0% of the phrases of the original Wikipedia "Ship of Theseus" article remain | Hacker News Reader

0% of the phrases of the original Wikipedia "Ship of Theseus" article remain

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516 pointsfortran77123 comments

It's hard to say whether it's even the same article at this point.

Naturally.

The solution to the Ship of Theseus is obviously that there is no Ship of Theseus. All things are just events in time, long moments where matter is organized into some structure for a while and then breaks apart again, and we assign names to those events. Some happen so quick that naming them is pointless and others are so slow to dissipate that a name becomes useful.

If that assertion is true, I can’t even respond to the person who typed it. The “event” that typed the comment has passed and “you” are already gone.

The organization of matter is constantly changing. If Heraclitus was right it’s hard to even say which organization of particles counts as Heraclitus.

I believe the solution was given by the great philosopher Pratchett*:

"Wen considered the nature of time and understood that the universe is, instant by instant, recreated anew. Therefore, he understood, there is in truth no past, only a memory of the past. Blink your eyes, and the world you see next did not exist when you closed them. Therefore, he said, the only appropriate state of the mind is surprise. The only appropriate state of the heart is joy. The sky you see now, you have never seen before. The perfect moment is now. Be glad of it."

- Terry Pratchett

(from Thief of Time - a remarkable book, IMO)

* / Wen the eternally surprised

Where to start with reading Sir Terry? I’ve been intimidated in the past. Do you nave to read the others to understand this one?

Google discworld reading order, pick a storyline that is similar to genres you like (the guard books are copper fiction, the Lipwig books are inverted heist novels, the Rincewind books are classic fantasy by way of Oxford University culture, etc.)

Just starting with the first book (The Colour of Magic) and continuing in release order is fine. No need to make things more complicated than that.

Start with the City Watch series of Discworld. If you like Guards! Guards! then you'll like the next books. After reading a couple of them I'd start branching into other series.

> If that assertion is true, I can’t even respond to the person who typed it. The “event” that typed the comment has passed and “you” are already gone.

I think that's exactly right. For the general sanity of the human mind, we make and share assumptions about our experiences.

We don't really agree on what makes a person in the first place. When does a person begin? In the US, that's a heated debate. When does a person cease to exist? If you account for feelings, a relative with advanced dementia, or being in a coma indefinitely often doesn't feel like the same person. Or when people discover something really unpleasant about their significant other. A person only exist in a frame of reference. In a legal framework too, for example, which again changes from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.

Some cultures theorize an essence of sorts, that's unique per person, so it can carry the identity of a person. Let's call that a soul. This makes it easy to think about another person, as they can inhabit another body, or even an inanimate object or even share a body with another, and yet still be unique and addressable.

That is simply a one sided reduction of the ship of Theseus dilemma. In it's reduction, it necessarily negates the essence of ontological meaning, including the meaning of the statement you are making.

The dilemma is not in search of a solution but instead it offers meaning exactly because of it's lack of resolution.

The Ship of Theseus was originally proposed as a paradox, not a question of where subjectively to draw a line between the identity of objects. Like most paradoxes it is the result of a flawed assumption. Here the assumption is that there is a Ship of Theseus. If we assign a definition to "Ship of Theseus" then the question of whether a given object is a Ship of Theseus is trivial. But the paradox assumes there is a Ship of Theseus object on its own rather than a definition of Ship of Theseus. The subjective question of "when, generally, should we consider the Ship of Theseus to be gone" is a separate and arbitrary question.

This hilariously sounds like a possible "defense" in court after being caught stealing said ship. Was it really Theseus's ship?

Here’s a real mystery for you. You’re a worker at a dry dock where you are maintaining a ship. You periodically remove perfectly good parts of the ship and send them away, replacing them with new parts and making falsified records claiming spurious damage that needed to be repaired. At a second facility, the pieces from the original ship are reassembled. Did you steal the ship, or has it been sitting there in drydock all along?

Even better: get a loan to buy a ship that's collateralized with the ship itself, destruct the ship to sell for parts, and default on the loan!

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-09-13/yields...

