Setting Sail on the Ship of Theseus.

Hi, and welcome to Studious! I’m your host, Stuart Byers. Every week, we’ll be getting Studious, talking topics of particular interest to me, and hopefully of interest to you, the listener, as well. If not, consider this one of those great podcasts to fall asleep to.

Today on Studious, we’re gonna get kinda cerebral and examine one of my favorite thought experiments: The Ship of Theseus. Foremost, we’ll examine the concept. Then we will look at the literary aspect of this logical conundrum, and last we’ll wrap it by delving into the practical, real-world application of this perplexing puzzle.

According to legend, Theseus, the mythical founder of Athens, Greece had rescued some children of his city who had been abducted by  King Minos of Crete. After slaying the minotaur, Theseus then escaped on a ship headed to Delos. Every passing year, the Athenians commemorated this legend by taking that ship on a pilgrimage to Delos to honor the Sun God, Apollo. Subsequently, a question was raised by ancient philosophers: After several centuries of maintenance, if every part of the Ship of Theseus had been replaced, one at a time, was it technically still the same ship?

Mind you, this isn’t happening on one episode of a renovation show; slowly, plank by plank, the ship succumbs to time. Often times, it’s hard for us creatures bound to a fraction of existential time, to wrap our heads about minute changes occurring over a millennia. It’s why I still have trouble understanding the evolution of flight with life on this planet. I just don’t get the slow preference of scales to slightly longer scales until we eventually get feathers. Ok, I’m totally lying to appear relatable. I live in the information age. I could Google that theory at any time, though I actually learned that answer described at the Frost Science Museum in Downtown Miami. Note to self: let’s do an episode on the evolution of flight.

Back to the Ship of Theseus: So here we are, an old ship doing some essential repairs. What’s the question here? If it happens slowly, then at each passing moment, doesn’t it still consider itself the Ship of Theseus? The identity of the ship is seamless with the passage of time. At no point is it not identified as “The Ship of Theseus.”

Then at some point, the wiseass in the room asks, “if they found all those old planks that were removed from the original ship, and reconstructed them into one complete vessel, which ship is the TRUE ship of Theseus? The damaged old one, or the whole new one? 

Now it’s an argument of semantics. At which point does it cease to be the ship of Theseus? With the first plank removed? A logical argument could be totally petty and insist that on normal decay rates, an even infinitesimal amount of degradation: say, the loss of one atom would change its constitution, and how often does that happen? I’m gonna assume it a constant state of flux. This may seem nitpicky, but it’s the very challenge of this thought experiment. It’s not designed to have a clear victor.

All of you could come up with other ideas arguing points for OR against when or IF the ship EVER changes its identity.

I mean, take us humans for example. You are the same you you were 5 minutes ago, aren’t you? But I think we can all agree you definitely aren’t the same person you were 10, 15 years ago, would you? Surely you picked up something along the way, didn’t you? Ok, Let’s get nerdy. It’s practically common knowledge that the body changes its skeletal structure every 7 years, as well as our tastebuds. Growth and decay, it’s what we share in common with all life on this earth.

But back to the amount of change and why it matters. What qualities are what make you, you? Is it your charm, your personality, your rakish wit? Are you just a great pair of legs, perhaps bizarrely double jointed? Wait, where was I going with this? 

Even if we aren’t considering ourselves as more than mere hat racks, Van Gogh still looked different sans the ear. Does physical composition only matter for the easily observable? Mental illness can lurk beneath the surface, and doesn’t need detection to simply exist (unless you guys wanna get super specific and talk about the Grand Simulation Theory… what is up with light behaving differently depending upon observation?) Wait. Did I lose you guys? I’ll address it another time when we cover the Grand Simulation in greater detail.

My train of thought has once again derailed. We were discussing that even the most minute of changes still constitute a change. However imperceptible, even fractional changes can have grand outcomes long term. This is commonly known as the Butterfly Effect, another topic to tackle at a future date. For practical purposes, would we stop considering it The Ship of Theseus if only one board was replaced? It would have to depend on the sentimental attachment placed on that specific board.

Perhaps The Ship of Theseus serves as a greater puzzle of identity in relation to perpetuity. The only observable constant in this world seems to be change. With the ebbs and flows of the tides, the rocks are battered. Over the grand scale of time, these rocks are pulverized and broken down into sediment. Further into the future, that sediment will reconstitute into another form of sedimentary rock through time and pressure. Not a thing exists in this universe that is impervious to change.

