Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert lamp and I'm Joe McCormick and Robert.
Speaker 1: I know you're not a big fan of air travel,
Speaker 1: so I've got a I've got a question for you,
Speaker 1: all right, if you wanted to go to, say, somewhere
Speaker 1: on the other side of the world, you wanted to
Speaker 1: go to China or go to somewhere in Europe or something,
Speaker 1: and you still hate air travel as much as you did,
Speaker 1: and I offered you the chance to go there instantly
Speaker 1: via a real life teleportation machine that would scan your
Speaker 1: body and figure out where all the atoms are and
Speaker 1: then rebuild you in a teleporter pod on the other
Speaker 1: side of the globe wherever you wanted to go, and
Speaker 1: you could be there instantly. Would you do it? Oh?
Speaker 1: This is a fun one, right, because what happens to
Speaker 1: my my old body is it just destroyed and it's
Speaker 1: just incinerated on the spot. Well, incinerated has such negative vibes.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's not incinerated, it is turned into its
Speaker 1: atomic constituents, all right, And then I can't just keep
Speaker 1: both though I can't double sleeve and have have have
Speaker 1: one of me here in the States and the end
Speaker 1: the other me is is in Asia somewhere. I don't know.
Speaker 1: That seems like it would lead to bad sci fi
Speaker 1: action movie scenarios where one of you must eliminate the
Speaker 1: other on the commands of the moon King. Well, you know,
Speaker 1: it's it's tempting still just to to cut out all
Speaker 1: of that air travel, because air travel can be taxing,
Speaker 1: it can be exhausting, um and yet at the same time,
Speaker 1: by virtue of being taxing and exhausting, I'm never quite
Speaker 1: the same person when I reached the other end of
Speaker 1: that flight, especially if it's a long flight, right, because
Speaker 1: I may enter into the flight being a little anxious,
Speaker 1: but maybe on some level like looking looking forward to
Speaker 1: that you know, long period in which I can just
Speaker 1: listen to music and read. And then on the other
Speaker 1: side then I am I'm potentially tired. I'm actually you know,
Speaker 1: blust out from you know Xanix and Steve Roach albums, um,
Speaker 1: you know, three hours plus. But I'm not quite the
Speaker 1: same person, right, I'm I've changed a little bit, so
Speaker 1: I might as well be this teleported other self that
Speaker 1: is Uh, that is a diversion from who I am now.
Speaker 1: I don't know, when you get to the end of
Speaker 1: a flight, even if it's been unpleasant, do you really
Speaker 1: have the sensation that you have died. Uh? It depends
Speaker 1: I guess how much turbulence I have to endure. I mean,
Speaker 1: that's always the question about the teleporter machine, right, I
Speaker 1: mean it's the question that everybody had to start wondering
Speaker 1: about Star Trek. I guess. I guess there was probably
Speaker 1: a blissful period early in Star Trek history where nobody
Speaker 1: wondered if the teleporter machines killed you, But pretty soon
Speaker 1: people had to catch on, Right, is it just is
Speaker 1: it just killing you and then making a copy of
Speaker 1: you somewhere else that will continue with your behaviors, but
Speaker 1: your life ends when you step in. Yeah. And it's
Speaker 1: just everyone's gotten to the point where they're cool with it.
Speaker 1: They just don't think about it. They just step into
Speaker 1: the teleporter and let's suite annihilation wash over them. I'm
Speaker 1: just I'm ready to die and make a copy of
Speaker 1: me somewhere. I don't know, it doesn't seem like people
Speaker 1: would be like that. I mean, most of the time
Speaker 1: people have the sensation that their experiences are continuous and
Speaker 1: they want it to continue to be continuous. I guess
Speaker 1: in track, as long as there's not an afterlife, you're good, right,
Speaker 1: So just never know, it's just blind leap of faith, right.
Speaker 1: And of course, I mean we have, as we've talked
Speaker 1: about on the show before, we have no idea how
Speaker 1: the say the baton of consciousness is handed off from
Speaker 1: past self to present self, to future self and from
Speaker 1: one moment to the next. I mean, maybe maybe it's
Speaker 1: the case that every time you go under general anesthesia,
Speaker 1: you die, and then a different person wakes up with
Speaker 1: all of your thoughts and memories. Maybe you are the
Speaker 1: copy that woke up after the last time you went
Speaker 1: under anesthesia. Maybe that happens every time you fall asleep.
Speaker 1: You'd really have no way to know. Yeah, that that
Speaker 1: is certainly a point when the curtain drops and who
Speaker 1: knows exactly what's going on with the set, right, or
Speaker 1: at least what's going on with the set is is
Speaker 1: very much an area of interest to UH, to scientists
Speaker 1: who study consciousness. Now here's another question for you, Joe,
Speaker 1: what if you were able to get ahold of a
Speaker 1: time machine? I'm not talking some sort of realistic uh,
Speaker 1: you know, time machine like we've talked about discussing, you know,
Speaker 1: black holes and whatnot. I'm talking to a causality wrecking
Speaker 1: Hollywood time machine, travel to the past machine, time cop
Speaker 1: travel to the past machine. That is rough. So if
Speaker 1: if I were to go back in time and meet
Speaker 1: a younger me, is that younger me really me? Is
Speaker 1: this to means? Because the younger means not physically identical
Speaker 1: to me, It's mind and personality isn't identical to me.
Speaker 1: So if if a Jean Claude van Damme were to
Speaker 1: spin kick me into my past self, would I even
Speaker 1: melt into a screaming pilot Jelley? Well, no, I don't
Speaker 1: think so, because I don't think travel into the past
Speaker 1: is possible. But even if it were possible, I assume
Speaker 1: that if you went into the past, you would just
Speaker 1: be like another person, like an identical twin, And identical
Speaker 1: twins don't melt each other into jelly when they collide,
Speaker 1: at least at least as far as I know. I
Speaker 1: don't know, we've never seen it happen. Now, we have
Speaker 1: a lot of wonderful of science fiction to utilize when
Speaker 1: we we tackle these these questions of identity and self
Speaker 1: and change. But they haven't always been around in the
Speaker 1: old days. You had to do depend on listen more
Speaker 1: traditional stories, uh myths for your your thought experiments. And
Speaker 1: in fact, one of the oldest thought experiments is that
Speaker 1: we had that we have is uh is very much
Speaker 1: in this vein the ship of theseus, the ship of theseus. Right,
Speaker 1: So this is one of the most classic paradoxes in
Speaker 1: the history of philosophy. And it also goes to a
Speaker 1: thing that I think for some reason, it seems the
Speaker 1: Greeks were particularly interested in, which was the nature and
Speaker 1: identity of things? I mean, of course, the nature and
Speaker 1: identity of things is always a topic for philosophers to investigate,
Speaker 1: but the ancient Greek philosophers seemed really concerned with what
Speaker 1: made a thing itself? What were the properties or the
Speaker 1: essences of a thing that gave it its identity? How
Speaker 1: did you know that you were really Robert? How did
Speaker 1: you Robert know that you earned that you had the
Speaker 1: merit of being called Robert? Why why wasn't something else Robert?
Speaker 1: And so they had these ideas of essences and forms
Speaker 1: and all this stuff is deeply concerned with what makes
Speaker 1: something itself and when you can call it what it is.
Speaker 1: You know, this makes up an interesting side question here.
Speaker 1: Do you think of yourself as Joe. That's a good question,
Speaker 1: and there are actually a couple of ways to answer it.
Speaker 1: I mean, I would say in when I step back
Speaker 1: and think of myself, I do. I guess I think
Speaker 1: of myself as Joe as a self. You know, there's
Speaker 1: some there's some soul Joe out there that is the
Speaker 1: core of who I think I am and my main
Speaker 1: qualities and all that. And of course you're not always
Speaker 1: the best judge of yourself, so other people could probably
Speaker 1: describe that person better than I could. But but there's
Speaker 1: there's another sense of how you think of yourself in
Speaker 1: which I don't think I think of myself as Joe.
Speaker 1: Moment to moment. I think of myself as the most
Speaker 1: recent contents of my consciousness. So I'm just a moment
Speaker 1: to moment, I'm not Joe. Moment to moment, I am
Speaker 1: whatever I'm thinking about. That's a good way of putting it. Well.
Speaker 1: When I try and answer the question myself, I think, well,
Speaker 1: I'm not I don't only think of myself as Robert.
Speaker 1: I think of myself kind of as the me. You know,
Speaker 1: I'm just I'm just this I in in a given
Speaker 1: scenario unless I am like you're you're saying essentially becoming
Speaker 1: the thoughts that I am having. And then I'm even
Speaker 1: further away from this when I when I'm forced to
Speaker 1: think of myself as Robert, it is because, uh, the
Speaker 1: external world is is making me do it, because that
Speaker 1: is what they call me, and that is what I
Speaker 1: continue to be called because I just, I guess, don't
Speaker 1: feel passionately enough about it to change it. Well, one
Speaker 1: of the reasons we wanted to talk about the idea
Speaker 1: of identity in the ship of Theseus is that the
Speaker 1: external world is increasingly going to be forcing us to
Speaker 1: think about questions like this because of new technological capabilities
Speaker 1: that are coming online. So this is yet another conversation
Speaker 1: that we're having, sort of in the wake of of
Speaker 1: a conversation you saw in New York this year at
Speaker 1: the World Science Festival. But this is a great topic
Speaker 1: that's worth exploring from the bottom up. So I say
Speaker 1: we go all the way back to theseus and then
Speaker 1: work our way to the technological and scientific questions. All Right, well,
Speaker 1: let's start with Theseus. Then, who was a gimme? Theseus?
