A Reply to the Ship of Theseus

[Bear Ribs]

No more than a clone, even with the same memories as the original, would be. It's trickier to say with AI, as it's harder to define exactly what it is, but one of them had the experiences, and the copies only have the memories of them.

I guess I didn't get any of that from what you said. Going back to the gun example, honestly, pointing to a specific part is just what the ATF does, and there often is very little logical basis in anything the ATF does or how it categories firearms. The amount of an old gun that has been replaced is actually part of what makes it more or less valuable, specifically for the reason that once you start replacing parts, it is no longer the same rifle, it is only mostly the same rifle, except for those parts that have been replaced, and I would even count the receiver among them. As it applies to ships, the closest anyone has come to saying that a specific part represents the entire ship is the ship's bell, and it would be pretty absurd to say that a ship which has had everything but the bell replaced is the same ship, just because it has the same bell.

Well that was a specific example but hardly the only such case. F'rex on humans we use the brain. You can lose all four limbs, get a heart, kidney, liver, and gallbladder transplant, and there's no question that you're the same person. Replace the brain and you are a different person.

In technical writing terms this is called a synecdoche. We use it all the time to identify are single part of something, the heart of the matter that is to say.

The other aspect of your argument I didn't get was over the Bugs Bunny stuff, because as I pointed out, people do make arguments like that, and I even gave a couple of my own. I could point to things like writing when it comes to dismissing nuTrek as not being "real" Star Trek, for example, and it would be a matter of whether people agreed with it or not, but the point remains that it is an argument that can be made and does get made.

Yeah, the Bugs Bunny bit, I think you weren't looking at the actual point I was trying to make. It's not about versions of the same character, it's about identity and changing material.

Let's narrow it to one short of one Bugs Bunny cartoon to remove the confusion. There's, let's presume, 24 frames per second. The short is four minutes long, that's 240 seconds, so there are 5760 individual pictures of Bugs Bunny that go into making the cartoon.

Here's the point: Nobody will say that the still picture at the end is the same still picture as the beginning one. But everybody will identify that Bugs is the same Bunny throughout all 5760 pictures, even the one where Bugs is a small pile of ash with ears. This is simply a variant on the Ship of Theseus writ large but helps highlight the main point, it's about how you perceive the world and how your perceptions are perhaps affecting your view of the world. When the images are still, you perceive them as thousands of individual pictures but when they are flashed at 24 frames per second, you see a single animated bunny for four minutes. We would look very strangely at both a person who claims that the four minute short contains 5760 Bugs Bunnies and a person who looked at a pile of 5760 pictures of Bugs on a table and said there was only one there. Yet in practice there is no material difference.

Yoda: "No, no different. Only different in your mind."

 

[Captain X]

I guess I don't agree with that. If you're talking about literal animation cells, I'm not even seeing the point as it relates to the ship. Bugs Bunny is not simply a physical drawing - he's a creation of writing, acting, and direction. In contrast, the ship is the ship. With the ship, we can say that it was originally built a certain way, with specific parts/materials. As parts get replaced, there gets to be a kind of asterisk there from that point on, because of those parts being changed. Thus, after a certain point, it is no longer the same ship. We can certainly say this after all the parts have been replaced, but the real trick is trying to decide at what point during the course of these replacements does the ship cease to be the original. Hell, this is the argument Star Trek fans get into when it comes to the "refit" version of the Enterprise from TMP, because there is no way anything more substantial than some structural members from the original that was seen on TV could exist within the "refit" that was seen on screen in the movie. Hell, the movie itself beat the audience in the head repeatedly with the idea of this being an entirely new ship in order to make the drama between Kirk and Decker work.

 

[Bear Ribs]

I guess I don't agree with that. If you're talking about literal animation cells, I'm not even seeing the point as it relates to the ship. Bugs Bunny is not simply a physical drawing - he's a creation of writing, acting, and direction. In contrast, the ship is the ship. With the ship, we can say that it was originally built a certain way, with specific parts/materials. As parts get replaced, there gets to be a kind of asterisk there from that point on, because of those parts being changed. Thus, after a certain point, it is no longer the same ship. We can certainly say this after all the parts have been replaced, but the real trick is trying to decide at what point during the course of these replacements does the ship cease to be the original. Hell, this is the argument Star Trek fans get into when it comes to the "refit" version of the Enterprise from TMP, because there is no way anything more substantial than some structural members from the original that was seen on TV could exist within the "refit" that was seen on screen in the movie. Hell, the movie itself beat the audience in the head repeatedly with the idea of this being an entirely new ship in order to make the drama between Kirk and Decker work.

Again, only from your perspective. Bugs Bunny is a creation of writing, drawing, acting, and direction. The Ship is a creation of carpentry, weaving, black smithing, and wrightwork. Both are the sum of many individual parts coming together just so. If they weren't, you wouldn't be able to have the paradox in your head because the ship wouldn't be made of parts to swap out, that's the whole point. The Ship of Theseus exists because you call that collection of parts a "ship." Bugs Bunny's short exists because you call that collection of images shown in the correct order a "cartoon." The individual pixels on your screen are not a cartoon and the individual planks and nails are not a ship.

The paradox we call the Ship of Theseus also only exists because you're swapping your perspective from "there is 1 ship" to "there are 5400 boards, 16,000 nails, 180 square yards of sailcloth, and 900 feet of rope" on the fly as needed, which is something humans do. The universe doesn't recognize either of those but both viewpoints are convenient for us to keep our perspectives organized. There is a bunny bouncing on the screen. There are several thousand still pictures of a bunny. Both are true but which you perceive at any given moment depends on your perspective at that precise moment, which you will change whenever it's more convenient for keeping your worldview organized.

 

[Captain X]

 

[Bear Ribs]

Yeah, Tanya's not very good at expanding her horizons and looking at things from other perspectives either.