out of different molecules, the tree is turned
into my physical replica. My replica, the swamp Man, moves
exactly as I did, according to its nature. It departs
the swamp encounters and seems to recognize my friends and
appears to return their greetings in English. It moves into

(35:56):
my house and seems to write articles on radical interpretation.
And no one can tell the difference. But there is
a difference. My replica can't recognize my friends. It can't
recognize anything, since it never cognized anything in the first place.
It can't know my friends names, though of course it
seems to. It can't remember my house. It can't mean

(36:20):
what I do by the word house, for example, since
the sound house it makes was not learned in the
context that would give it the right meaning, or any
meaning at all. Indeed, I don't see how my replica
can be said to mean anything by the sounds it makes,
nor to have any thoughts. It's a nice creepy little tale.

(36:41):
Uh that is summoning. Uh. You know memories of the
philosophical zombies that we've discussed, the p zombies. Well, yeah,
so it's the question with the p zombies is it's
assumed in the P zombie thought experiment that that they
behave exactly like humans, except they're not conscious. I guess
Davidson's asking the question of can thing that behaves exactly

(37:02):
like a normal person but has no prior experiences actually
be having thoughts, actually be uh speaking meaningful sentences if
it's just randomly producing phenomena identical to what a person
would produce if they arrived at those behaviors by the
normal means. And so to be clear, if we if
we follow through with this, if we really imagine what

(37:24):
he's saying, a perfect Adam for Adam copy of you
would be externally indistinguishable from you, and would presumably behave
exactly like the original you. There's nothing we know of
that would make it behave differently, but it would not
exist in a context in which its behavior would have
any meaning. It might have a long heartfelt conversation with

(37:45):
a close friend of yours, and it would behave exactly
like you would and say the exact same things the
original You would have said in that conversation, but it
in fact would never have met this friend before. So
does the swamp Creature. I have a relationship with your friend.
Does the swamp creature know the friend? And for the
same reason, does the swamp creature know anything? Now, I

(38:08):
know we have some comic book fans out there who
might think, hey, this sounds a little bit familiar, because
this is exactly the way that Alec Holland becomes swamp
Thing in Alan Moore's amazing run with the swamp Thing comic.
Huh um. Actually went back and read this again. The
very first issue, I guess you'd say this is is

(38:31):
titled The Anatomy Lesson. It's from February. Yeah, I haven't
read it. Actually, I feel bad because Christian once gave
me a huge stack of comics to read that did
include a run of Swamp Thing. I'm sure it was Moore's,
but I never made it to that one though. I
did read All Star Superman, which was great and I
think sort of lightly brushed against some of the same
philosophical questions about the identity of a person through time

(38:54):
travel and all that. But I gotta read swamp Thing now.
Oh yeah, it's it's It's definitely worth checking out. It's
probably been a decade since I read All of it,
but I did pick up the anatomy lesson and gave
it another read, and it is indeed wonderful. This is
the one that originally hooked me when I when I
read it for the first time, and I wound up
spending way too much money at the time on all

(39:15):
of the Alan Moore swamp Thing books. Uh, none of
them disappointed. But this first story is just perfect. It's
a it's an intelligent little horror story that cast the very,
the very identity of swamp thing in a new light.
So he's not just Alc Holland, a man who is
mutated into a plant man following a science lab explosion

(39:36):
in the swamp. No is More describes it. The wonder
chemical here transforms the plants, and when Holland's burnt corpse
sinks into the swamp, the plants eat it and regrow
a body that believes itself to be Alc Holland. So
the organs don't work, the heart, lungs, brains, it's all
just vegetable manner that has form but no function. But

(39:58):
it believes it is Holland, and it is always believed
that it is Holland. And this is the only thing
that has kept the swamp Things saying this whole time. Well,
so this Davidson presentation, I believe is from the first
time he presented It was in seven, which is after this.
So I think it would have to be that Davidson

(40:20):
was inspired by swamp Thing and not the other way around. Yeah,
I think it might be the case. I did just
a little bit of research on this, and I could
not find any definitive statements on inspiration here. But but
it seems like that would be the case, and I
think that's great. I suppose we can only wait until
the leave extraordinary gentlemen show up in the philosophy journals. Now, well,