Speaker 1: He's essentially the flash Gordon of Greek mythology. You know,
Speaker 1: he's always the most important, but the least interesting character
Speaker 1: in a given story. That's my initial response anyway. But
Speaker 1: he also went into the maze and fought the minotaur, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: not only thought the minotaur, but but what is he
Speaker 1: is the slayer of the minotaur, solver of the the
Speaker 1: Maniuan maze as well. Solver that's the corporate speak idea, right,
Speaker 1: you know, he didn't slay the minotar. He solved that problem.
Speaker 1: He was able to execute on on strategy, yes, but
Speaker 1: then he also escaped from the maze right by by
Speaker 1: virtue of string if I remember. Oh that's right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a good part, because it's one thing to kill
Speaker 1: the minotar. I mean, that's pretty impressive in and on itself,
Speaker 1: But you still have to find your way out of
Speaker 1: the Manoan maze. How many minimally counterintuitive elements does the
Speaker 1: story of Theseus and the Minotaur have? Well, we have
Speaker 1: the minotaur for starters. Is that it is that the
Speaker 1: only part well the maze I suppose I suppose there
Speaker 1: could be a real maze or is there something magic
Speaker 1: about the maze? Well, that's kind of the if I'm
Speaker 1: remembering correctly from past episode on on mazes and labyrinths. Um.
Speaker 1: One of the things about the maze is that depends
Speaker 1: on depends on which telling you're looking at. If you
Speaker 1: go back far enough, it's less of a maze. It
Speaker 1: could be something else, something less extravagant. But as the
Speaker 1: tradition builds, the maze becomes this this fabulous, fabulous dungeons
Speaker 1: and dragons dungeon scenario, you know, which I love. But
Speaker 1: but I guess that's always something to keep in mind
Speaker 1: with with these tales, is it's not it fits in
Speaker 1: with what we're talking about here today. Mythological story is
Speaker 1: not this one thing that has been passed on. It
Speaker 1: is a thing that is built upon, a thing that
Speaker 1: changes over time. Ah well, well that brings us to
Speaker 1: the central concept, right the ship of Theseus, so to
Speaker 1: quote from Plutarch in his his Lives, he wrote you
Speaker 1: about the lives of illustrious men, And so Plutarch wrote, quote,
Speaker 1: the ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned,
Speaker 1: had thirty oars and was preserved by the Athenians down
Speaker 1: even to the time of Demetrius. Hilarious, for they took
Speaker 1: away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new
Speaker 1: and stronger timber in their place, insomuch that this ship
Speaker 1: became a standing example among the philosophers for the logical
Speaker 1: questions of things that grow, one side holding that the
Speaker 1: ship remained the same, and the other contending that it
Speaker 1: was not the same. So there's your classic dilemma on
Speaker 1: the ship of Theseus. They have a ship. The ship,
Speaker 1: of course, like all ships, rots and falls away over time,
Speaker 1: so you've got to replace parts of it. Now, if
Speaker 1: you maintain this ship for so long that you've eventually
Speaker 1: replaced every original board in the ship and no original
Speaker 1: parts remain, is it the same ship? Is it still
Speaker 1: the ship of Theseus? Or has it become something else? Yeah,
Speaker 1: the hokey version of this is the or the hokey
Speaker 1: variant is is Grandfather's Acts, which, imagine a number of
Speaker 1: our listeners have heard as well, Why is this hokey?
Speaker 1: It's just it's like it only has two parts to it,
Speaker 1: Like there's so the Grandfather's Acts is the idea. Hey,
Speaker 1: here's Grandfather's acts. But the handle rotted away, we had
Speaker 1: to replace that, and then also the blade brokes we
Speaker 1: had to replace that. Both parts of this two part
Speaker 1: tool have been replaced. How can it possibly be grandfather's acts? Well, actually,
Speaker 1: don't think that's a hokey example, because I think that
Speaker 1: kind of thing really comes through when when you think about, say, uh,
Speaker 1: artifacts in a museum, A lot of historical artifacts in
Speaker 1: a museum them are not going to be exactly the
Speaker 1: same material constituents as when the artifact was first forged,
Speaker 1: or especially a lot of like things that are not
Speaker 1: so much an artifact you can pick up in your hand,
Speaker 1: but like buildings and installations, a lot of these things
Speaker 1: have been restored long ago in history. So you might
Speaker 1: see a thing in a museum that at some point
Speaker 1: somebody replaced parts of long ago. So are you seeing
Speaker 1: the real original thing? Yeah? You know, this makes me
Speaker 1: think of the Parthenon, which of course is in ruins
Speaker 1: and has been in ruins for a little while. Now
Speaker 1: should we rebuild it exactly? But if you rebuild it,
Speaker 1: then yes, you make it look like the thing that
Speaker 1: once was. But then, like you think, the thing that
Speaker 1: wants to think, and then you have to choose which
Speaker 1: era you want to recreate. You know, there's certain eras
Speaker 1: that they're certainly not talking about recreating. But but then, yeah,
Speaker 1: once you've restored it, then you also lose the the
Speaker 1: iconic ruins that exist today that that in that in
Speaker 1: a way are a more I guess you could say,
Speaker 1: honest reminder of what was there before. Well, in a
Speaker 1: way also, the ruins are part of what the Parthenon is.
Speaker 1: I mean, the Parthenon is a thing that exists over time.
Speaker 1: And if you take away the ruins, you have in
Speaker 1: a way destroyed the Parthenon, even if you take them
Speaker 1: away to rebuild it. I think of that. It makes
Speaker 1: me think of the Colossi of Memnon that we discussed,
Speaker 1: which to remind everybody, these were These were a pair
Speaker 1: of of ancient coloss i. One of them fell over
Speaker 1: in ancient times. But then what's also restored poorly in
Speaker 1: ancient times? Uh so what do you do? Do you
Speaker 1: get up you decide one day that you're just gonna
Speaker 1: restore them both to how they may have once looked?
Speaker 1: Do you restore them both to the ruins? I mean
Speaker 1: they are these are all a part of the essentially
Speaker 1: the life cycle of these statues over time. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: this question is actually meaningful. If you want people to
Speaker 1: be able to experience history, what is the thing that
Speaker 1: gives them the most authentic experience of history? Is it
Speaker 1: the de Haid version as it stands or is it
Speaker 1: a restored version? And the same thing is true of
Speaker 1: the ship. If you want people to be able to
Speaker 1: see the Ship of Theseus because it has this great
Speaker 1: historical significance, do you replace the rotting parts or do
Speaker 1: you just let it rot? And if you just let
Speaker 1: it rot, does it eventually disappear? Of course it does.
Speaker 1: I think that's one of the reasons I like the
Speaker 1: Ship of Theseus more than I care for a grandfather's acts,
Speaker 1: because it's more gradual. There's so many more parts involved.
Speaker 1: There's more of a question of at what point, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, is it more new than old? At which
Speaker 1: point in this gradual process does it does it lose
Speaker 1: its identity? Yeah, I see what you're saying. It's sort
Speaker 1: of incorporates the paradox of the heap into the question
Speaker 1: of whether a thing that is replaced in the same
Speaker 1: way as the original thing. Because you're you're you're asking
Speaker 1: is there a transition point. At what point is you know,
Speaker 1: if fifty percent of the mass of the ship has
Speaker 1: been replaced, now, is it no longer the ship of Theseus?
Speaker 1: Like it's a dollar bill, you know, do you have
Speaker 1: more than half of it to have it be worth
Speaker 1: a dollar? Yeah? Like this this comes up some more
Speaker 1: scenario comes up when we start thinking about species and
Speaker 1: does speciation. At what point does this cease to be
Speaker 1: one species and truly become a different species. Well, this
Speaker 1: just highlights the idea, the fact that species is sort
Speaker 1: of an artificial distinction. I mean, it has some utility
Speaker 1: for biologists, but it's a species, not a thing you
Speaker 1: find in nature. It's just sort of a useful concept,
Speaker 1: a useful concept to describe something that is an ongoing process,
Speaker 1: which you know, ultimately, one of the questions we're asking
Speaker 1: here today is to what extent can the same be
Speaker 1: said about identity? Now, of course, lots of philosophers have
Speaker 1: explored the idea of the ship of Theseus. You know,
Speaker 1: philosophers get real worked up about whether something is what
Speaker 1: it is. So Plato's Cradlest Dialogue in some ways deals
Speaker 1: with this concept. Um and Thomas Hobbes dealt with it too, right,
Speaker 1: that's right. English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who have fifteen eighty
Speaker 1: eight through sixty nine. He added another and in my opinion,
Speaker 1: very fun level of complexity to this thought experiment. He said,
Speaker 1: what if you not only gradually replaced all of the
Speaker 1: parts of the Ship of Theseus, but what if you
Speaker 1: also took all of those old parts and use them
Speaker 1: to assemble an identical boat. So you took the rotting timber,
Speaker 1: you replaced that with goodwood, and then you took the
Speaker 1: rotting timber and made a new boat out of it. Right,
Speaker 1: And at this point, which is the real ship? Now
Speaker 1: one is remodeled, the other is reassembled. They're both the
Speaker 1: same same ship, and yet clearly they are not the
Speaker 1: same ship. That is a good variation. I've also heard
Speaker 1: a variation of this where you like gradually steal some
Speaker 1: sort of masterpiece a piece at a time, and replace it.