Ultimately, we eventually end up asking whether the sum is greater than its parts. There are so many balls up in the air here. Surely any human is more than just a collection of bones and organs. What we may continue to wonder is, “what makes us who we are?”. 

As I began to research The Ship of Theseus in literature, I stumbled upon more examples in Media on the whole. This topic is apparently such a favorite with writers, that it now has become somewhat of a trope. I could speak at length perhaps for hours addressing them all, and I’m sure you have some favorites that come to mind, but today I’m going to limit them to a small handful of examples.

First, let’s talk about Bicentennial Man with the late Robin Williams. The film is an adaptation of both the novelette The Bicentennial Man, and the later novel, The Positronic Man, both by Sci-Fi guru Isaac Asimov. In the story, we find our central character, a robot who struggles to find is place in the human world. William’s robot finds himself in the employment of a family who eventually grow quite fond of him. Through the passage of time, the robot gets continual upgrades, replacing his parts eventually with synthetic human parts, effectively making him more of an android than robot. This Pinocchio tale brings forth the question: how much of the robot needs to be replaced with human parts before we consider it human? Subsequently, it is argued in the converse, “if a human has parts replaced or augmented with mechanical devices, at which point does this being cease to be human?”

I’m just gonna take a quick aside to mention that all of science fiction seeks to find our place in this universe by asking these kinds of existential questions. If we look at the genre’s first notable inception, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, we dabble in monstrosity, that between creator and creation, to whom of which is more monstrous? So clearly that is one of the most central themes, but at the heart of this story, we can’t ignore the importance of the brain in relation to identity. Had they used a different brain, would the outcome remain the same?  

Let’s look at time being like a river, ever flowing and continuous. Heraclitus once posited, “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.” The water stepped in has long since flowed downstream. 

As for larger continuities, the longest running Sci-Fi show in existence is Doctor Who, with almost 700 episodes to date. One of the most genius creative decisions was making the central protagonist an alien not bound to space and time conventionally like us humans. When the Doctor has taken on damage too great and is close to dying, his death and rebirth become more than metaphoric, and he regenerates in a completely new form, equipped with new personality quirks and preferences. Indeed, the only thing that makes The Doctor, well, The Doctor is a continuity of memory and perhaps a driving directive of being of service. His memories are even fallible, as The Doctor seems to lose them when encountering past versions of himself on his many adventures.

Another quick side note: I do understand that the Doctor is now being played by a woman, so my decisions to engender him with the previous pronouns speaks more to the majority of time spent with the character being played by males. But this newer development with the character only highlights our conversation about the Ship of Theseus, with modern writers of the show examining the way sex and gender are expressed in our performance in roles in grander societal narratives.

With Doctor Who, you can’t get a character more discombobulated. One could only imagine how ceaseless exploration of time and space would pull on the very fabric of one’s being, but perhaps our weary eyes see this through the lens of our own unique place in space/time. It’s hard to fathom the experiential existence of a redwood, lasting between 800 to 1500 years. Conversely, we often hear it touted that the Mayfly has the shortest lifespan on Earth, for in that form it exists for nearly only 24 hours, but it at least enjoys a larval state for close to a year prior. If you want true brevity of life, The American Copper Butterfly exists only for about a month and a half for its total life cycle from the time the egg is laid. It would seem that for the American Copper the only upside is that his girlfriend will never bother him with talks about his 5-year-plans.

As humans with our lifespans being relatively brief in regards to cosmic time, it’s hard to fathom grander scales of existence. I used to think that loss of memory was one of our greater flaws as humans; an inability of recall surely made us inferior to the machines we designed. Now I look at this loss as a blessing. It helps us move forward and past trauma, on quicker to the next set of problems for solving. I’d suppose the same would be true for the Doctor. With a lifespan scrawling across many human lifetimes, it would perhaps be nice to shed one’s skin and reincarnate, retaining somewhat of a recollection and continuity, as well as not having to bluster through puberty again.

Watchers of this series also know that when the Doctor is reborn anew, his appearance and personality aren’t the only thing that change. His time machine, The TARDIS changes its appearance to reflect his new personality. The knobs and levers that operate the TARDIS move and change in design, but as a viewer, there’s still this continuity: that’s the Doctor, and he’s flying his TARDIS through space/time. We readily suspend disbelief knowing the parameters of that universe and the laws governing it. The Doctor and his TARDIS are figurative displays of The Ship of Theseus, making the concept slightly more palatable.