(40:40):
I would actually love to see um swamp Thing and
Swampman meet up. I think that sounds like exactly the
kind of thing that Alan Moore could return to rite
at some point. In fact, I'm a little surprised it
didn't happen, except Swampman would be completely indistinguishable from Donald Davidson, right,
so it would basically just be Donald Davidson meets swamp Thing,

(41:02):
except it's not the original Donald Davidson. I mean, it's
a weird thing to consider. I spend a while trying
to This is one of those weird kind of thought
experiments that pokes you and you have to sit there
for a while thinking like, wait a minute, is this
Is this truly illuminating or not? I mean, I was
like trying to decide and I still don't think I've

(41:23):
made up my mind. But it is strange. What does
it mean to have a thought? Because we typically believe
that a thought is about something, So say, for example,
you have the thought I do not like the smell
of hard boiled eggs. We consider it part of the
definition of this thought that you're aware of the existence
of hard boiled eggs and you have smelled them, or

(41:44):
at least you think you have, and you do not
like the smell. But if a being with an atom
for adom replica of your brain has that thought and
yet it has never smelled this smell, is it really
having that thought? What is it doing with its brain?
You know, it would not be forming that thought from
information derived from sense experience. That thought when coming from

(42:05):
a being that's never seen any evidence of the existence
of hard boiled eggs, has never smelled them, hasn't ever
learned the words hard boiled eggs or the words smell.
The thought is just random behavior, no more significant than
you know, a million pages of random numbers printed out
on paper. Now at the same time that I can't
help but think that, hey, I could develop a false
memory of, say, eating a hard boiled ostrich egg, which

(42:28):
I don't believe I have ever eaten. But if I but,
I can easily imagine where I might tweak my memory
into into thinking that I have. Likewise, what have I
read a very convincing passage in a novel in which
a character eats a hard boiled dragon egg. I have
no actual sense experience of that happening, But if it
was well written and had lots of detail and atmosphere,

(42:50):
then I could I could very well in a sense
experience it in my mind. I think it's fairly obvious
that that we humans spend a great deal of time
obsessing over memories that are at least flawed, even if
we're lucky enough to be free of memories that are
false entirely. And you're exactly right, I mean we have
we have false memories all the time, but they arise
within a context of semantics, right, I mean they arise

(43:12):
in a world where you know that you exist and
where words have meanings, and you've learned the meanings of
words like egg and like smell, and you know that
there is such a thing as smells. And I mean,
there's an entire structure that makes that false memory possible
and makes it feel meaningful. So, for instance, I I've
had a hard boiled egg, I have seen an ostrich

(43:33):
I've seen a picture of an ostrich egg. Yeah, I
can therefore extrapolate what it would be to eat one
and then have the fuel to to build that false memory. Yeah.
Now imagine you have a brain that generates that memory,
except it's never seen anything, and it's never learned any words,
and it's never had any of this experience. It just

(43:54):
happens to have the atomic structure of a brain that
has had all those experiences, and thus it behaves the
same way. It's like if I had to form a
false memory of smoking a clues pats like what, I
don't I don't know where I would begin to to
assemble that memory exactly. So Yeah, that's what's at stake.
So I I've I've struggled with this thought experiment because

(44:14):
I don't know if it's if it's making me feel
weird because it gets it something really fundamental, or because
it's one of those confusion machines that just like takes
our intuitions and churns up a bunch of confusion about
stuff that doesn't really matter. Yeah, I don't know. I
keep coming back to the idea that if swamp man
or even swamp thing, remember like, if he has these

(44:36):
memories of being this person, then yeah, those those those
memories arise from those memories, have we have internal context.
They're kind of like a software that that that that
that that he's carrying around with him. Yeah, and even
if he you know, even if it's just a copy
of the original software, it's still the software. Well, it's
kind of like if you imagined a software, a piece

(44:58):
of software created by randomly generating characters to create lines
of code that would execute eventually, and so at some
point you could randomly create a piece of software that
does things. Could you call that software? Could you say
that it has a purpose, Could you say that it
has functions? Could you say that it uh that it executes?