Speaker 1: So if you were just wanted to steal, to say,
Speaker 1: the Ship of Theseus from a museum, and he sold
Speaker 1: it piece by piece, you know, swapping out for a
Speaker 1: counterfeit piece, then do you ultimately do what do you have?
Speaker 1: Did you actually steal the whole ship or in replace
Speaker 1: it with a counterfeit or is that still the ship
Speaker 1: in there? I just got an awesome idea for yet
Speaker 1: another remake of the Thomas Crown affair. They steal the
Speaker 1: painting one centimeter at a time with razor blades. Yeah. Now,
Speaker 1: and and you know another detail that's often thrown in
Speaker 1: as did theseus ever actually stand foot on this ship?
Speaker 1: That ends up playing into the identity of it. But
Speaker 1: back to Thomas Hobbs, so yeah, he's he's saying, you
Speaker 1: know what, have you took the old pieces and you
Speaker 1: just reconstructed the ship? But if you you could take
Speaker 1: that principle and extend it to other scenarios, less less
Speaker 1: contrived ones. Yeah, yeah, I mean he he ends up
Speaker 1: pondering this a bit more too. He says, wouldn't this
Speaker 1: also mean that nothing can be the same? A man
Speaker 1: standing would not be the same as he was when
Speaker 1: he was sitting. Water in a vessel would be another
Speaker 1: example of this. It's in the vessel and then you
Speaker 1: pour it out. I mean, clearly it's the same water
Speaker 1: or is it the same water? Based on on this question,
Speaker 1: he says, uh quote. Wherefore, the beginnings of individualization is
Speaker 1: not always to be taken either from matter alone or
Speaker 1: from form alone. And all this gets down to is
Speaker 1: this idea of identity over time as opposed to identity
Speaker 1: in a single moment, you know, whatever a single moment is.
Speaker 1: And there's a lot of philosophical thought on this topic,
Speaker 1: more than we can possibly summarize in this episode. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: but I do think it's worth exploring the idea of
Speaker 1: thinking about um, maybe there, maybe what these paradoxes are doing,
Speaker 1: like the ship of theseus and Grandfather's acts and the
Speaker 1: water in a vessel is highlighting some fundamental flaw in
Speaker 1: our metaphysics. It's showing you hate you're generating paradox is
Speaker 1: because there's something wrong with the way you categorize things
Speaker 1: in the world. It's the same way you might know
Speaker 1: there's something wrong with your physics theory, if it's requiring
Speaker 1: you to divide by zero or something. You know, something
Speaker 1: went wrong somewhere along here. Well, it really feels more
Speaker 1: and more like it's a situation where our metaphysics is
Speaker 1: largely about figuring out real time events, Like, you know,
Speaker 1: the soldier is unning at me, what should I do
Speaker 1: to avoid him? Uh? But then we we end up
Speaker 1: extrapolating that via mental time travel and memory. But we're
Speaker 1: taking it into the future. We're taking it into the past,
Speaker 1: and we're considering knees and hiss and situations that are
Speaker 1: not identical to the present. That's a great point. But
Speaker 1: more than that, what would it mean for a thing
Speaker 1: to be identical to the present? I mean, is there
Speaker 1: such a thing as an identical moment to the president
Speaker 1: or the identity of a thing? Even so, I want
Speaker 1: to talk about a cool article I saw. This was
Speaker 1: published in Aon magazine in November seventeen by kelso Vaira,
Speaker 1: and it's called which is more fundamental processes or Things?
Speaker 1: And it's just a quick, nice little explainer on the
Speaker 1: difference between what's known as substance metaphysics and process metaphysics.
Speaker 1: Now metaphysics, of course, it's just our attempt to understand
Speaker 1: the most basic level of reality or existence. It's the
Speaker 1: set of principles that's underneath physics. So physics, for example,
Speaker 1: might be able to tell to you that a thing
Speaker 1: is a certain mass and a certain velocity and so forth.
Speaker 1: Metaphysics might ask what does it mean for a thing
Speaker 1: to exist? Or what does it mean to have a
Speaker 1: property like mass or velocity. What are properties? And so,
Speaker 1: to quote from Vyera's article, quote, Western metaphysics tends to
Speaker 1: rely on the paradigm of substances. We often see the
Speaker 1: world as a world of things, composed of atomic molecules,
Speaker 1: natural kinds, galaxies. Objects are the paradigmatic mode of existence,
Speaker 1: the basic building blocks of the universe. What exists exists
Speaker 1: as an object. That is to say, things are of
Speaker 1: a certain kind, They have some specific qualities and well
Speaker 1: defined spatial and temporal limits. And so you might use
Speaker 1: the example of like a cat, your cat, Robert, Now,
Speaker 1: your cat has existed for a certain amount of time.
Speaker 1: It has certain features that you can list that describe
Speaker 1: it physically, the color of its fur, the color of
Speaker 1: its eyes. I don't know how much it likes to
Speaker 1: jump up on the cow her, how much it obeys
Speaker 1: you when you tell you to do something. I don't
Speaker 1: know how much cats ever do that. That's probably not
Speaker 1: part of cat identity. Yeah, she's not much for obeying.
Speaker 1: But ve Era argues that perhaps substance metaphysics is just
Speaker 1: not the best way of thinking about the world, and
Speaker 1: it actually leads to confusion and paradox and so He
Speaker 1: gives this example of the question of the you know,
Speaker 1: you know, the classic do you see this glass of
Speaker 1: water is half empty or half full? But about that
Speaker 1: glass of water? Via writes, quote, but what if the
Speaker 1: isolated frame a glass of water fails to give the
Speaker 1: relevant information? Anyone would prefer an emptier glass that is
Speaker 1: getting full to a fuller one getting empty. Any analysis
Speaker 1: lacking information about change misses the point, which is just
Speaker 1: what substance metaphysics is missing. So he articulates the view
Speaker 1: of process philosophers, people who believe that the fundamental constituents
Speaker 1: of reality are not things but processes. It's not that
Speaker 1: a thing exists, it's that a process is in a
Speaker 1: particular state at a particular time. As the philosopher Alfred
Speaker 1: North Whitehead put it, we should think of the world
Speaker 1: as a collection of occurrences instead of things. And this
Speaker 1: resonates with me a lot. I actually think about this
Speaker 1: view fairly often, especially when I'm reading about fundamental physics.
Speaker 1: But speaking of the Greeks that I mean, this also
Speaker 1: has a there's a long tradition of this kind of thought.
Speaker 1: If you go back to hero Clydas, who propounded the
Speaker 1: principle of Panta ray. Everything flows. Existence in a way
Speaker 1: is like a river, and you can't step into the
Speaker 1: same river twice for multiple reasons, not just because the
Speaker 1: water of the river has flown past and changed, but
Speaker 1: because you've changed when you step into the river again.
Speaker 1: And I think the important thing about this thing about
Speaker 1: process metaphysics is that this doesn't have to change anything
Speaker 1: about our understanding of the physical laws of nature, and
Speaker 1: as far as far as I can tell, it's totally
Speaker 1: compatible with them, and some would actually say more compatible
Speaker 1: with them. It's also certainly more in keeping with our
Speaker 1: understanding of biology, which tells us that they're not actually
Speaker 1: fixed kinds of animals or plants or bacteria, but there's
Speaker 1: instead this process of change over time, and that the
Speaker 1: change produces frequencies of different alleles as its cycles through
Speaker 1: ever changing states. Yeah, and then of course you also
Speaker 1: think about the various chemical reactions that are are necessary,
Speaker 1: the various um you know, all the things that that
Speaker 1: that affect our mind stated even any given point of
Speaker 1: the day. You know, when we try and decide who
Speaker 1: we are, we're essentially trying to like pick out what
Speaker 1: is the ideal version of me that they manifest at
Speaker 1: any given point in the you know, the currently or
Speaker 1: in the near future or the near past. Is it
Speaker 1: the you know, is it the I haven't finished my
Speaker 1: second drink or I'm on my second cup of coffee?