Insufficiently specified. Clearly depends on the details of the repair contract.

What?! You mean Theseus didn’t have a contract?!

No.

Let's take the more direct approach and move the ship entirely and replace it with a copy.

Have you stolen the ship?

I suppose legally you could argue you haven't. The registration etc still applies to the customers ship, and unless the customer could demonstrate some kind of emotional attachment, there would be no 'loss'.

It's like going to a shop, selecting a tin of beans, when you pay, the cashier swaps it for another tin of beans. Have your beans been stolen?

Something something no-cloning theorem prevents this (/s, since of course, we could 'teleport' the ships's quantum state onto the 'new' ship (/s)).

Now that is the kind of "modern problems require modern solutions" thinking I like to see!

Kudos - excellent examination of implications / change of perspective / viewing from another angle.

The kind of thinking that, more seriously, really can be essential in developing insight(s) etc. ... and, finding (proofs by) contradiction(s) etc.

The solution to the Ship of Theseus is that telos, not atomic physics, is how the vernacular We identify and organize the contents of our existence. I am the same me as the me of 10 years ago, even though we have zero cells in common, because we are iterations of an ongoing physical phenomena the same root cause: my conception.

And so it is with Theseus and his Ship.

You still have lots of cells in common. But point still taken.

I think they are refering to the phenomenon of "Each and every cell of our body is replaced after a period of 7-10 years which means we renew."

https://www.questdiagnostics.com/patients/blog/articles/do-m...

Its a common myth that our cells all die and are replaced by new ones, but that is not actually true, it is true for the vast majority of cells tho.

One of the most extreme example where this is not true, are the female gametes aka the egg cells. They are all created before birth and are never replaced. Quite the opposite of the male counterpart where the production of gametes starts 10+ year after birth and usually continues for the rest of the life.

“The Silent Transformations” by RANÇOIS JULLIEN tackles this head on by highlighting western thought’s roots in ancient Greek concepts of determined forms of being and Aristotilian logic, compared against the fluidity of non-Western thought and emphasis of change over time from ancient Chinese philosophy.

To put it glibly, the Ship of Theseus problem goes away when you stop thinking of identity as discrete points and instead as a process of change and movement through time. I.e., We are not the same people we were as children, and that’s okay. Or Emerson: “I contain multitudes.”

To regard Western and non-Western thought as distinct is to again indulge the fallacy of determined forms and non-fluidity. Going back at least to the time of Alexander the Great before 300BC, there were was constant cross-polination of ideas between Indian and Mediterranean cultures, so that Ashoka used Greek Buddhists to spread the dhamma, and there is some suspicion that Nagarjuna was influenced by Pyrrhonism.

You could say the opposite and say there's no such thing as western, or eastern thought.

Even within countries people have different ideas and have very different world views.

We can nonetheless generalise certain things.

I don't think that's the opposite of what I said. It's more like an extrapolation. But if I came right out to the person who I was replying to and said there is no such thing as eastern or western thought, everyone would have started jumping up and down ;)

But, you are you, from the moment you were conceived in your mother's womb through to the end of your days.

Author, thou, of my inmost being, didst thou not form me in my mother’s womb? I praise thee for my wondrous fashioning, for all the wonders of thy creation. Of my soul thou hast full knowledge, and this mortal frame had no mysteries for thee, who didst contrive it in secret, devise its pattern, there in the dark recesses of the earth. All my acts thy eyes have seen, all are set down already in thy record; my days were numbered before ever they came to be.

— Psalm 139, Knox translation https://www.newadvent.org/bible/psa138.htm

Wow, someone took yesterday’s article about event sourcing way too seriously. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38664412

I missed that one but generally I think event sourcing is pretty great too :)

The ship is a pattern that persists in time.

Not if the overall design is completely altered through the work done on it.

So are you saying that an identity cannot persist beyond the original physical elements that composed the identity?

The opposite. It's identity is really an "event" called the ship of Theseus. The effect continues to happen regardless of the specific matter.

That's fine to define a start event, but where does it end ? Is the universe the ship of Theseus at some point ?