(45:19):
I mean, obviously we don't think software is conscious. I
guess the question of whether the swampman would be conscious
is a different kind of thing. Well, if if Swamman
goes home and and then and says hi to to
these friends, I feel like he's he's as human as
anybody else. Really, I think that would be Daniel Dennett's take.
So Dinnett has addressed the challenges and usefulness of this

(45:42):
thought experiment about Swampman, despite how popular it's been. Davidson
first offered it, I think in eight seven, and uh
though a lot of people have picked up on it
since then. Davidson apparently told Dnnett at some point that
he regretted introducing it because he believed it caused a
lot of unenlightening back and forth without proving much. So
then it's got a critique of this thought experiment. He says,

(46:03):
You know, a lot of thought experiments basically try to
function like science experiments, so you can coct a bizarre,
implausible scenario with the purpose of isolating a variable. You
want to put something some particular variable. You want to
be able to turn one knob up to eleven and
control everything else, and you know, run everything else down
to zero, so that you can test your intuitions about

(46:27):
what happens and with changes in that variable alone, and
so the variable isolated in this thought experiment is the
history of an object such as a person. Right, you say,
materially identical. Only thing that's different is how the atom's
got that way. And then you know, he admits that
a lot of times thought experiments like this are really useful.
I think about how physicists like Einstein and Galileo and

(46:48):
Newton abuse thought experiments. Uh. They use intuitions and math
to determine fundamental facts about the laws of nature before
anybody had actually confirmed them with physical experiments. So thought experiment,
it's based on bizarre scenarios and intuitions, can be very powerful.
But other times thought experiments testing bizarre scenarios are are
just creating unnecessary confusion. And in his discussion of Swampman,

(47:12):
then it asks us to consider the cow shark. Robert,
have you ever seen a cow shark? I have not. Well,
here here's how you know if you have. The cow
shark is created when a normal cow gives birth to
an animal that is Adam, for Adam exactly like a
shark that you would find swimming in the ocean. Now,
is this newborn animal a cow or a shark? I'm

(47:34):
gonna say it's a shark. It looks like a shark,
if it swims like a shark, it's a shark. Even
if it came out of a cow. Oh, well, so
you got you're challenging some definitions, right, because some people
would say, well, white sharks are born to shark parents.
Even if a shark looks kind of weird, it's still
a shark, right if it's parents were sharks. Well, that
kind of logic will get you eaten by a shark,
I'm thinking. But then denn It adds another wrinkle. He says, Okay, well,

(47:58):
let's say this shark is them for Adam, a shark,
but with the exception that it has cow DNA and
all of it cells. Now is it a cow or
a shark? It's a very peculiar shark, I would say, now,
dnn It asks this question with with the idea that
if you ask this to a biologist, they would probably
not think this was a very meaningful question, right, because
in reality, a cow will never give birth to an

(48:20):
animal in the perfect form of a shark that has
cow DNA and all of its cells. It's not logically impossible,
meaning it doesn't involve an inherent contradiction, but it's just
never ever going to happen in nature, and thus we
don't learn a lot about biology by testing our intuitions
about cows and sharks this way, because our intuitions about
biology have evolved to function in the world where this

(48:43):
never happens and never will happen. In other words, the
very tools we're using to solve this puzzle of is
it a cow is it a shark are shaped by
a world where this question will never arise because it
is physically impossible. Now, you could come back and you
could say, wait a minute, haven't we solved real world
physics problems by creating physically impossible thought experiments things like

(49:04):
a like a sleigh traveling at the speed of light
for relativity, or objects that fly through the air with
zero friction. And the answer is yes. But Dinnett says,
you know, those experiments involved much less of an uncontrolled
departure from reality than the cow, shark or the swampman.
The physics experiments carefully name and limit their violations of
reality so that you can take that violation and calibrated

(49:27):
as part of the experiment, and then real world experiments
can be devised to test the conclusions of the thought
experiments after you're done. Not so for cow shark and swampman. Really,
you know, dinn It says, uh, there's sort of a
general rule of thumb, and It's quote the utility of
a thought experiment is inversely proportional to the size of

(49:48):
its departures from reality. So he does not really seem
concerned with Davidson's worries about whether swampman can actually have
thoughts or known the meanings of words, or even be
a person, because swamp may is physically impossible in the
context that we've developed words and concepts like thought and meaning.
In person, a person has thoughts which are derived from evolution, development,