Speaker 1: You know me that that's that's the only version that
Speaker 1: I'm going to account that I'm gonna count. What's the
Speaker 1: platonic form of Robert? You're trying to seek out some
Speaker 1: ideal form of yourself that you've created as an abstraction,
Speaker 1: and that doesn't actually match who you are or what
Speaker 1: you're doing at any given moment in time. In fact,
Speaker 1: try to think of an object that you can identify
Speaker 1: that has an identity that does not fundamentally change its
Speaker 1: former nature over time. A seed turns into a sapling
Speaker 1: and then into a tree, and then it dies, and
Speaker 1: then it rots and goes into the ground. And this
Speaker 1: is the case of every biological thing you can think of.
Speaker 1: But then, of course, on a longer time scale, other
Speaker 1: things are like that, stars, asteroids, planets, black holes. You know,
Speaker 1: think things change over time, even even black holes evaporate
Speaker 1: over time. You've got hawking radiation. Well, just I think
Speaker 1: too about the very stones that we build our monuments
Speaker 1: and our grave stones out off. We build things out
Speaker 1: of stone because it makes them more permanent. You know
Speaker 1: that that that it will live on after we'd gone.
Speaker 1: And that's true. These things tend to to exist on
Speaker 1: a scale that goes beyond the limits of of our biology.
Speaker 1: Of pure mortal exists. And yet at the same time
Speaker 1: we change the stone to make it into the graves gravestone.
Speaker 1: And any walk through the cemetery will remind you that
Speaker 1: that these things to fade uh and uh and and
Speaker 1: are eroded or are shattered when when tree limbs fall
Speaker 1: upon them. Uh So yeah, everything spoiler, everything changes. It's
Speaker 1: great to walk backwards through time in a cemetery, to
Speaker 1: start with the fresher graves that have the pristine stones,
Speaker 1: and then walk back through time to the older and
Speaker 1: older graves, which often they tend to just disappear into
Speaker 1: the ground. They turn into nubs. You can't read what's
Speaker 1: on them anymore. There there there will maybe be just
Speaker 1: a kind of rock marker and that's it. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: then the sun starts going down and the ghouls come,
Speaker 1: and then you realize you've really been wandering in the
Speaker 1: graveyard too long and you have changed into a delicious meal.
Speaker 1: Uh No, I guess the ghouls prefer grave flesh, don't
Speaker 1: they do they eat live people? You know, it depends
Speaker 1: on the interpretation. But the stories I like, I think
Speaker 1: the girls will go for a live meal if they
Speaker 1: can get it, you know, especially if it's somebody that
Speaker 1: has become lost in the cemetery and uh and the
Speaker 1: sun is setting. It's like the kid who prefers chicken McNuggets,
Speaker 1: but will if they're forced to eat a delicious, fresh
Speaker 1: cooked me a lot of produce and all that. But yeah,
Speaker 1: so I was trying to think of an example of
Speaker 1: a counter example, right, is there something that doesn't change
Speaker 1: over time? And I was like, well, you know, you've
Speaker 1: got maybe fundamental elementary particles. They don't really they don't
Speaker 1: have characteristics. They're all identical, they're interchangeable. Maybe they don't
Speaker 1: change over time. But thinking back to the entire history
Speaker 1: of the universe, that's not actually true. Like during the
Speaker 1: Plank Epoch at the beginning of time, as far as
Speaker 1: we know in the local universe, quarks and electrons hadn't
Speaker 1: been formed yet. This is a time of hot condensed
Speaker 1: energy when we did not have quarks, And then later
Speaker 1: you get quark glue on plasma and all that. But so,
Speaker 1: I don't know, I don't know if you can actually
Speaker 1: think of a thing that is an object that has
Speaker 1: never changed and will never change. Even in mythology and religion,
Speaker 1: you're often hard pressed to find that one constant that
Speaker 1: doesn't change. I think probably, I guess if you if
Speaker 1: you look at you know, Monotheistic, Judeo christian Um and
Speaker 1: Islamic interpretations of God, then you have something that is
Speaker 1: supposedly unchanging over time from the very beginning to the
Speaker 1: very end. But in it's like most other religions and cosmologies.
Speaker 1: You know, God's beget begot, God's and and and they
Speaker 1: all have these essentially life cycles that they're going through. Well,
Speaker 1: I would say even the fact that monotheistic gods enter
Speaker 1: into narratives makes them not exactly unchanging. You can't tell
Speaker 1: a narrative about something that doesn't change. If it enters
Speaker 1: into a new covenant with with humanity, then that's hopefully
Speaker 1: a change. Hopefully there was some change in uh, in
Speaker 1: attitude there that we can view as positive. I'm sure
Speaker 1: there are a million ways of splitting that theological hair,
Speaker 1: but uh, but anyway to come back to the idea
Speaker 1: of philosophy, process metaphysics, thinking of things not as objects.
Speaker 1: This is not a world of things, but a world
Speaker 1: of processes going through changes. How how should this change
Speaker 1: the way we think about the ship of theseus, so
Speaker 1: Vieira writes. To explain why things change without losing their identity,
Speaker 1: substance philosophers need deposit some underlying core, an essence that
Speaker 1: remains the same throughout change. It is not easy to
Speaker 1: pin down what this core might be. As the paradox
Speaker 1: of theseus ship illustrates, and then he explains the ship
Speaker 1: as we already have. But he writes, is this the
Speaker 1: same ship, even though materially it is completely different? For
Speaker 1: substance philosophers, this is something of a paradox. For process philosophers,
Speaker 1: this is a necessary part of identity. Of course, it
Speaker 1: is the same ship. Identity ceases to be a static
Speaker 1: equivalence of a thing with itself. After all, without the repairs,
Speaker 1: the ship would have lost its functionality. It would have
Speaker 1: become a ruin or a shipwreck. Well, it just wouldn't
Speaker 1: be a ship anymore. Yeah, uh so, Yeah, ships change,
Speaker 1: parts get replaced, and that's part of the process of
Speaker 1: the ship. There is no thing ship. Ship is A
Speaker 1: ship is an ongoing process of change, just like you
Speaker 1: and me are. And Naviera defends against the idea that
Speaker 1: processes are just transitions between different fundamental substance realities by
Speaker 1: pointing out one thing we mentioned a little bit earlier
Speaker 1: than the paradox of the heap. Uh, if you've never
Speaker 1: read about this before, The paradox of the heap basically says, Okay,
Speaker 1: you've got a heap of sand. Now you remove one
Speaker 1: grain of sand at a time, and every time you
Speaker 1: remove a grain of sand, you ask is it still
Speaker 1: a heap of sand? And at some point you will
Speaker 1: only have one grain of sand left. That's obviously not
Speaker 1: a heap. But you can't point to a moment where
Speaker 1: suddenly the heap was not a heap anymore. The same
Speaker 1: thing happens with biological entities in evolution. One of the
Speaker 1: great images that are Richard Dawkins is used in explaining
Speaker 1: the history of an organism is try to imagine your
Speaker 1: ancestors going all the way back down the generations, where
Speaker 1: you old hands with your mother, and then your mother
Speaker 1: holds hands with her mother, and it goes back like
Speaker 1: that forever. At what point where will you find the
Speaker 1: moment where a mother gave birth to a daughter of
Speaker 1: a different species than her. It will never happen every
Speaker 1: At every point, the mother was giving birth to something
Speaker 1: that was pretty much the same animal she was. But
Speaker 1: these changes accumulate over time, and you can't if you
Speaker 1: zoom in, you'll never see the change. I mean, at
Speaker 1: some point the thumb is no longer opposable. I guess
Speaker 1: that that might play a role. Well, but it's not
Speaker 1: going to be a transition from opposable to not opposable.
Speaker 1: It'll be It'll be a gradual transition. That's something that
Speaker 1: maybe is not even noticeably less opposable, but does just
Speaker 1: slightly less and eventually it just becomes a fist bump. Oh,
Speaker 1: there you go. Can't hold hands anymore, You just fist
Speaker 1: bumping mom all the way back to the protozoa. But
Speaker 1: that can't be right, right, because the fist bump is
Speaker 1: the thing you arrive at, not a thing you came from.
Speaker 1: Fist bump is the future. But well, but who's to say.
Speaker 1: Who's to say the this bump wasn't the predominant mode
Speaker 1: of greeting in. You know, among our KaiC humans, they
Speaker 1: might have even done the explosion. Who knows, yeah, or
Speaker 1: the snail. That's what all those hands on the cave
Speaker 1: walls are the explosion. Alright, On that note, we're going
Speaker 1: to take a quick break. But when we come back,
Speaker 1: we will summon the swampman. Thank you, thank you. Alright,
Speaker 1: we're back. So we've been talking about the ship of dcs,
Speaker 1: the question of what determines the identity of a thing.
Speaker 1: If you take a ship and you replace all of
Speaker 1: its parts over many years, is it still the same
Speaker 1: ship even if no original part of that ship remains.
