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Comment by Blikkentrekker | Hacker News Reader

I find there to be nothing interesting about it.

This, like so many other “philosophical quæstions” is a futile quibble of semantics that answers nothing.

The simple answer to this problem, and many other problems, is that the exercise of giving clouds of atoms in vicinity to one another “identities” is not one based in salient thought. — there is no such thing.

All Theseus' Ship shows is that, indeed, this theory is flawed, and easily reduced to the absurd, but that is a trivial conclusion an unindoctrinated child should be able to easily make in a multitude of ways. It's as though one come with a thought experiment that demonstrates that the borders of countries are an artificial man-made construct, rather than an actual physical property of the universe. — it is rather obvious.

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I tend to agree. It's difficult to draw a good shell around what I call myself. Yes, there is the body, the brain, some part there somewhere that is "Me", but I also have children, and ideas that are part of my identity.

I tend to draw the border of self a little looser than most. I'm a human, a living being, and a piece of me extends both forward and backward in time far beyond the start and end of this meat bag at a keyboard.

Someone pooh-poohing something while claiming to provide a "simple answer to many problems" is ironic at best, and insufferably arrogant at worse.

It's a “simple answer to many problems” in the same way “Hoṃœopathy is nonsense.” is a “simple answer” to explain the complexity of “how can water have a memory?”.

There is no problem, and there is no answer. There is only a complex problem from assuming a falsehood and trying to explain it. — there is nothing arrogant about calling out obvious nonsense.

> The simple answer to this problem, and many other problems, is that the exercise of giving clouds of atoms in vicinity to one another “identities” is not one based in salient thought. — there is no such thing.

Are you implying identies don't exist? Because that either has to be sophistry (i.e. trolling) or insanity.

Way to engage in good faith discussion.

“exist"? I would hardly use such words in this frame of reference.

I'm saying that “identities” are a fuzzy human “You know it when you see it, and different men see it differently.” category that is bereft of any definition that can be objectively measured and reasoned about, and that what I just said is a trivial and obvious conclusion.

They “exist” in the same way that borders between different oceans exist, arbitrarily drawn, and different people will think differently as to where they lie.

If you wish to call that an “existence”, then be my guest, though many others would præfer to not call it such. — ironically the border between “existence” and “nonexistence” is of a similar quality.

The fact that borders exist doesn’t imply that there are different centers of power. In fact, for most of history borders were notoriously ill-defined.

But power in practice does not adhere to how different parties arbitrarily define where borders lie.

Most of nations of the world officially define Crimea to be within the Ukrainian border, but it is the Russian government who wields the actual, practical power there.

It took a rather long time for many countries to stop defining mainland China as falling within the power of the R.O.C. government, despite the R.O.C. wielding no practical power there any more, and the R.O.C. still defines mainland China as falling within it's power.

If “borders” of nations were defined descriptively based on sovereign entities having control over them, then they would certainly be more useful, but, this would also assume a simplified world where it is easy to decide what powerbase is sovereign, and what powerbase binarily has control over what surface of the planet; it is often not so simple and often multiple parties vie for control over a single area, and whether a powerbase be sovereign is not so easy to simply answer.

Power in practice does adhere to borders, just not 100% of the time.

Reality isn’t a computer program. The fact that some rules are broken occasionally doesn’t mean that they aren’t rules.

That's very much what a law of physics is.

If the law is observed broken once, that is a falsification of the entire theory.

And I assume you live in a rather peaceful area if you think powers adheres to borders. In many parts of the world governments have a harm time enforcing their law upon fringe areas where effective anarchy is quite common. — the picture is certainly not as simple as you paint it.

Physics isn’t politics.

Most countries follow borders most of the time.

This really isn’t that complicated.

> I'm saying that “identities” are a fuzzy human “You know it when you see it, and different men see it differently.”

I.e., you claim that identities don't (really) exist.

Do triangles exist? Is the definition of triangle "bereft of any definition that can be objectively measured"?

Is the Ship of Theseus fundamentally different than a triangle, or is it merely a difference of degree?

Ask any random human to define some extremely complex mathematical entity, and you'll get various fuzzy answers.

Does that mean complex math doesn't really exist?

> Do triangles exist? Is the definition of triangle "bereft of any definition that can be objectively measured"?

Certainly not, the definition of a triangle is quite a rigorously defined mathematical construct.

> Is the Ship of Theseus fundamentally different than a triangle, or is it merely a difference of degree?

It is not a difference of quantity but quality. A triangle is an objectively defined, mathematical concept; identities are as I said “You know it when you see it, and different men see it differently.”. — you will not find many mathematicians disagreeing on what is, and is not a triangle.

Another fundamental difference is that a triangle is an abstract reasoning tool, not an empirical one, and no mathematician would suggest that real life objects are, or are not, triangles.

> Ask any random human to define some extremely complex mathematical entity, and you'll get various fuzzy answers.

A lay human being with no mathematical understanding perhaps, but all of these entities have been defined rigorously in mathematical terms.

> Does that mean complex math doesn't really exist?

You were the one who speaks in such terms as “existence”. I will not have you put words in my mouth.

All I said is that one has an objective, rigorous definition such that you will find that every single educated man in the field agrees on what is, and what is not a triangle, such that a machine proof assistant can be fed this definition, and verify machine-level proofs that reason about them, and that the other lacks this such that you find that nigh any man, expert or not, has a different definition of what constitutes the identity of a physical object, and where a new object starts.

> It is not a difference of quantity but quality.

There is no evidence for this, you're claiming this purely out of personal bias.

Just because nobody bothered yet to define a rigorous mental model of 'Ship of Theseus' doesn't mean such a model doesn't exist in principle.

(In fact, the job of programmers is exactly that - to define rigorous models for things that nobody bothered to define before.)

> Just because nobody bothered yet to define a rigorous mental model of 'Ship of Theseus' doesn't mean such a model doesn't exist in principle.

Bothered to?

MY good man, giants have attempted, and failed. — you speak as though no one attempted, rather than that many have, and none could.

> (In fact, the job of programmers is exactly that - to define rigorous models for things that nobody bothered to define before.)

The difference being that they generally succeed and when after millennia of attempts none have, tend to acknowledge that it probably cannot be done.

The notion of an object, in the human sense, doesn't have any solid relationship with the physical world. I hope we are agreed on this much. For some objects, there is a stronger correlation between the human concept and the physical world (i.e. you could find a formal definition that matches to some extent what I mean by a particular spoon), but for other objects in our minds there is nothing in the physical world that truly matches our understanding (the Atlantic Ocean, as an object separate from the Pacific Ocean, is not a physical object, it is just a human abstraction).

In particular, our notion of the identity of an object has no relationship with the physical world, as the Ship of Theseus shows. Our idea that objects "shatter" and "transform", so that if I break a glass the pieces are a different object than the glass; or if I mix of bowl of flower with water and roll it into a dough, the dough is a different object than the bowl of flour and the water - these are not physically definable notions.

When it comes to human identity, the identity perceived by myself, the same logic MUST apply, unless you believe in a soul. The fact that I can think of myself as the same identity as myself 2 seconds ago, or myself when I was a handful of cells in my mother's womb, is obviously an artifice of the human mind. There is no such continuity in the physical world.

And this has all been said from the perspective of classical physics. If you go into QM, where any notion of identity of particles would contradict the theory and observations of it, things really break down.

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