(50:10):
and experience, and a swampman does not exist within that context.
So I'm curious when you think about Dennett's critique here.
I think he makes a good point, but I'm gonna
have to come back on it. Well, I do feel
like there is this sense that some of some thought
experiments are of course very useful, and then the further

(50:30):
you you get, you kind of get into that territory
of their fun. They're great to think about it, you know,
It's like saying, oh, my hands can touch everything but themselves. Man,
you know they're it's it's great, but I know what
my hand can touch itself. I'm poking my palm right now.
Well maybe, but this is why this was that was
from Futurama. I think with the one of the the
aliens eats a hippie and becomes high, and it's like,

(50:54):
my hands can touch everything but themselves. Um So it's yeah,
kind of a fall paradox. But you know, there's so
many of these things that they I do. I do
kind of side within it here. It does feel like
some of the more extravagant thought experiments do get into
that area where it's not particularly useful, but it's fun.
It's more recreational. Right. Yeah, I think that's right. I

(51:17):
mean I get what he's saying, and I think he's
exactly right that we should be careful not to draw
conclusions by testing our intuitions on conditions that those intuitions
are totally unsuited to evaluate. Here's a great example. I
bet you've heard people make arguments about the origin of
the universe based on an intuitive understanding of things like
space and time. Right, you know, people argue about like

(51:40):
what it means for the universe to begin or to
come into existence or something like that, based on what
they think it means for like a meeting at the
office to begin. It's just like our concepts are day
to day concepts are not only unhelpful but directly confusing
in that context. But I might take issue with Dennett's
response because I would say we live in a world

(52:01):
where science and technology might be making versions of the
Swampman experiment sort of replicable in reality. Maybe not making
an atom for adom recreation of your entire body that
does seem fairly impossible, but by making something like a
perfect copy of the processing functions of your individual brain,
or say, gradually replacing parts of your brain ship of

(52:24):
THESEUS style with a biotic computer hardware. And I want
to be clear that I don't know this is possible.
I'm pretty skeptical. I think Robert, you're also somewhat skeptical
of the curse Wiley and hype about digital immortality and
all that kind of stuff that I think there's a
lot of unanswered questions about that. That's some techno utopians
take for granted, But I also can't rule it out,

(52:44):
so it may not be a sure thing that you
can replace your brain with a digital copy, or that
you can replace parts of your brain one at a
time with hardware. But it's not a swampman, and it's
not a cow shark. It's a thing that I can't
be sure we should rule out. So this is a
question that it's entirely possible we could face in reality

(53:04):
in the near technological future. All right, so let's take
another break and when we come back we will discuss
this a bit more. Alright, we're back, So before we
keep going, though, Joe, I do want to point out, um,
your So what you do when I said that, when
I quoted the Alien and Future rum and said that
the hand can touch everything but itself, you demonstrated your

(53:27):
hand touching itself, But actually your fingers were touching your palm.
Was your hand actually touching your hand? Maybe there's more
weight to this, uh, this paradox than I thought. Well,
maybe there are no such things as hands. Is there
a hand or is it just like a team upon
which you have fingers and palm playing? You know, that's
another example that sometimes comes up for the ship of

(53:49):
theseus a sports team them individual members change over time.
But we have this idea that the team itself is
a thing that is consistent, even though sport teams are
are are generally anything. But you know they'll they'll be
ups and downs. Uh uh. You know, they may have
a great year this year, but then who knows what
next season will be like? Yes, definitely, this happens all

(54:10):
the time. Let's say you you like a company, you
want to invest in a company, but that company has
multiple rounds of like layoffs and new hires and all that,
so that none of the original people remain. And then
say they change their branding and they get a new
name for the company and all that, and they also
end up changing their core business model so that they're
doing something different than what they originally did. But you're

(54:33):
still investing in the company. I don't know why I
went to that. I'm not usually a big stocks guy.
So this ship of theseus, as we've discussed it, it
reveals a lot about the nature of change and this
elusive quality of self. Any given mind state we express
is ultimately just a just a phase and a continual path.
We tend to falsely identify both past selves and future

(54:56):
selves as being the same as who we are now.
But the reality, of course is it is it is
rather akin to these disassembled and reconstructed ships that we're
talking about. I'm a vessel composed of certain parts of
my past, and many of these parts will constitute the
ship of my future. And so when we ponder such
possibilities as digital immortality or some form of digitalized consciousness,