Speaker 1: And one of the ways that this becomes actually relevant
Speaker 1: to the real world is when we start thinking about minds. Right,
Speaker 1: because we have this thing we call experience, the experience
Speaker 1: of experience, and you have the sensation that your experience
Speaker 1: is continuous, or at least I have that sensation. I
Speaker 1: assume everybody else does. Everybody else acts like they do,
Speaker 1: and like they want their experience to be a unified
Speaker 1: part of this continuous, ongoing thing that is identifiable as itself.
Speaker 1: You don't want to suddenly be somebody else who is
Speaker 1: no longer you. Those certainly people do have, and this
Speaker 1: becomes a question like, to what extent do they legitimately
Speaker 1: have this moment of just profound change in their life,
Speaker 1: you know, as a moment of revelation or salvation, you know,
Speaker 1: a road to Damascus kind of thing. To what extent
Speaker 1: is it a true change or is it a or
Speaker 1: are we like forcing the change upon ourselves. We're saying
Speaker 1: that we changed, but on a on some other level,
Speaker 1: we're still thinking of ourselves as a continuous movement. Well,
Speaker 1: even then, people tend to put the value of their
Speaker 1: change in terms of themselves relative to who they used
Speaker 1: to be. So if you have had this Road to
Speaker 1: Damascus moment where you know, I'm a different person now
Speaker 1: and I'm so glad I am, you tend to think
Speaker 1: of that as being valuable relative to whatever kind of
Speaker 1: creepy were before, right, I mean, any if you have
Speaker 1: a good redemption story, you've got to get into what
Speaker 1: what came first. Yeah. And also if every personal change
Speaker 1: or improvement for the better was like the Star Trek
Speaker 1: teleporter that just kills you and makes a newer, better
Speaker 1: copy of you, would people really go for it? I
Speaker 1: don't know. Yeah, it's kind of like, you know, Occasionally
Speaker 1: there'll be a story where somebody, generally they've written a
Speaker 1: book or something, but they've made this phenomenal change that
Speaker 1: used to be a terrible person and now they're a
Speaker 1: good person, and they're out there preaching the word about
Speaker 1: how everyone should be a good person too. And it
Speaker 1: makes you think at times, well, I was never a
Speaker 1: terrible person. How come? How come Terry Gross isn't talking
Speaker 1: to me? You're the brother in the prodigal son story? Exactly?
Speaker 1: I never This isn't fair. Yeah, I was good the
Speaker 1: whole time. Where's my uh, where's my celebration? Ain't that
Speaker 1: life where jealous creatures aren't? But anyway, so, yeah, we
Speaker 1: we need to talk about the swampman. Yes, we We've
Speaker 1: put the swampman off for far too long. So the
Speaker 1: swampman is a variation on the ship of theseus idea
Speaker 1: applied to the human mind. And this is originally a
Speaker 1: concept that was introduced by the philosopher Donald Davidson in
Speaker 1: a presentation called knowing One's Own Mind originally, I think
Speaker 1: in the Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association.
Speaker 1: The version I found was reprinted in the American Philosophical
Speaker 1: Association Centennial series from but the original one was back
Speaker 1: in the eighties seven, and so Donald Davidson was raising
Speaker 1: this question, what is the relationship between the identity of
Speaker 1: a thing in the history of that thing? Are you
Speaker 1: ready to go to the swamp? Robert Okay Davidson says,
Speaker 1: Suppose lightning strikes a dead tree in a swamp. I
Speaker 1: am standing nearby. My body is reduced to its elements,
Speaker 1: while entirely by coincidence and out of different molecules, the
Speaker 1: tree is turned into my physical replica. My replica, the
Speaker 1: swamp man, moves exactly as I did, according to its nature.
Speaker 1: It departs the swamp in honors and seems to recognize
Speaker 1: my friends and appears to return their greetings in English.
Speaker 1: It moves into my house and seems to write articles
Speaker 1: on radical interpretation. No one can tell the difference, but
Speaker 1: there is a difference. My replica can't recognize my friends.
Speaker 1: It can't recognize anything, since it never cognized anything in
Speaker 1: the first place. It can't know my friends names, though
Speaker 1: of course it seems to. It can't remember my house.
Speaker 1: It can't mean what I do by the word house,
Speaker 1: for example, since the sound house it makes, was not
Speaker 1: learned in the context that would give it the right meaning,
Speaker 1: or any meaning at all. Indeed, I don't see how
Speaker 1: my replica can be said to mean anything by the
Speaker 1: sounds it makes, nor to have any thoughts. It's a
Speaker 1: nice creepy little tale. Uh that's summoning. Uh, you know
Speaker 1: memories of the philosophical zombies that we've discussed the zombies. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: so it's the question with the P zombies is it's
Speaker 1: a assumed in the P zombie thought experiment that that
Speaker 1: they behave exactly like humans, except they're not conscious. I
Speaker 1: guess Davidson's asking the question of can a thing that
Speaker 1: behaves exactly like a normal person but has no prior
Speaker 1: experiences actually be having thoughts, actually be uh speaking, meaningful
Speaker 1: sentences if it's just randomly producing phenomena identical to what
Speaker 1: a person would produce if they arrived at those behaviors
Speaker 1: by the normal means. And so, to be clear, if
Speaker 1: we if we follow through with this, if we really
Speaker 1: imagine what he's saying, a perfect Adam for Adam copy
Speaker 1: of you would be externally indistinguishable from you, and would
Speaker 1: presumably behave exactly like the original you. There's nothing we
Speaker 1: know of that would make it behave differently, but it
Speaker 1: would not exist in a context in which its behavior
Speaker 1: would have any meaning. It might have a long heartfelt
Speaker 1: conversation with a close friend of yours, and it would
Speaker 1: behave exactly like you would and say the exact same
Speaker 1: things the original you would have said in that conversation,
Speaker 1: but and in fact would never have met this friend before.
Speaker 1: So does the swamp creature have a relationship with your friend?
Speaker 1: Does the swamp creature know the friend? And for the
Speaker 1: same reason, does the swamp creature know anything? Now. I
Speaker 1: know we have some comic book fans out there who
Speaker 1: might think, hey, this sounds a little bit familiar, because
Speaker 1: this is exactly the way that Alec Holland become swamp
Speaker 1: Thing in Alan Moore's amazing run with the swamp Thing comic.
Speaker 1: Huh um. I actually went back and read this again.
Speaker 1: The very first issue I guess you'd say this is
Speaker 1: is titled The Anatomy Lesson. It's from February. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: haven't read it. Actually, I feel bad because Christian once
Speaker 1: gave me a huge stack of comics to read that
Speaker 1: did include a run of swamp Thing. I'm sure it
Speaker 1: was Moore's, but I never made it to that one though.
Speaker 1: I did read All Star Superman, which was great and
Speaker 1: I think sort of lightly brushed against some of the
Speaker 1: same philosophical questions about the identity of a person through
Speaker 1: time travel and all that. But I gotta read swamp
Speaker 1: Thing now. Oh yeah, well it's it's It's definitely worth
Speaker 1: checking out. It's probably been a decade since I read
Speaker 1: all of it, but I did pick up the anatomy
Speaker 1: lesson and gave it another read, and it is indeed wonderful.
Speaker 1: This is the one that originally hooked me when I
Speaker 1: when I read it for the first time, and I
Speaker 1: wound up spending way too much money at the time
Speaker 1: on all of the Alan Moore swamp Thing books. Uh,
Speaker 1: none of them disappointed. But this first story is just perfect.
Speaker 1: It's a it's an intelligent little horror story that cast
Speaker 1: the very the very identity of swamp Thing in a
Speaker 1: new light. So he's not just alc Holland a man
Speaker 1: who is mutated into a plant man following a science
Speaker 1: lab explosion in the swamp. No is More describes it.
Speaker 1: The wonder chemical here transforms the plants and when Holland's
Speaker 1: burnt corpse sinks into the swamp, the plants eat it
Speaker 1: and regrow a body that believes itself to be like Holland.
Speaker 1: So the organs don't work, heart, lungs, brains, It's all
Speaker 1: just vegetable manner that has form but no function. But
Speaker 1: it believes it is Holland. And it is always believed
Speaker 1: that it is Holland. And this is the only thing
Speaker 1: that has kept the swamp Things saying this whole time. Well,
Speaker 1: so this Davidson presentation, I believe is from the first
Speaker 1: time he presented. It was in which is after this,
Speaker 1: So I think it would have to be that Davidson
Speaker 1: was inspired by swamp Thing and not the other way around. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think it might be the case. I did just
Speaker 1: a little bit of research on this, and I could
Speaker 1: not find any definitive statements on inspiration here. But but
Speaker 1: it seems like that would be the case, and I
Speaker 1: think that's great. I suppose we can only wait until
Speaker 1: the leave of extraordinary Gentlemen show up in the philosophy journals. Now, well,
Speaker 1: I would actually love to see um swamp Thing and
Speaker 1: swamp Man meet up. I think that sounds like exactly
Speaker 1: the kind of thing that Alan Moore could return to
Speaker 1: rite at some point. In fact, I'm a little surprise
Speaker 1: it didn't happen, except Swampman would be completely indistinguishable from
Speaker 1: Donald Davidson, right, so it would basically just be Donald
Speaker 1: Davidson meets swamp thing, except it's not the original Donald Davidson.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's a weird thing to consider. I spend
Speaker 1: a while trying to this is one of those weird
Speaker 1: kind of thought experiments that pokes you and you have
Speaker 1: to sit there for a while thinking like, wait a minute,
Speaker 1: is this Is this truly illuminating or not? I mean,
Speaker 1: I was like trying to decide, and I still don't
Speaker 1: think I've made up my mind. But it is strange.
