Ship of Theseus

[t3knomanser]

The Ship of Theseus is one of those old philosophical saws. It came up in conversation the other day, and so I skimmed the Wikipedia article, only to be surprised that none of the sources cited took the same attack to the problem that seemed intuitive to me

Comments

[manycolored]

Makes perfect sense to me. The only thing I'd add is that you talk about the outside observer's object orientedness. I'd say that many things in the universe that do not have the capacity to understand or philosophize are still object-oriented

[t3knomanser]

A shipworm is a cognitive entity, albeit one with very different capacity from a human. Whether or not it's actually building an object oriented model of its environment is something I don't think we could really discuss without a serious investigation into termite intelligence. But it is definitely a modeling entity. Just like a human builds a model of the outside world, a shipworm has the capacity to build an internal model of the outside world. The vocabulary is certainly different, and so are the priorities

[lutraphile]

Oh! I didn't know it had an official name... in my family, we usually use the example of "my grandfather's hammer" which had the handle replaced three times and the head replaced twice but it's still the same hammer.

(I think the grandfather in question is my dad's dad's dad... possibly even my dad's biological dad's dad, but it really could be anyone's grandfather. Or anyone's hammer. :P)

[miusheri]

The same kind of thing applies to living organisms. We're all composed of millions of cells. Those cells die and are replaced by new cells. We're entirely composed of cells that did not exist a decade prior. Are we different people as a result? We aren't considered as such...