The organization of matter is constantly changing. If Heraclitus was right it’s hard to even say which organization of particles counts as Heraclitus.
"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
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.
The dilemma is not in search of a solution but instead it offers meaning exactly because of it's lack of resolution.
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.
What?! You mean Theseus didn’t have a contract?!
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?
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-09-13/yields...
And so it is with Theseus and his Ship.
https://www.questdiagnostics.com/patients/blog/articles/do-m...
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.
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.”
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
Even within countries people have different ideas and have very different world views.
We can nonetheless generalise certain things.
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.
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.
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.
> 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 hydrogen atom.
An STL file.
Maybe they're all the same Ship.
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.