Speaker 1: What does it mean to have a thought? Because we
Speaker 1: typically believe that a thought is about something. So say,
Speaker 1: for example, you have the thought I do not like
Speaker 1: the smell of hard boiled eggs. We consider it part
Speaker 1: of the definition of this thought that you're aware of
Speaker 1: the existence of hard boiled eggs and you have smelled them,
Speaker 1: or at least you think you have, and you do
Speaker 1: not like the smell. But if a being with an
Speaker 1: atom for Adam Replica of your brain has that thought,
Speaker 1: and yet it has never smelled the smell. Is it
Speaker 1: really having that thought? What is it doing with its brain?
Speaker 1: You know it could not be forming that thought from
Speaker 1: information derived from sense experience. That thought when coming from
Speaker 1: a being that's never seen any evidence of the existence
Speaker 1: of hard boiled eggs, has never smelled them, hasn't ever
Speaker 1: learned the words hard boiled eggs or the words smell.
Speaker 1: The thought is just random behavior, no more significant than
Speaker 1: you know, a million pages of random numbers printed out
Speaker 1: on paper. Now at the same time that I can't
Speaker 1: help but think that, hey, I could develop a false
Speaker 1: memory of, say, eating a hard boiled ostrich egg, which
Speaker 1: I don't believe I have ever eaten. But if I but,
Speaker 1: I can easily imagine where I might tweak my memory
Speaker 1: into into thinking that I have. Likewise, what have I
Speaker 1: read a very convincing passage in a novel in which
Speaker 1: a character eats a hard boiled dragon egg. I have
Speaker 1: no actual sense experience of that happening, But if it
Speaker 1: was well written and had lots of detail and atmosphere,
Speaker 1: then I could i it very well in a sense
Speaker 1: experience it in my mind. I think it's fairly obvious
Speaker 1: that that we humans spend a great deal of time
Speaker 1: obsessing over memories that are at least flawed, even if
Speaker 1: we're lucky enough to be free of memories that are
Speaker 1: false entirely. And you're exactly right, I mean we have,
Speaker 1: we have false memories all the time. But they arise
Speaker 1: within a context of semantics, right, I mean they arise
Speaker 1: in a world where you know that you exist, and
Speaker 1: where words have meanings, and you've learned the meanings of
Speaker 1: words like egg and like smell, and you know that
Speaker 1: there is such a thing as smells, And I mean
Speaker 1: there's an entire structure that makes that false memory possible
Speaker 1: and makes it feel meaningful. So, for instance, I I
Speaker 1: have had a hard boiled egg, I have seen an
Speaker 1: ostrich I've seen a picture of an OSTRICHJAG. I can
Speaker 1: therefore extrapolate what it would be to eat one and
Speaker 1: then have the fuel to to build that false memory. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Now imagine you have a brain that generates that memory,
Speaker 1: except it's never seen anything, and it's never learned any words,
Speaker 1: and it's never had any of this experience. It just
Speaker 1: happens to have the atomic structure of a brain that
Speaker 1: has had all those experiences and thus it behaves the
Speaker 1: same way. It's like if I had to form a
Speaker 1: false memory of smoking a clues pats like what, I
Speaker 1: don't I don't know where I would begin to to
Speaker 1: assemble that memory exactly. So yeah, that's what's at stake.
Speaker 1: So I I've I've struggled with this thought experiment because
Speaker 1: I don't know if it's if it's making me feel
Speaker 1: weird because it gets it something really fundamental, or because
Speaker 1: it's one of those confusion machines that just like takes
Speaker 1: their intuitions and churns up a bunch of confusion about
Speaker 1: stuff that doesn't really matter. Yeah, I don't know. I
Speaker 1: keep coming back to the idea that if swamp man
Speaker 1: or even swamp thing, remember like, if he has these
Speaker 1: memories of being this person, then yeah, those those those
Speaker 1: memories arise from those memories have internal context. They're kind
Speaker 1: of like a software that that that that that that
Speaker 1: he's carrying around with him. Yeah, and even if he
Speaker 1: you know, even if it's just a copy of the
Speaker 1: original software, it's still the software. Well, it's kind of
Speaker 1: like if you imagined a software, a piece of software
Speaker 1: created by randomly generating characters to create lines of code
Speaker 1: that would execute eventually. And so at some point you
Speaker 1: could randomly create a piece of software that does things.
Speaker 1: Could you call that software? Could you say that it
Speaker 1: has a purpose? Could you say that it has functions?
Speaker 1: Could you say that it uh that it executes? I mean,
Speaker 1: obviously we don't think software is conscious. I guess the
Speaker 1: question of whether the swampman would be conscious is a
Speaker 1: different kind of thing. Well, if if Swamman goes home
Speaker 1: and and then and says hi to to these friends,
Speaker 1: I feel like he's he's as human as anybody else. Really,
Speaker 1: I think that would be Daniel Dennett's take. So Dinnett
Speaker 1: has addressed the challenges and usefulness of this thought experiment
Speaker 1: about Swampman, despite how popular it's been. Davidson first offered it,
Speaker 1: I think in the seven and uh, though a lot
Speaker 1: of people have picked up since then. Davidson apparently told
Speaker 1: Dnnet at some point that he regretted introducing it because
Speaker 1: he believed it caused a lot of unenlightening back and
Speaker 1: forth without proving much. So then it's got a critique
Speaker 1: of this thought experiment. He says, you know a lot
Speaker 1: of thought experiments basically try to function like science experiments,
Speaker 1: so you can coct a bizarre, implausible scenario with the
Speaker 1: purpose of isolating a variable. You want to put something
Speaker 1: some particular variable. You want to be able to turn
Speaker 1: one knob up to eleven and control everything else, and
Speaker 1: you know, run everything else down to zero, so that
Speaker 1: you can test your intuitions about what happens and with
Speaker 1: changes in that variable alone. And so the variable isolated
Speaker 1: in this thought experiment is the history of an object
Speaker 1: such as a person. Right, you say, materially identical. Only
Speaker 1: thing that's different is how the atoms got that way,
Speaker 1: and then it you know. He admits that a lot
Speaker 1: of times thought experiments like this are really useful, like
Speaker 1: think about how physicists like Einstein and Galileo and Newton
Speaker 1: abuse thought experiments that us intuitions and math to determine
Speaker 1: fundamental facts about the laws of nature before anybody had
Speaker 1: actually confirmed them with physical experiments. So thought experiments based
Speaker 1: on bizarre scenarios and intuitions can be very powerful. But
Speaker 1: other times thought experiments testing bizarre scenarios are are just
Speaker 1: creating unnecessary confusion. And in his discussion of Swampman, then
Speaker 1: it asks us to consider the cow shark, Robert, have
Speaker 1: you ever seen a cow shark? I have not. Well, here,
Speaker 1: here's how you'd know if you have. The cow shark
Speaker 1: is created when a normal cow gives birth to an
Speaker 1: animal that is Adam for Adam, exactly like a shark
Speaker 1: that you would find swimming in the ocean. Now, is
Speaker 1: this newborn animal a cow or a shark? I'm gonna
Speaker 1: say it's a shark. It looks like a shark, it
Speaker 1: swims like a shark. It's a shark, even if it
Speaker 1: came out of a cow. Oh, well, so you got
Speaker 1: you're challenging some definitions, right, because some people would say, well,
Speaker 1: white sharks are born to shark parents. Even if a
Speaker 1: shark looks kind of weird, it's still a shark, right
Speaker 1: if it parents were sharks. Well, that kind of logic
Speaker 1: will get you eaten by a shark, I'm thinking. But
Speaker 1: then dnn, it adds another wrinkle. He says. Okay, Well,
Speaker 1: let's say this shark is Adam for Adam, a shark,
Speaker 1: but with the exception that it has cow DNA and
Speaker 1: all of its cells. Now, is it a cow or
Speaker 1: a shark? It's a very peculiar shark. I would say, now, DNN.