[Disclaimer: I am not a philosopher]

The ship can shrink as much as it can grow. If you replace a wooden plank on it, the discarded wood is no longer part of it. And if you disassemble it entirely, the "event" is no longer happening, and the ship no longer exists.

It's analogous to any other "real event" you might think of. If you have a party, it starts when people show up and ends when people leave. Guests can come and go all the while.

The point isn't to define a strict beginning and end, however. It's to point out that the ship isn't defined by its original parts. It's defined by the confluence of parts that continuously exist and are recognized as being a cohesive entity.

When no one remembers the name of the ship.

The solution is to treat the Ship of Theseus not as an object but as a process. I believe it is what you are saying just with different words. It is no help to claim that there is no Ship of Theseus, because it is. Or at least it was. Or some says it was.

And so it is with consciousness. People place mysticism on consciousness because the idea that we are simply matter capable of knowing it is matter is disturbing. Season 1 of WestWorld used Anthony Hopkins to make this point well.

Not really. Your stance is something that people take when they don't understand the Hard Problem of consciousness.

They don't try to understand hard problem of consciousness and just try to strawman the whole thing down by tying it to mysticism.

Physicists like Penrose are not morons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness

I seriously doubt Westworld writers were aware of the hard problem of consciousness.

>Your stance is something that people take when they don't understand the Hard Problem of consciousness.

Do you also think the 30% of philosophers who also have this stance simply don't understand it? The only one calling anyone a moron here is you, and I don't think anyone involved in this discussion actually is. It's a cheap trick to discredit an opinion you disagree with.

Maybe you should reread your first comment?

> Do you also think the 30% of philosophers who also have this stance simply don't understand it?

Almost none of those philosophers accuse proponents of the hard problem of consciousness with dabbling in mysticism.

> The only one calling anyone a moron here is you, and I don't think anyone involved in this discussion actually is. It's a cheap trick to discredit an opinion you disagree with.

You equated people that find consciousness hard with people being scared of the conclusions. You are essentially saying that those people are not intellectually strong as you.

A sentient Ship of Theseus?

Yes!! :D

Some structures are quite repeated. The 16S rRNA genes.

A hydrogen atom.

An STL file.

Maybe they're all the same Ship.

Nope. The time and space in which they exist acts as a unique identifier.

What's the unique identifier, what's the resolution, and how many bits of information is it?

What if we're in a procedural simulation?

> What if we're in a procedural simulation?

We ARE in a procedural simulation, with a random seed determined at The Big Bang.

Whether someone monitors the simulation or not is a different question.

Is that Event Sourcing applied to philosophy?

This is the Early Buddhist position.

yeah but how can you be sure things are different if they share the same name?

Just like a ship would be "christened" before its maiden voyage, it feels like the very first blob of text added to a draft of an article doesn't really constitute "the original" article. It's still "being built" until it gets a sufficiently decent grade. Right now it is still rated C, even though it's been around for decades. It's like an abandoned half-built ship

(Which is not to say this tweet isn't uninteresting... but it's funnier than it is insightful)

I get a real kick out of going back to articles I created almost 20 years ago to see how much of them still remains.

I still think I have the weirdest named article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qeqertaq_Avannarleq

From the first reply to the Mastadon post linked by u/manicennui:

>@mori@mastodon.au @wikipedia And yet, the Ship of Theseus page remains, thus proving a bird in the hand is worth two stitches in time.

Would have been better if they hadn't bungled their mixed metonymy...

It's a stitch in the bird is worth a pound of eggs off a duck's back, as everyone knows...*

* Courtesy of the excellent "Field Guide of Egregious Mixed Metonomies", soon to be published by Penguin Random House Simon Schuster Merriam Webster Britannica, I'm told

Tiny heads-up: it’s "MastOdon" not "MastAdon". Seems like a common mistake

Thanks

Just like the article, the ship of Theseus changes in its constituency but not in its identity. Am I a different person because almost none of my cells at the time of my birth remain in me? Of course not. And the wiki article is the same article.

Whether something can be identified as a specific thing is a matter of social convention. A transformation of something is not a new thing but exactly the former: a transormation, but still that same thing. When does it become something new? Never. For it to be a different ship, it needs to be deconstructed first fully.