Our third example of The Ship of Theseus probably offers the most striking or jarring view of the concept. Long have geeks waxed poetic about Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek, and the implications surrounding their teleportation system. For you die hard fans, I’m gonna forewarn that I might get this explanation somewhat wrong, but I will attempt to give it my best efforts.

So, the transporters on Star Trek started off transporting inanimate objects. They dematerialize an object, turning it into energy. This energy can then be “beamed” to another destination where the energy signal rematerializes into physical matter once again. It reminds me of my days in Air National Guard where I learned to fix radios. A radio takes audio waves or sound in the common vernacular and piggyback that on a larger carrier wave on the Radio Frequency spectrum. Then the receiver separates the addition of audio from the radio wave to complete the cycle of transmission. In the case of the Trek Transporter, the physical object acts much in the same way as the audio in a radio. However, I’m at a complete loss if the transporter functions in a digital or analogue manner.

According to cannon, the transporter works down to the quantum level in replicating the signal at the other end. Other fail safes were designed for transporter malfunction, the most important being that a copy of the object or person is saved in the computer should something go horribly wrong. All of human life is now reduced to either a wave of code or a series of ones and zeroes.

Inevitably, this led critics of the transporter to envision it as a “suicide machine.” Each time someone steps foot inside the transporter, they get erased from existence, only to have a copy replicated away at a distance. Does this make you question your existence? What if you could be cloned exactly down to the quantum level? The physical body and the mind are completely identical. If you were to lose consciousness during this duplication, how would you know which you is the REAL you? This plot device was actually used many moons ago in the Spiderverse. Peter Parker was chasing a clone of himself all around New York, only to later find that he himself was the clone.

A similar plot was devised for Star Trek: The Next Generation, or as it is commonly referred to as TNG. On TNG, Commander William Riker is introduced to us as this space-age lothario, having shared a romantic history with the Ship’s counselor, Deanna Troi. After several seasons defining their platonic relationship, the crew is beckoned by a distress signal coming from an outpost Commander Riker once was stationed at 8 years prior. An accident occurred and Riker was transported from the outpost to a nearby ship. This occurred while Riker and Troi were still romantically entangled. This situation changed the trajectory of Riker’s life, where he chose duty over love, ending his relationship with Troi for a position of advancement in his career.

However, not all was what it seemed in the outpost below. A glitch in the system thought it had failed in transmitting a Riker to the vessel, so it subsequently reverted a signal back into the outpost of which Riker was initially marooned. Ok, just to make this plain: we now have two Rikers: one rescued, one still marooned. And marooned he will stay, for the next 8 years, pining away for his beloved Counselor Troi. Until coincidentally, his Eskimo brother, The Rescued Riker returns to the scene aboard his newest designation, and feather in the federation’s cap: The Starship Enterprise.

This raises all the questions that our Ship of Theseus puzzle puts forth. Which one is the real Riker? One could argue neither, since the transporter destroys the original once it dematerializes it into an energy pattern. Everything after this is just a copy. But let’s just say that we are ok with this effective copy process. It’s the same physicality and mind as the original. Neither copy can be viewed as the TRUE original, so they each occupy an identity as equals. They are both effectively William T. Riker. However, we view the marooned Riker as the “other.” For his experiences and desires diverged from the Riker we know that fateful day. Here is where perception changes reality. Since we’re following the narrative of rescued Riker’s trajectory, we’ve become impartial to that copy. However, we can’t help but feel empathetic to marooned Riker, eking out such a lonely existence for 8 years, only to find that his love has moved on, and worse, that it was his own doing. 

Perhaps the hardest thing for us to understand here is that neither Riker is the TRUE William T. Riker. He ceased to exist the moment he boarded his first transporter. Since then, he’s been a living facsimile, traversing the universe a la fax machine. If you really wanna get META, William T. Riker doesn’t exist at all, but is only a creation for purposes of entertainment. If we look to philosophy, our experiential existence can’t be proven as a truth at all. We could all (or worse, you alone!) could be just a brain in a jar tied to a simulator. One could never be truly certain that their very existence wasn’t being acted out inside of one giant mainframe.

What we’ll examine quite frequently in this podcast, is the very nature or fabric of reality, when, how, and why it matters. Reality is a subjective experience. This is why they get particularly semantical in linguistics. We can use words and then all come to a similar consensus about what they mean, but often without tone to convey meaning, the message can easily be lost between sender and receiver, not dissimilar to our transporter malfunctions. Even given the inherent fallibility of memory, this is another reason why eyewitness testimony is certainly suspect. Our recollection is forever tainted by our own clouded lenses. Two people can experience a scene very differently based on their own biases: exhilaration over fear. Comedy over tragedy. You could even prime the response you desire simply by pairing an incident with an accompanying sound. Add a simple horn honk or a spring boing, and the most brutal pain witnessed now becomes folly. We humans are beyond susceptible to manipulation. And even if we aren’t being primed by an outside source, our own internal programming will inform our experiences, well outside our conscious control. We can delve into thistopic at great length when we consider the concepts of Determinism in a future episode.