Speaker 1: It asks this question with with the idea that if
Speaker 1: you ask this to a biologist, they would probably not
Speaker 1: think this was a very meaningful question, right, because in reality,
Speaker 1: a cow will never give birth to an animal in
Speaker 1: the perfect form of a shark that has cow DNA
Speaker 1: and all of its cells. It's not logically impossible, meaning
Speaker 1: it doesn't involve an inherent contradiction, but it's just never
Speaker 1: ever going to happen in nature. And thus we don't
Speaker 1: learn a lot about biology by testing our intuitions about
Speaker 1: cows and sharks this way, because our intuitions about biology
Speaker 1: have evolved to function in the world where this never
Speaker 1: happens and never will happen. In other words, the very
Speaker 1: tools we're using to solve this puzzle of is it
Speaker 1: a cow is to shark are shaped by a world
Speaker 1: where this question will never arise because it is physically impossible. Now,
Speaker 1: you could come back and you could say, wait a minute,
Speaker 1: haven't we solved real world physics problems by creating physically
Speaker 1: impossible thought experiments things like a like a sleigh traveling
Speaker 1: at the speed of light for relativity, or objects that
Speaker 1: fly through the air with zero friction and the answer
Speaker 1: is yes. But dinn It says, you know, those experiments
Speaker 1: involved much less of an uncontrolled departure from reality than
Speaker 1: the cow shark or the swampman. The physics experiments carefully
Speaker 1: name and limit their violations of reality so that you
Speaker 1: can take that violation and calibrated as part of the experiment,
Speaker 1: and then real world experiments can be devised to test
Speaker 1: the conclusions of the thought experiments after you're done. Not
Speaker 1: so for cow shark and swampman. Really, you know, dinn
Speaker 1: It says, Uh, there's sort of a general rule of thumb,
Speaker 1: and It's quote the utility of a thought experiment is
Speaker 1: inversely proportional to the size of its departures from reality.
Speaker 1: So he does not really seem concerned with Davidson's worries
Speaker 1: about whether swampman can actually have thoughts or known the
Speaker 1: meanings of words, or even be a person, because swampman
Speaker 1: is physically impossible in the context that we've developed words
Speaker 1: and concepts like thought and meaning. In person, a person
Speaker 1: has thoughts which are derived from evolution, development, and experience,
Speaker 1: and a swampman does not exist within that context. So
Speaker 1: I'm curious what you think about Dennett's critique here. I
Speaker 1: think he makes a good point, but I'm gonna have
Speaker 1: to come back on it. Well, I do feel like
Speaker 1: there is this sense that some some thought experiments are
Speaker 1: of course very useful, and then the further you you get,
Speaker 1: you kind of get into that territory of their fun.
Speaker 1: They're great to think about it. You know, it's like saying, oh,
Speaker 1: my hands can touch everything but themselves. Man, you know,
Speaker 1: they're it's it's it's great, but I don't. But my
Speaker 1: hand can touch itself. I'm poking my palm right now.
Speaker 1: Well maybe, but this is why this is That was
Speaker 1: for Futurama. I think with the h one of the
Speaker 1: ends eats a hippie and becomes high, and it's like,
Speaker 1: my hands contect everything but themselves. Um so it's yeah,
Speaker 1: kind of a false paradox. But but you know, there's
Speaker 1: so many of these things that they I do. I
Speaker 1: do kind of side within it here. It does feel
Speaker 1: like some of the more extravagant thought experiments do get
Speaker 1: into that area where it's not particularly useful, but it's fun.
Speaker 1: It's more recreational. Right, Yeah, I think that's right. I
Speaker 1: mean I get what he's saying, and I think He's
Speaker 1: exactly right that we should be careful not to draw
Speaker 1: conclusions by testing our intuitions on conditions that those intuitions
Speaker 1: are totally unsuited to evaluate. Here's a great example. I
Speaker 1: bet you've heard people make arguments about the origin of
Speaker 1: the universe based on an intuitive understanding of things like
Speaker 1: space and time. Right. You know, people argue about like
Speaker 1: what it means for the universe to begin or to
Speaker 1: come into existence or something like that, based on what
Speaker 1: they think it means for like a meeting at the
Speaker 1: office to begin. It's just like our concepts are day
Speaker 1: to day concepts are not only unhelpful but directly confusing
Speaker 1: in that context. But I might take issue with Dennett's
Speaker 1: response because I would say, we live in a world
Speaker 1: where science and technology might be making versions of the
Speaker 1: Swampman experiment sort of replicable in reality. Maybe not making
Speaker 1: an atom for adom recreation of your entire body that
Speaker 1: does seem fairly impossible, but by making something like a
Speaker 1: perfect copy of the processing functions of your individual brain,
Speaker 1: or say, gradually replacing parts of your brain ship of
Speaker 1: theseus style with a biotic computer hardware. And I want
Speaker 1: to be clear that I don't know this is possible.
Speaker 1: I'm pretty skeptical. I think Robert, you're also somewhat skeptical
Speaker 1: of the curse Wiley and hype about digital immortality and
Speaker 1: all that kind of stuff that I think there's a
Speaker 1: lot of unanswered questions about that. That's some techno utopians
Speaker 1: take for granted. But I also can't rule it out.
Speaker 1: So it may not be a sure thing that you
Speaker 1: can replace your brain with a digital copy, or that
Speaker 1: you can replace parts of your brain one at a
Speaker 1: time with hardware. But it's not a swamp man, and
Speaker 1: it's not a cow shark. It's a thing that I
Speaker 1: can't be sure we should rule out. So this is
Speaker 1: a question that it's entirely possible we could face in
Speaker 1: reality in the near technological future. All right, so let's
Speaker 1: take another break and when we come back we will
Speaker 1: discuss this a bit more than Alright, we're back, So
Speaker 1: before we keep going, though, Joe, I do want to
Speaker 1: point out, um your so what you do when I
Speaker 1: said that when I quoted the Alien and Future rum
Speaker 1: and said that the hand can touch everything but itself,
Speaker 1: you demonstrated your hand touching itself, but actually your fingers
Speaker 1: were touching your palm? Was your hand actually touching your hand?
Speaker 1: Maybe there's more weight to this, uh, this paradox than
Speaker 1: I thought. Well, maybe there are no such things as hands.
Speaker 1: Is there a hand or is it just like a
Speaker 1: team upon which you have fingers and palm playing? You know,
Speaker 1: that's another example that sometimes comes up for the ship
Speaker 1: of THESEUS A sports team, them individual members change over time,
Speaker 1: but we have this idea that the team itself is
Speaker 1: a thing that is consistent, even though sporting teams are
Speaker 1: are are generally anything. But you know, they'll they'll be
Speaker 1: ups and downs. Uh uh. You know, they may have
Speaker 1: a great year this year, but then who knows what
Speaker 1: next season will be? Like, Yes, definitely, this happens all
Speaker 1: the time. Let's say you you like a company. You
Speaker 1: want to invest in a company, but that company has
Speaker 1: multiple rounds of like layoffs and new hires and all that,
Speaker 1: so that none of the original people remain. And then
Speaker 1: say they change their branding and they get a new
Speaker 1: name for the company and all that, and they also
Speaker 1: end up changing their core business model so that they're
Speaker 1: doing something different than what they originally did. But you're
Speaker 1: still investing in the company. I don't know why I
Speaker 1: went to that. I'm not usually a big stocks guy.
Speaker 1: So this ship of theseus, as we've discussed it, it it
Speaker 1: reveals a lot about the nature of change and this
Speaker 1: elusive quality of self. Any given mind state we express
Speaker 1: is ultimately just just a phase and a continual path.
Speaker 1: We tend to falsely identify both past selves and future
Speaker 1: selves as being the same as who we are now.
Speaker 1: But the reality, of course is it is it is
Speaker 1: rather akin to these uh, disassembled and reconstructed ships that
Speaker 1: we're talking about. I'm a vessel composed of certain parts
Speaker 1: of my past, and many of these parts will constitute
Speaker 1: the ship of my future. And so when we ponder
Speaker 1: such possibilities as digital immortality or some form of digitalized consciousness,
Speaker 1: we can't help it summon the ship of theseus, which
Speaker 1: me am I attempting to safeguard. Though will and will
Speaker 1: it remain me? Will it change? Doesn't matter? And then
Speaker 1: there's the whole coin flip to consider. Oh yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: what's the deal with the coin flip? Proper um? Well,
Speaker 1: this is the idea, like, if I am digitizing myself
Speaker 1: for teleporting, is there any uh, well, am I actually
Speaker 1: going to continue experiencing as this new thing or is
Speaker 1: it in there? Well, that's a great question. I mean,
Speaker 1: we don't really know the answer to that, and I
Speaker 1: I feel like it's almost hilarious sometimes. How easily many
Speaker 1: techno utopians and digital immortality enthusiasts just seemed to assume
Speaker 1: that your consciousness can be transported onto some kind of
Speaker 1: hardware or machine. I think that's far from a given.
Speaker 1: We don't even know if it's possible for machines to
Speaker 1: be conscious. Maybe, I mean, it might be possible. But
Speaker 1: even if so, would that be you in there? Would
Speaker 1: it be like the teleporter and Okay, now you die
Speaker 1: and here's a digital copy of you that you don't
Speaker 1: get to share in the experience of I mean it
Speaker 1: ultimately is would it be the same as that stone
Speaker 1: statue of a long dead individual? Like it's just the
Speaker 1: technological evolution of that same idea, Like that that statue
Speaker 1: is not long dead Napoleon. Uh, neither is this digitized
Speaker 1: Napoleon that we're going to send alpha centauri. Now. I
Speaker 1: attended the World Science Festival earlier this year, and one
Speaker 1: of the salons that I attended as a smaller panel
Speaker 1: discussion was a titled to be or not to be bionic.
