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

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

#101

Post by benj111 »

trevyn wrote: post #94
philwelch wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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?

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

#102

Post by benj111 »

enasterosophes wrote: post #91
goopthink wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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…

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.

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

#103

Post by Kavelach »

jamiek88 wrote: post #96
tiffanyg wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

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?

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.

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

#104

Post by Ekaros »

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.

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

#105

Post by Ekaros »

stevenwoo wrote: post #13

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.

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

#106

Post by npteljes »

Ekaros wrote: post #104

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.…

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.

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

#107

Post by npteljes »

ARandomerDude wrote: post #63
deadbabe wrote: post #34

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.

> 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.

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

#108

Post by thiht »

deadbabe wrote: post #34

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.

Is that Event Sourcing applied to philosophy?

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

#109

Post by thiht »

DiscourseFan wrote: post #17

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.

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

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

#110

Post by willis936 »

cscurmudgeon wrote: post #54
willis936 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 con…

>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.

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