Fleeting Essence Of Identity

What is the core, the essence of a thing or a person? What is it that makes you "you"? This might seem a straightforward question with an obvious answer; "I'm me, of course, and you're you. That glass on the table is not the table. The table is the table and the glass the glass. And you should stop using controlled substances..."

_{Image by johnhain - source: Pixabay}

This is where the thought experiment of the "Ship of Theuseus" comes in. Imagine, if you will, the mighty wooden warship of Theseus. It has seen many battles and now lies in a harbor as a museum piece. As the years go by, some of the wooden parts begin to rot and are replaced by new ones. Given enough time, all the parts are eventually replaced; now the question is, is the restored ship still the same object as the original? Taken one step further, now imagine that the removed parts are kept in a warehouse, and in time a technology is developed to "cure" their rotting. It's now possible to reconstruct the entire ship from the original, cured parts. The question now becomes: are the two ships, the restored and the reconstructed one, both Theseus' ship?

This is a fun question to ponder on, as it applies to us too, dear reader; we are a material wave-pattern. Whatever makes us "us" is not the material we're made of, because like Theseus' ship, all our parts have been replaced many times; cells constantly die and are replaced and on even smaller scales replacement takes place on an even faster rate. We are in a constant state of reconstruction, so what exactly is the constant, the core, the essence that makes me feel like myself all the time?

Say we develop technology that enables us to replace damaged nerve-cells, including the ones in our brains, synapses and all; how many of them can we replace and still be called human? Let's say we can replace ALL of them, leaving us with a completely restored brain, would we still be conscious like we are now? If we essentially stay the same, that would implicate that robots could eventually become sentient creatures with as convincing an illusion of free will as ourselves; would we have to grant them the right to vote? Would they be eligible for for the same basic human rights? And, going back to the reconstructed version of Theseus' ship, consider that we would then be able to make artificial copies of ourselves. Would we from then on develop further and both, copy and original, become our own unique selves, two different people?

We can also apply this thought experiment to statements: how many words can we replace in a statement before it's meaning becomes something completely different? In philosophy of mind, the ship is replaced by a person whose identity over time is called into question, as we have seen, and there are many more examples of the paradox found in real-life and in fiction. I love science fiction, but I'm glad that these questions are indeed the stuff of science fiction for now, and that we don't have to worry about bumping into ourselves any time soon. Philosophers have been wrestling with this thought experiment for centuries and have come up with several "solutions", all worth getting acquainted with, so here's the Wikipedia article on the Ship of Theseus.

_{The Ship of Theseus (One Minute Philosophy)}

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