With reality being constantly interpreted subjectively, philosophers have always been concerned with objective truth and the really real. It’s where we find ourselves with the Ship of Theseus. As humans, we are hard wired to find patterns in nature. If you stare at the clouds, or perhaps an old, knotted tree, you may start to see faces. This is a condition called pareidolia. Recognizing faces was so important to our survival, such as interpreting who might be a possible threat or potential ally, that we are now inclined to naturally interpret random patterns that resemble faces. Our brains are constantly interpreting visual cues given to us from other humans. Males subconsciously are attracted more to females with bodies proportioned with the golden ratio. Again, faces are considered with greater aesthetic if they are proportioned to the golden ratio, but what happens when we go in the other direction? Are there patterns that conjure disgust?

When designing artificial humans be it a robot or computer-generated graphic, researchers stumbled upon a psychological conundrum. If you anthropomorphize something, we interpret a robot or a cartoon just fine if it is 95% similar to a human. Think of C3PO from Star Wars. He’s got eyes, a nose, a mouth hole. He has arms and legs, a torso, and 20 digits. We are very comfortable with this kind of facsimile, some might even find him cute. Have you ever seen some of these Japanese androids they are creating? What about wax figures in museums? Have you seen any news articles on the new “realistic” high dollar sex dolls they are creating? What do all these things have in common? They all tend to look creepy, and there’s a reason for that. It’s called the Valley of the Uncanny. After you reach 95% of similarity to human, you now have this valley between 96% and 99.9% where we no longer interpret this thing as something like a human. We are revulsed because we now see this doppelganger as a human with something terribly wrong with it. This is just part of our internal survival programming. Nature isn’t designed for empathy at the risk of survival. We are detecting a malady, and subconsciously we don’t trust it.

This is the case with the two Rikers and the Ship of Theseus. The marooned Riker isn’t a bad guy or evil, he’s actually a really sympathetic character. For purposes of narrative, we the audience will just never see him as the TRUE Riker. We’ve followed the rescued Riker trajectory for too long. And listen, there are people that dislike that Riker. He’s kind of corny and melodramatic or may even come across as smarmy. These people could secretly be rooting for the marooned Riker to take his place. However, would they still consider the marooned Riker the TRUE Riker? This isn’t about playing favorites, this is a search for truth.

It’s like the Valley of the Uncanny. There’s something hidden inside of us that holds derision to a copy. This isn’t about favoritism, it’s simply a judgement about identity. And listen, we established already that both RIKERS are copies. However, when we suspend our disbelief and buy into the transported human as an original and NOT a copy, it is under this guise of continuity, the same way we see water flowing and occupying the same space as an identifiable river that we have named.

The Ship of Theseus has long been a literary trope, but does it have real world application? 

My wife is 35 and was too young for the Seinfeld series when it first aired back in 1989. However, she recently became a fan after the show began streaming on one of these platforms. We were winding down the other night in bed watching an episode, and it of course starts as always with Jerry doing some material on stage, setting up a premise. He begins saying, “loyalty to any one sports team is pretty hard to justify because the players are always changing, the team can move to another city… you’re actually rooting for the clothes when you get right down to it.”

This brings us to fandom and The Ship of Theseus. Jerry is not wrong here. Sports franchises are in a constant state of flux. “How’re my Cubbies doing?” “I heard they may trade Nick Madrigal.” It is perhaps this very volatile nature that keeps people tuned in, needing ever increasing status updates, especially as a new season begins to approach. 

Though Jerry is being funny with his observation, even the uniforms change over time, and the mascots aren’t immune to conversion either. 

Quick side note here: I’ll never understand the purpose of the mascot. I’m saying this as having been a mascot at one time, and a costumed character for a well noted pizza chain in my formative years. First and foremost, stop abusing mascots. Those costumes have padding, but it’s not designed to withstand injury. As a costumed cheesy mouse, children would frequently, and I mean frequently, take cheap shots to the groin. It might be funny on a video clip, but I assure you it’s not funny to the guy making minimum wage inside the suit. I’m gonna date myself here: in 1990, that figure was $4.25/hr.