(55:19):
we can't help it summon the ship of theseus which
me am I attempting to safeguard, though will and will
it remain me? Will it change? Doesn't matter? And then
there's the whole coin flip to consider. Oh yeah, yeah,
what's the deal with the coin flip? Propert um, Well,
this is the idea, like, if I am digitizing myself
for teleporting, is there any uh well, am I actually

(55:40):
going to continue experiencing as this new thing? Or is
it in there? Well that's a great question. I mean,
we don't really know the answer to that, and I
feel like it's almost hilarious sometimes. How easily many techno
utopians and digital immortality enthusiasts just seemed to assume that
your consciousness can be transported onto some kind of hardware

(56:04):
or machine. I think that that's far from a given
we don't even know if it's possible for machines to
be conscious. Maybe, I mean, it might be possible. But
even if so, would that be you in there? Would
it be like the teleporter and Okay, now you die
and here's a digital copy of you that you don't
get to share in the experience of I mean it
ultimately is would it be the same as that stone
statue of a long dead individual, like it's just the

(56:27):
technological evolution of that same idea, like that that statue
is not long dead Napoleon. Uh, neither is this digitized
Napoleon that we're going to send Alpha Centauri. Now. I
attended the World Science Festival earlier this year, and one
of the salons that I attended uh as a smaller
panel discussion, was titled to Be or Not to Be Bionic?

(56:51):
And one of the participants on this panel was a
man by the name of S. Matthew Law, director of
the Center for Bioethics and affiliate aided professor in the
Department of Philosophy at New York University, and he brought
up the whole if you can upload it, is it
you question and pointed to the gradual replacement of neurons

(57:11):
one by one is a potential approach. Uh. And it
makes sense, right, don't just make an immortal robot version
of me? Now gradually change me piece by piece into
an immortal robot almost like almost like tricked me into
being an immortal robot. You know, don't just don't just
hoodwink me all at once, like like you know, slip

(57:32):
in there. That's an interesting question. So yeah, I imagine
if somebody just made a robot copy of you and
then said well, now this is you, you would say, no, wait,
that's don't turn me off. That's not me. But if
they replaced you one part at a time, it's possible
that might give you a feeling of continuous experience that
the rest that the other process wouldn't. But I mean
that depends on you know, they're all these different models

(57:55):
of what's the physical substrate of consciousness? Right? Is consciousness? Uh?
Is there some part of the brain that it's based in.
If you go back to Daniel Dennet, who we were
talking about a minute ago, he might say, well, actually,
the idea that consciousness is a single thing is an illusion.
You know, consciousness is a range of phenomena. Now this uh,
this gradual replacement of neurons to upload consciousness. This, of course,

(58:17):
is just another thought experiment in and of itself. For instance,
cognitive scientists and philosopher David J. Chalmers wrote about it
back in the nineties. Though I'm I'm unsure who first
actually proposed the idea and if it occurred within the
realm of philosophy, cognitive science, or science fiction. So many
of these wonderful ideas actually emerge within the sci fi

(58:39):
realm before they become you know, cognitive science, thought experience,
etcetera swamp thing and swamp Man potentially being an example
of this. I mean, this is one of the great
things about science fiction, is it gives us space to
explore these concepts before they're actually technologically feasible. Yeah. Uh,
and you know it is it kind of gets into
that whole Daniel Dennett situation too. Sometimes it's it's just

(59:01):
there to amuse you and like, you know, twist your
mind around. But if it twist your mind enough, you know,
sometimes you end up it becomes this, uh, this pure
thought experiment. Um. Well. Yeah, and along the same lines,
I think maybe what you're getting at is that sometimes
science fictional explorations of concepts can become the opposite of enlightening.
They just become confusing, they become a bad road to take,

(59:25):
or they just become art. You know. I think of
like some of the Borhees stories where you have somebody
that's dreaming within a dream, the circular ruins and all
these there are elements to them that are similar to
thought experiments. But I would never say that a Borhe's
story is a thought experiment. I guess you could. I mean,
I guess an interesting question in the story, I'd have