But what if you reconstruct it so that it is identical to the former ship? It's still a new ship because identity is defined at the time of construction, independent of relative comparisons. Similar to how your complete identical clone would be a different person.

Yes! This is the discussion starter we've been waiting for.

Then you're admitting that there's something non-physical that defines the identity of the physical thing, is it possible to argue against that?

Or is identity itself meaningless? But it cannot be because without identity there can be no understanding of the universe. Thus, the non-physical is a requirement of the physical. One cannot exist without the other. But where, in what non-physical plane (is there a word for that? ideamension?), does the non-physical inhabit?

Or is "understanding" also only existent in the ideamension, not a requirement of the existence of the physical universe? But if not for understanding, why does the universe exist in the first place? Reason; yet another resident of the ideamension.

> Then you're admitting that there's something non-physical that defines the identity of the physical thing

It's not a question of being physical but that of independently describable.

> Or is identity itself meaningless

Identity is how we frame and contextualize for the purpose of thought and communication. For the purpose of thought I might consider the modified ship the same as the one in the initial state but if the law requires you to rename and re-register as new when you modify so much of a ship then for legal purposes I will start identifying it as a new ship but the people that use the ship will probably consider it that same old ship because for the purpose of thought the independently describable object has not changed.

It is not identity that has no meaning but that physical objects themselves have no meaning to us unless framed in an independently describable context (i.e.: as separate from all other things in the context).

For a computer program, does the letter 'A' exist? It does if the program can decode a byte as such, but does its inability to describe the bits and bytes that way mean the letter 'A' does not exist? Maybe it is 0x41? Identity has meaning but only to those who are able to describe that identity and reason about the context.

> ship of Theseus changes in its constituency

Does it? Atoms and electrons are indistinguishable so much that physicists argued that every electron is actually the same single electron: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe

We are all Ships of Theseus.

There is a movie by the name Ship of Theseus which explores the idea in the context of organ donation and transplantation.

I loved the movie. There is one actor by the name of Neeraj Kabi who lost a lot of weight for his role as a monk.

Here is the trailer: https://youtu.be/tzw1ezTTVEY?si=NfsG9sY1R1JjmbVV

Was this done deliberately by the editors? (If that is addressed in Twitter comments, that is not visible.)

Unlikely. I'm counting 1816 revisions since the article was created 15 July 2003‎. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ship_of_Theseus&a...

And the first version was pretty rough. It was only a couple of sentences long, and included a bizarre, irrelevant tangent ("a modern embellishment"). It's no surprise that every part of that has long since been replaced.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Permalink/1154003

TBH, the same is probably true of most Wikipedia articles which were created early in the site's history. It took a while for editors to settle into the writing style that's now characteristic of the site.

I feel like the overall description from 2003 better explains the concept than the current article:

> According to an ancient Greek legend, Theseus had a warship that was preserved as a historical relic by the Athenians. Some of its boards rotted and had to be replaced. After many, many years, many such replacements occurred. Eventually, none of the original boards were present. Philosophers could then debate whether it was the same ship that Theseus had used, and if not, when it had ceased to be so.

versus the current version:

> The Ship of Theseus is a thought experiment about whether an object which has had all of its original components replaced remains the same object. In Greek mythology, Theseus, the mythical Greek founder-king of Athens, rescued the children of Athens from King Minos after slaying the minotaur and then escaped onto a ship going to Delos. Each year, the Athenians commemorated this by taking the ship on a pilgrimage to Delos to honor Apollo. A question was raised by ancient philosophers: After several centuries of maintenance, if each individual part of the Ship of Theseus was replaced, one at a time, was it still the same ship?

The modern version communicates the full premise in the first sentence, whereas the old version takes much longer to get to the point.

While the story of the ship illustrates the problem nicely, it is not as important, as the ship is merely a vehicle to get the point across - and Theseus too, presumably.

Perhaps you should put some parts of the original article back!

Creating opportunities for tangential article links is not the issue it once was at Wikipedia, but it still definitely impacts readability.

