Table of Contents



This cute, little dictator is still the same human he was when he first heard the word “assassination”.

The idea that you have a “body” is an enormous oversimplification. Atoms enter (by themselves, and in the form of molecules) and leave the vicinity of what you think of as your body continuously. They are used or not, and some stay around for a while, while others leave.

~Stumpy-the-peg, in this brilliant Reddit post.

Ship of Theseus
“Imagine that a ship which fought a great battle, while captained by the hero Theseus, is stored in a harbor as a museum piece. As the years go by some of its rotten parts are replaced by new ones until, eventually, all of the parts from the original ship are replaced. If someone were to recover the original parts and rebuild the ship at another location, which of the ships should be considered the true ship of Theseus? Is there a point at which the structure at the first location stopped being the ship of Theseus?” ~RationalWiki

Is the Ship of Theseus still the same ship?
Yes.
Unless you believe that you in your mother's womb, you when you were born, you when your were a toddler, 10 years, 20 years or when you will be 90 years old or even DEAD - if you believe that those are all different humans, THEN it's not the same ship.1)

What about the other ship?
That's another ship built from old parts of the Ship of Theseus.

But some parts in the body don't replace so quickly!

But if they did, would you then suddenly be a different person? If the atoms making up your DNA were replaced on a daily basis, would you THEN be a different human? The point is that there are obviously some properties of things and objects that transcend the realm of the physical and, as long as they continue to apply to the physical human they are tied to, the exact physical makeup of that human does not matter.

Words

If you think about it then you literally are just a particularly dense part of the atomic cloud we call reality, with no “real” body to speak of.

~Me while discussing this page with PiousLittleChristianGirl.

As with most things, the issue over Ship of Theseus is mostly a words problem. My arm is the same arm I was born with as far as I am concerned, the question over whether it being of a different physical makeup makes it a different arm is so incredibly far removed from anything resembling a meaningful or reality-based conversation that it is absolutely pointless to talk about. If one day you found out that you were not the son of your mother but were indeed artificially bred in an incubator - would that make you a different human? Surely you would feel like you were different from what you thought you were but essentially you are still the same human being and retain all of the qualities you previously had, just with a different context than what you had originally presumed to be true. This is the core of the problem - “being” a human is a thought in monkey brains. People attribute different things to “being a human”. For one a new human might start and end where for someone else there have already been three different humans - not because there have actually been different humans, but because their perception of what makes a human a human is different. REALITY only knows the presence or absence of atoms, things like “being” or “continuing to be” and “ceasing to be” are ridiculed on this level. Down here, the only thing that “is” is math.2)

2)
YouTube: CGP Grey - The Simple Secret of Runway Digits “Okay look, 'whirl around' and 'spin' don't mean what you think, down here, because in the land of quantum words mean nothing, there is only math.”