(59:46):
to like go back and think story by story, But
I'll library library of Babbel's kind of a thought experience. Yeah, yeah,
I mean you could almost say it's a philosophy paper,
you could. Yeah, alright, maybe I take all that back.
Let's see, I need to reread to some bore Yes preaps.
But but but you know what I'm saying, like it
can become I feel like some of these ideas, it's
almost like there's a crossroads likely right, where are you

(01:00:08):
gonna push it? Are you gonna push it into this
realm of of of sort of you know, boiled down
thought experimentation or is it art? Is it meant to
to make you think and explore new ideas, but not
in like necessarily a you know, a regimented fashion is
most sci fi, just like speculative meta ethics papers that
are it's formulated in a way that people want to read. Well,

(01:00:31):
it comes back to time COP. Time COP is not
a thought experiment. And yet at the same time, when
I first saw it as a kid, and in time
and time over the years, I'll stop and I'll think, well,
that part when when the two villains melt together, is
that right? How would that work? Like? I'm it's you know,
it's poorly constructed ultimately, but it does make me think

(01:00:52):
like a lot of bad movies, do I guess? But
but back to the gradual replacement of neurons and uploading
them and all, um, yeah, it comes back to the
ship of theseis idea during this replacement? Is gradual replacement?
Does it at some point cease to be me? And
And what if there is this dark point in the transition,

(01:01:12):
the moment of unconsciousness, does that signal the end of
your consciousness in the beginning of the next Uh? Is
that which comes after not you? And if it's not,
then again coming back to what you said earlier about anesthesia.
How are we supposed to interpret that is that the
individual before and after anesthesia are those ultimately separate uh entities.

(01:01:34):
I mean, ultimately there's this slippery kind of concept in
here that I feel like his key that that is
causing a lot of the trouble, And it's the idea
of I don't know if there's already a name for it,
but I'd call it something like anticipatory continuity. So it's like,
you think, if you can create a conscious robot and
you could put your brain in there, you know, at

(01:01:55):
least the conscious robot could have the experience of being
continuously you. But what you don't want is the you
that's about to transition, thinking I'm going to disappear and die.
Though of course, you know, the you of every moment
changes into the you of the future, and that you
of the future remembers being past you, and the future

(01:02:18):
you know, the current you doesn't really worry about the
fact that present you won't exist a few seconds in
the future. But there's there's some kind of distinction people
are making mentally. They're right, they're saying, like, if wait,
there's a way that I could die, and some other
thing could go on being me, which would be different
than just me being me a few seconds from now. Well,

(01:02:40):
I just need a teleporter to edit that out before
it recreates the enemy. Edit out the fear of death
in the teleporter, and then I guess we'll be okay.
But I mean, is it death? I mean, I guess
that's actually a question to ask, like, if there's a
version of you continuing, is there a way of saying
that it's actually that it's not any different from you
of three seconds from now continuing the existence of you

(01:03:03):
right now? Well, I mean, because if we're talking about
just the physical body, we also have to remember that
the body does replace itself largely with a new set
of cells every seven seven years to ten years, and
some of the most important parts are revamped even more rapidly.
But that's that's the more original ship of theseus idea.
That's gradual replacement, and so we tend to be on

(01:03:26):
board with that, right you know, I mean, I refuse,
you refuse, I won't do it. There's some people who
who who believe the body is just well, it makes
me think of our old friend Connor McLeod, the Highlander.
So in order to live like five centuries, is it
just more or less like our body, Like everything is
just you know, some cells are dying and being replaced

(01:03:47):
or are his cells just super strong? Are they the
same cells? Is he like also largely identical to the
original Highlander except he had a haircut? Well, I mean
this makes me think about our episode about neuroplasticity, about
how neuroplasticity is a balancing act. Like, you want the
brain to be able to change and adapt to a
certain extent so it can adapt to new scenarios and

(01:04:09):
learn and all that, But you also don't want the
brain to be so radically open to change that it is.
You know, it can just be ravaged by trauma and
things like that. You know, you know what I mean.
So there's weakness in being elastic, but there's also strength
and being elastic. And I guess evolution tried to shape
our our nervous systems to find that correct balance. But

(01:04:32):
inherent in that tension is the idea that some amount
of stability over time is preferable. That's like better for
us as an organism. You don't want to be radically
open to change all the time. Then again maybe that
that only matters over long time scales. And then it's
that I guess you could also want to it's the
average person just going to be open to the appropriate

