by Ben Ayuko
{image by jotem}
We have all, by now, heard of ‘the Ship of Theseus‘. If you haven’t, Theseus was Divine Hero and a Founder of Athens in Greek Mythology. He was known for his exploits, most famously perhaps for defeating the minotaur. The King Minos of Crete had an annual tradition whereby he would select 7 maidens & 7 young men from Athens to feed, as a sacrifice, to the minotaur located at the center of the Labyrinth on Crete. Theseus, determined to end Minoan rule, volunteered to go as one of the young men. Remember when I said he was a Hero.
He would find his way to the Minotaur, slay it, and, with the help of Ariadne- the King’s daughter- he would make his way out of the Labyrinth, escaping the island on a ship. The Athenians, undoubtedly grateful, would preserve this ship -which came to be known as the aforementioned Ship of Theseus– by replacing each panel of decaying wood one at a time. That’s how the story goes anyway.
The question is this, after every single aging/decaying panel of wood that makes up the boat has been replaced by new wood, can we still refer to the new ship as the Ship of Theseus?
Or, in other words, what makes the ship of Theseus the Ship of Theseus? Is it the wooden framework? Is it the contents of the ship? Is it the fact that Theseus sailed on it?
Surely once you have replaced every single panel of the ship, then the original ship ceases to exist. Or maybe it does still exist, but it exists in the corner where the pile of discarded dead wood has been tossed. That is to say, should one possess the ability to stitch the dead wood back together, then Theseus would now have 2 ships, no? Or is it still just one? Surely, they can’t both be the Ship of Theseus because only one of these ships aided in his escape from Crete. But which one is it?
With developing technology, we, as humans, may soon have to come up with a concrete answer to this question. In video games such as Cyberpunk 2077, we come across characters who have augmented their bodies, replacing their fleshy body parts with robotic attachments to enhance their level of existence. For instance, replacing one’s eyeballs with actual cameras that can see things more clearly, record events, even zoom in and out. Maybe they want to run faster/ jump higher, so they replace their legs with machinery that would enable them to do so. They have smoked all their lives and have therefore weakened their lungs, so they replace them with more efficient ventilators. Or they have had one too many heart attacks and opt to replace their heart with a state-of-the-art pacemaker.
Or maybe I take things up an echelon. I want to avoid death. I mean, it’s only the physical elements of our bodies that die, right? The brain may decay and limit the mind’s functionality, but the mind would otherwise remain unaffected.
Maybe I want to live beyond the years my body will allow me. Maybe I watched shows like ‘Altered Carbon‘ and ‘Pantheon‘ and got intrigued by their idea of life. Maybe I can just lift my consciousness from out of my brain and preserve it on some kind of digital hardware. Maybe I can upload this hardware onto a different machine and live like the Terminator and call myself Adam Smasher.
If I did so, then would I cease to be myself? And if so, then at what point would I cease to be myself? How many body parts would I need to replace in order to stop being myself? And if I donated all my body parts to one single person who needed them, would they become me? Surely, we couldn’t both be me, could we?
Or maybe I made a copy of my own consciousness. Then I put it into another body. Would it be me? If anyone else talked to it, they would definitely believe that they were talking to me, wouldn’t they? But it wouldn’t really be me, would it? If I left my clone with them and travelled to the other side of the galaxy to start another life, by the time I returned, would they still accept me? Or would my clone now take priority considering the clone now had some new memories with them. Memories that I don’t have. From their perspective, it’s all the same. All the time I’ve been away, they have been living with me.
If Theseus returned from beyond Olympus, would he recognize the ship as the same ship he had escaped from Crete with? If not, then what was the crossover point?