Ok, back to sportball. Clearly, professional sports rely on fandom to capitalize on profit. Without the fans, there is no marketable reason for the sport. Professional teams rely on our perception of continuity to keep us clinging to this notion that we are rooting for the same team year after year. The mascot now begins to make more sense. It is the symbol that remains continuous perpetually. It’s also why people cling these symbols perhaps irrationally.

Case in Point: My senior year, I took on the role of Chief Redskin, our high school’s mascot. My freshman year, Bruce Shemp just killed it as the Chief during football season. He made the crowd go wild and made the job look fun. I never looked at the role as cultural appropriation or as a degrading stereotype. I looked at the symbol as a proud warrior, in fact, I eschewed the normal three stripe paint on the cheeks, and opted more for war paint, inspired at that time by The Ultimate Warrior from the WWF. As a teenager, it never occurred to me that a people wouldn’t want to be reduced to a stereotypical symbol, no matter how well intended the community meant for that symbolic usage. Many years later, my father was one of the people in the community proposing for that symbol to change. 

But you get a lot of pushback from fans when these teams change their old mascots in efforts to be more sensitive to people’s cultural identities. Is it because the fans are racist? I’d argue more insensitive than racist, again, reality is a very subjective experience as previously mentioned. More so, I would say this only illustrates the importance of the symbol in relation to the identity of the franchise. People are clinging to these symbols because they are often the only continuity left to identify the team.

Let’s be honest. The symbols only stand in place for the sake of continuity. They don’t inspire admiration or fear. If anything, they simply exist for the purposes of merchandising. Change a mascot by one letter and you could upset the whole merchandising apple cart. Nobody is buying souvenirs for the Chicago Cups. 

And mind you, whatever passes for fandom in the United States perhaps seems quaint futbol fans worldwide. People insanely support their clubs abroad. Not that fandom need logical explanation, for reason is far too quickly abandoned for the sake of mania. The franchise is forever in flux, so for whatever the symbol that is, that the club is supposed to represent, it extends well past club constitutional identity, and is transferred to the fan’s identity in relation to the team. Their experiences of being a fan while happen slowly, imperceptibly changing with the roster, and it will go only as noticed as their receding hairline, depending on rate off change.

The players change, and the coaches change, but what doesn’t change is the fan’s position of being a fan. The fan is the constant in his own mind, and that is sufficient for the continuous transfer of identity between this Ship of Theseus and fandom. It’s rather obvious that you have these dynastic moments within franchises that can’t hope to be ever repeated: The Steelers of the late 70’s, Jordan’s Double Threepeats, The Red Wings of the late 90’s. However, it’s these inspirational moments that forever fuel fandom and keep them coming back for more.

So, I think if we learn anything from the Ship of Theseus, is that due to impermanence and a constant state of flux, continuity is irrevocably linked to identity. We humans need simple answers to very complex questions tied with a pink, pretty bow. The next time you are on a flight, take the window seat. As you fly overhead, take notice of the many rivers along the way. You’ll surely notice little crescent ponds immediately off the banks of most rivers. This was once the old path before the river changed to its current state. So not only is the water constantly being renewed, but with time and erosion, rivers can’t even be counted on to hold a permanent space. 

Recently, I learned two new words: interoception and exteroception. These terms relate to our human perception of stimuli on the body, internally and externally respectively. The problem with identity, is that we comparatively view the external like the internal. Our perceptions of self and identity are being transferred to the things in the world around us. Ultimately, we are not so dissimilar to the Ship of Theseus; slowly our body succumbs to the ravages of time. Our cells grow old and are replaced constantly. We learn new skills, take new positions. We even change our political ideologies through time. We still transfer this identity continuously in respects to ourselves and others, and such is life with how we identify the external. We have simple mental constructs designated for identification purposes. We all are just pattern seeking mammals after all. We see a closely related pattern, and whether or not it defies logic or criticism, we are comfortable sticking to our guns once we’ve come to a conclusion. So, no matter which team you are on: The 10th Doctor vs 11th, Marooned Riker vs. Rescued Riker, The Old Ship vs The New Ship, your perception of the TRUE one will always be yours, and forever shape your reality, the completely subjective experience it is, ever susceptible to change.

Just keep that in mind the next time you are making a judgement call.

Thank you for joining me today. Be sure and check me out next week when I decide to get Studious with Mimetic Theory. If you like what you heard today: tell a friend, write a review, or click like and subscribe. I’ll see you all real soon.