(01:04:52):
amount of change. I think back to. Uh, this is
a line from Terence McKenna that he said, um, if
there's something that needs to be done, you will find
yourself doing it, um, which is is one of those
statements that seems kind of kind of obvious, but at
the same time it's I keep coming back to and thinking, well, yeah,
I guess I would like. Man, if you say, well,

(01:05:13):
there's this thing I should have done and I didn't
do it, well, maybe you didn't need to do that thing,
and that's why you have reached this point where you're
looking back on it like that. What does it mean
to need to do something? Yeah? Wow, we've really gone
all the way into the navel on this this episode. Um,
lots of hands not touching themselves. All right. Well, on
that note, I think we're gonna exit here. But before

(01:05:37):
we do, well, we're not gonna have time to touch base. Uh.
You know, on every example of the ship of Theseus,
as it's been expressed in various works of art or fiction.
But but I do want to pinpoint a couple of
them here real quick for starters, the book blind Side
by Peter Watts that we both read. I didn't realize
until I started looking into this, or I didn't remember

(01:05:59):
that the space ship that there on is the Theseus.
That's kind and it is a joke, I guess, yeah,
and it is capable of rebuilding itself. And then you
also have a member of the crew who has had
half his brain rebuilt. So there are a number of
elements there well. Also, just generally in the works of
Peter Watts, characters are very much Ship of THESEUS style brains.

(01:06:22):
Maybe we've had lots of neural augmentation and all that.
Now the teleporter problem variant that we talked about, that's
been explored on The Outer Limits and to a large
extent the Christopher Nolan film The Prestige. There was a
character on Star Trek Deep Space nine named Antos who
was a Bajor and spiritual leader who had to have

(01:06:42):
his brain gradually replaced with cybernetics, and this eroded his
previous sense of self and this had a negative impact
on his relationship with Kira, the Joran character on that
show I must. I've never watched Deep Space, but it's
pretty great. I didn't. I have to say, I do
not specifically remember this episode, but I used to watch
it all the time, like every evening at like nine
pm or something in syndication. Our producer Alex has often

(01:07:05):
schooled me on to Space nine. We're gonna get an
email on this one, for sure. Uh. There's an episode
of Futurama titled The six Million Dollar Man, in which Hermes,
one of the characters, gradually replaces his entire body with
the robotic parts, while Zoidberg, the you know, crustacean alien doctor.
He's been stitching the discarded parts together into little Hermes

(01:07:27):
of introlcos dummy. Oh no. And so there, you know,
you're left to wonder, well, which one is the original?
Which one is Hermes? Is that this the robot or
this grotesque meat puppet? And then one of the examples
that I was most impressed we have mainly because I
just had no idea about the depth here on this,
but the tin Woodman from the Wizard of Oz books,

(01:07:48):
the books by L. Frank Baum. Oh, I've never read
the books. I have not either, but when I started
looking into this. Yeah, there's this whole narrative about the
tin Man, how the tin Man has a like his
ax was was cursed by the wicked witch and then
he like accidentally like chopped away, you know, part of
his body, and then then it was replaced with tin.

(01:08:11):
And then he ends up chopping away another part of
his body and it's replaced with tin. And he just
keeps losing pieces upon pieces of his body until he's
all ten except for his heart. And then one day
he cuts himself in half, I believe. And so now
now his heart has been bisected, and that's why he
needs the the heart he has to reclaim like this,
this this portion of his humanity that has been lost

(01:08:33):
in this gradual replacement essentially a cybernetic replacement of itself.
Oh wow, I never thought of Frank Baum getting into cybernetics. Yeah,
he's essentially transhumanist. Right. Are you one of the people
who's a big fan of Return to Oz? I know
people who are into that. I've never seen it, but
I remember seeing the trailer as a kid, being like
a little freaked out by those people with wheels for hands,

(01:08:55):
so I should see it. It sounds exactly like the
thing i'd be into. We should do a science of
return to OZ episode. Well, let's not commit until we
know we're getting into. Okay, Now, there are just a
few fictional examples of the Ship of Theseus. I'm sure
all of you listening out there you have examples you'd
like to bring up as well. Um, so we would

(01:09:16):
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(01:09:39):
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(01:10:00):
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