I was not proficient with this topic, so had to look it up:
The Ship of Theseus, also known as Theseus’s Paradox, is a paradox and a common thought experiment about whether an object is the same object after having all of its original components replaced over time, typically one after the other.
In Greek mythology, Theseus, the mythical king of the city 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 would commemorate this by taking the ship on a pilgrimage to Delos to honour Apollo. A question was raised by ancient philosophers: After several hundreds of years of maintenance, if each individual piece of the Ship of Theseus were replaced, one after the other, was it still the same ship?
It’s like how ‘Lynyrd Skynyrd’ is still touring with zero original members
Thanks for explanation
I like the answer by some philosopher that we have a sense of object permanence. If your neighbor replaced different parts of his house over several years until they all were replaced, you’d likely say it was the same house because at every point in time, it was there. But if one day he knocked the whole things down and rebuilt it exactly the same as it had been, you’d say it was a different house because there was that moment when it wasn’t there.
I like calling this the ‘continuity’ answer, and it’s my thinking as well
Britons of a certain age refer to this as the “Trigger’s Broom Paradox”, after a character from a comedy TV Series “Only Fools and Horses”.
Trigger, who worked as a street sweeper, got an award from the City Council for maintaining the same sweeping brush for twenty years (though the broom has had 17 new heads and 14 new handles).
And I’m still using the same 386 that my family bought when I was a kid. Every time I’ve upgraded it I’ve kept at least one part from the previous configuration.
Lotta greek mythology/philosophy on lemmy this week…
What’s going on
We moved on from beans.
Did we, though?
What is going on? Or Why is it going on? For this is what we shall ponder
Wait
Helen of Troy? Is this a crossover?
Theseus is the guy who kidnapped Helen of Troy! Or that’s what the stories tell us. Maybe it was the ship’s fault!
oh, so when they say she has a face that launched a thousand ships, they were all just that one boat with a thousand makeovers?!
Yes! Something about her face really attracts boats for some reason!
Massive overbite. Great for scraping off barnacles.
(In before the reinterpretation of that last word as a Greek name.)