I find the modern version easier to read, with the exception of the tangent in the middle.

Yeah, the old version is definitely much better.

We all accepted santa was real at one point right? Like, we grew up and realized hes a fantasy character. I think its perfectly fine to keep the original article, you can discuss whether the history is true or not later in the analysis. Big boys and big girls can accept that some myths are worthy thought experiments implicitly, it doesnt need this language, only to gatekeep the knowledge behind some kind of intellectual sanctity.

Wait, what do you mean Santa is a fantasy character? Are you implying the big jolly red man isn’t real?

The identity of Santa transcends one body, but his identity manifests in many bodies. If someone is dressed as Santa and you wave and he says "ho ho ho!" you say "hi Santa!" But if you wave and he says "leave me alone. My wife left me last night," then it is suddenly clear you are no longer talking to Santa, but instead to a guy dressed as Santa, but who is having a bad day. Just because Santa's identity transcends one body doesn't mean he isn't real. You can interact with Santa, and know when you aren't interacting with Santa.

I had a philosophy proffessor in school that shared this prespective; ill never forget the arguement I had with him, at one point I said "he doesnt bring you presents", to which he replied "he brings me presents, thats your problem!", it still cracks me up thinking about it.

It's the same thinking behind the phrase uttered when a king died: "The king is dead! Long live the king!" The person embodying the identity of the king is mortal and has died, but the identity of the king lives on and will be embodied by another mortal person soon.

This is a problem with the Ship of Theseus thought experiment as well. When did the Ship of Theseus become a "ship"? With that being nebulous it becomes even stranger to discuss whether switching out parts compromises its personal identity.

Well, obviously the resolution of this apparent paradox is that things/objects don't actually have any "identity" immanent to them, although in most practical circumstances a notion of objects having identities is both useful and roughly accurate.

Which is what the deflationist explanation from the page seems to allude to?

> When did the Ship of Theseus become a "ship"?

Another submission currently on the front page might help answer that! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38670845

I think that actually simplifies things.

You go down to the docks, you see a half assembled ship, you ask about it, and they tell you that’s Hector’s ship. It’s not a ship yet. It’s a promise of a ship, and idea.

It’s still Theseus’ ship until he loses it gambling, and whether it continues to be a ship or is sold for scrap and becomes part of five other ships… well then the idea of the ship has died.

Ha ha, "a modern embellishment" reads like the quirky early Web.

(I had to go back and see if I had embarrassed myself when I stubbed in an article back in 2004. Meh — but just as well I stopped contributing to Wikipedia.)

Why did you stop contributing?

I only contributed the one article because I was searching for the thing on Wikipedia and it didn't exist.

It is weird that for me it kinda depends on item in question.

Slowly keeping rotting wooden ship alive is probably same ship.

But let's take desktop computer. CPU, GPU, RAM, MotherBoard, Case, Powersupply, A disk. What if I replace each of these components over a year with exactly same model. So exactly same CPU for exactly same CPU. And then finally I clone the disk to new disk, but to exactly same model of a disk.

Some serial numbers have changed, but it operates the same, has the same data and software on. And I could even change the license key of software like OS.

Is it same computer or not? And somehow I feel it is not the same.

That feeling is the one that's important, I feel. None of these things exist in that way the first place, but we pretend, and we agree on these pretenses. This is how the human mind copes with the stimuli it gets.

With regards to computers, I have different things in my mind. For the feeling part, the computer's role is what matter. "My main desktop computer", "My main server computer", "My work laptop". I can know that they are not the same, but they feel similar enough, because they play the same role for me, so for the most part, I don't make a difference.

I love Annie Rauwerda (Depth of Wikipedia). So much passion for these random bits of info. Her tiktok is absolutely delightful and she's been good on the Lateral podcast as well.

I wonder how much our human body is a ship of theseus.

I was reading about the hb1ac test, and it is a long-term test that analyzes the percentage of your blood hemoglobin chemically linked to sugar.

It is "long-term" because your blood cells have a life span of about 4 months.

(If you manage your blood sugar well, you have to do it for 4 months so that new cells won't be affected and a later test will show improvement.)

so, I wonder how many other cells turn over? You are not you, repeatedly.

Most of the cells in the nervous system (including the brain), as well as muscle cells, last your entire life time

I read The Wager earlier this year and it’s implied that every active wooden ship eventually is a ship of Theseus, for a trip from England to the passage around South America at that time many of the ships had to be repaired along the way, though they didn’t start with all new ships.

I somewhere heard that smaller ships were expected to pay themselves back in couple of years. As they really rotted or other ways did not last very long. And actually maintaining and keeping one operational is massive undertaking, even if you do not actively use it too much.

Are they repairing every board though or is it mostly the same boards in vulnerable areas getting replaced?

IIRC all the wood was vulnerable to either ship worms or rot eventually, they had to replace masts and rudders and scavenge from the least seaworthy ships (and scuttle if necessary) and opportunistically get wood from any island they could make landfall on to make the journey described in the book.

Define "the same board"...

I think what I was imagining there being a schematic which called for a board to be hammered into place at a particular location, and some of these being more exposed to wear than others (as well as being of different strengths because of the dimensions of the board, and if I'm not mistaken different parts of a ship are constructed with different kinds of wood).

If we're feeling inclined to Greek philosophy, perhaps this is the Platonic form of the boards being replaced.

I'd be more impressed if it were that case that 0% of the WORDS remain.

Nevertheless, the consonance of this 'weaker result' is still satisfying.

Bravo!

If you want to understand recursion, you need to understand recursion first.

It's almost like intangible social constructs don't really exist or something. As long as you do not know the thing in itself, how do you know it's really there?

Identities exist and are associated with the material world, but are not directly tied to it. "The king is dead! Long live the king!" illustrates this perfectly. The mortal person who has been embodying the identity of "king" has died, but the identity of "king" persists and will be embodied by a different person soon.

That’s the axe that slayed me. Or was it?

This article is relatable

ironic

To be fair, the original article was rather terrible. Like what the heck is with the "modern embellishment"?

That is the secret of writing. Usually, everything is written in private. Edited, refined over time. And then published. The key is you have to start writing. Something might sound wrong or feel like sand in your socks. This is probably the most difficult part of learning to write. You can't edit and improve what you haven't written yet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ship_of_Theseus&o...

Well said.

Every well-written piece of text is, in itself, a ship of theseus. And only a ship of theseus piece of text can float, having had all the leaky boards replaced.

Now its time to add a new article to Wikipedia with those original phrases and words rearranged to talk about something totally different, and then debate which one is the real Ship of Theseus article.

Is that possible without immediately displacing the existing article?

They can argue about it on the disambiguation page.

Without the walled garden: https://wikis.world/@wikipedia/111587024591220062

If it's the same person running both accounts, I think it's funny that she snagged the @wikipedia handle, even for that domain.

According to https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/@Wikipedia, the account is official and community-run.

https://wikis.world/@wikipedia also shows verified ownership of the Wikipedia homepage on the account page.

What?

Because Twitter limits interactions unless you're logged in.

It’s common practice at HN (this site) to make articles accessible to everyone. In this case twitter limits your ability to read an article if you are not logged in. The link provided lets you read it regardless of whether you have an account or whatnot.

Is this an important metric? I’d imagine a lot of articles across Wikipedia change over time and barely resemble the original article… which is a huge benefit, as opposed to printed encyclopaedias

All that matters is that the content is factually accurate, which this seems to be

It’s not an important metric, but relates quite strongly to the content of the article…

Its importance is contextual. Semantically, if the replacement text says the same things, it has less importance than if the replacement text understood to meaning says something different: one is just "we liked saying it better this way" and the other is "we changed our mind(s)" -they aren't the same.

The field of change over a topic is itself a subject of study. It feels like a join over politics, Ontology and Epistemology.

Do you know what the Ship of Theseus is?

Is it even possible, though, to know what the ship of Theseus is?

It's more of an amusing fact, given the topic of the article.

Ahhh okay, I can't believe I missed the irony of this post

Is the replacement of boards in a ship an important metric?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com