Speaker 1: And one of the participants on this panel was a
Speaker 1: man by the name of S. Matthew Law, director of
Speaker 1: the Center for Bioethics and affiliated professor in the Department
Speaker 1: of Philosophy at New York University, and he brought up
Speaker 1: the whole if you can upload it is it you
Speaker 1: question and pointed to the gradual replacement of neurons one
Speaker 1: by one is a potential approach. Uh, And it makes sense, right,
Speaker 1: don't just make an immortal robot version of me, No,
Speaker 1: gradually change me piece by piece into an immortal robot
Speaker 1: almost like almost like tricked me into being an immortal robot.
Speaker 1: You know. Don't just don't just hoodwink me all at once,
Speaker 1: like like you know, slip in there. That's an interesting question.
Speaker 1: So yeah, I imagine if somebody just made a robot
Speaker 1: copy of you and then said, well, now this is
Speaker 1: you, you you would say no way that that's don't turn
Speaker 1: me off because that's not me. But if they replaced
Speaker 1: you one part at a time, it's possible that might
Speaker 1: give you a feeling of continuous experience that the rest
Speaker 1: that the the process wouldn't. But I mean that depends
Speaker 1: on you know, they're all these different models of what's
Speaker 1: the physical substrate of consciousness? Right? Is consciousness? Uh? Is
Speaker 1: there some part of the brain that it's based in.
Speaker 1: If you go back to Daniel Dennet, who we were
Speaker 1: talking about a minute ago, he might say, well, actually,
Speaker 1: the idea that consciousness is a single thing is an illusion.
Speaker 1: You know, consciousness is a range of phenomena. Now this, uh,
Speaker 1: this gradual replacement of neurons to upload consciousness, this of course,
Speaker 1: is just another thought experiment in and of itself. For instance,
Speaker 1: cognitive scientists and philosopher David J. Chalmers wrote about it
Speaker 1: back in the nineties. Though I'm I'm unsure who first
Speaker 1: actually proposed the idea and if it occurred within the
Speaker 1: realm of philosophy, cognitive science, or science fiction. So many
Speaker 1: of these wonderful ideas actually emerged within the sci fi
Speaker 1: realm before uh they become you know, cognitive science, thought experience, etcetera.
Speaker 1: Swamp thing and swamp Man potentially being an example of this.
Speaker 1: I mean, this is one of the great things about
Speaker 1: science fiction is it gives us space used to explore
Speaker 1: these concepts before they're actually technologically feasible. Uh. And you
Speaker 1: know it is. It kind of gets into that whole
Speaker 1: Daniel Dennett situation too, Like sometimes it's it's just there
Speaker 1: to amuse you and like, you know, twist your mind around.
Speaker 1: But if it twist your mind enough, you know, sometimes
Speaker 1: you end up it becomes this, uh, this pure thought experiment. Um.
Speaker 1: Well yeah, and along the same lines, I think maybe
Speaker 1: what you're getting at is that sometimes science fictional explorations
Speaker 1: of concepts can become the opposite of enlightening. They just
Speaker 1: become confusing, they become a bad road to take, or
Speaker 1: they just become art you know. I think of like
Speaker 1: some of the Borhees stories where you have somebody that's
Speaker 1: dreaming within a dream, the circular ruins and all these
Speaker 1: there are elements to them that are similar to thought experiments.
Speaker 1: But I would never say that a Borhe's story is
Speaker 1: a thought experiment. I guess you could. I mean, I
Speaker 1: guess an interesting questions in the story. I'd have to
Speaker 1: like go back and think story by story. But Library
Speaker 1: Library of Babbel's kind of a thoughtics it is, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean you could almost say it's a philosophy paper,
Speaker 1: you could. Yeah, all right, maybe I take all that
Speaker 1: back let's see I need to reread to some bore
Speaker 1: high scraps. But but but you know what I'm saying,
Speaker 1: like it can become I feel like some of these ideas,
Speaker 1: it's almost like there's a crossroads, like, right, where are
Speaker 1: you gonna push it? Are you gonna push it into
Speaker 1: this realm of of of sort of you know, boiled
Speaker 1: down thought experimentation or is it art? Is it meant
Speaker 1: too to make you think and explore new ideas, but
Speaker 1: not in like necessarily a you know, a regimented fashion
Speaker 1: is most sci fi, just like speculative meta ethics papers
Speaker 1: that are it's formulated in a way that people want
Speaker 1: to read. Well, it comes back to time Cop. Time
Speaker 1: Cop is not a thought experient. And yet at the
Speaker 1: same time, when I first saw it as a kid,
Speaker 1: and in time and time over the years, I'll stop
Speaker 1: and I'll think, well that part when when the two
Speaker 1: villains melt together, is that right? How would that work?
Speaker 1: Like I'm it's you know, it's poorly constructed ultimately, but
Speaker 1: it does make me think, like a lot of bad
Speaker 1: movies do, I guess. But but back to the gradual
Speaker 1: replacement of neurons and uploading them at all um, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it comes back to the ship of theseus idea during
Speaker 1: this replacement is gradual replacement? Does it at some point
Speaker 1: cease to be me? And and what if there is
Speaker 1: this dark point in the transition, the moment of unconsciousness,
Speaker 1: does that signal the end of your consciousness in the
Speaker 1: beginning of the next Uh? Is that which comes after
Speaker 1: not you? And if it's not, then again, coming back
Speaker 1: to what you said earlier about anesthesia, how are we
Speaker 1: supposed to interpret that? Is the the individual before and
Speaker 1: after anesthesia? Are those ultimately separate uh entities? I mean,
Speaker 1: ultimately there's this slippery kind of concept in here that
Speaker 1: I feel like is key that that is causing a
Speaker 1: lot of the trouble. And it's the idea of I
Speaker 1: don't know if there's already a name for it, but
Speaker 1: I'd call it something like anticipatory continuity. So it's like,
Speaker 1: you think, if you can create a conscious robot and
Speaker 1: you could put your brain in there, you know, at
Speaker 1: least the conscious robot could have the experience of being
Speaker 1: continuously you. But what you don't want is the you
Speaker 1: that's about to transition thinking I'm going to disappear and die.
Speaker 1: Though of course, you know, the you of every moment
Speaker 1: changes into the you of the future, and that you
Speaker 1: of the future remembers being past you and the future.
Speaker 1: You know, the current you doesn't really worry about the
Speaker 1: fact that present you won't exist a few seconds in
Speaker 1: the future. But there's there's some kind of distinction people
Speaker 1: are making mentally. They're right, they're saying like, if wait,
Speaker 1: there's a way that I could die and some other
Speaker 1: thing could go on being me, which would be different
Speaker 1: than just me being me a few seconds from now, Well,
Speaker 1: I just need a teleporter to edit that out before
Speaker 1: it recreates the enemy, edit out the the fear of
Speaker 1: death in the teleporter, and then I guess we'll be okay.
Speaker 1: But I mean, is it death? I mean, I guess
Speaker 1: that's actually a question to ask, like, if there's a
Speaker 1: version of you continuing, is there a way of saying
Speaker 1: that it's actually that it's not any different from the
Speaker 1: you of three seconds from now continuing the existence of
Speaker 1: you right now? Well, I mean, because if we're talking
Speaker 1: about just the physical body, we also have to remember
Speaker 1: that the body does replace itself largely with a new
Speaker 1: set of cells every seven seven years to ten years,
Speaker 1: and some of the most important parts are revamped even
Speaker 1: more rapidly. But that's that's the more original ship of
Speaker 1: theseus idea. That's gradual replacement, and so we tend to
Speaker 1: be on board with that, right you know, I mean
Speaker 1: I refuse, you refuse, I won't do it. There's some
Speaker 1: people who who who believe the other the body is
Speaker 1: just well, it makes me think of our old friend
Speaker 1: Connor McLeod, the Highlander. So in order to live like
Speaker 1: five centuries, is it just more or less like our body,
Speaker 1: Like everything is just you know, cells are dying and
Speaker 1: being replaced or are his cells just super strong? Are
Speaker 1: they the same cells? Is he like also largely identical
Speaker 1: to the original Highlander except he had a haircut? Well,
Speaker 1: I mean, this makes me think about our episode about neuroplasticity,
Speaker 1: about how neuroplasticity is a balancing act, right, Like, you
Speaker 1: want the brain to be able to change and adapt
Speaker 1: to a certain extent so it can adapt to new
Speaker 1: scenarios and learn and all that. But you also don't
Speaker 1: want the brain to be so radically open to change
Speaker 1: that it is. You know, it can just be ravaged
Speaker 1: by trauma and things like that. You know, you know,
Speaker 1: what I mean. So there's weakness in being elastic, but
Speaker 1: there's also strength in being elastic, And I guess evolution
Speaker 1: tried to shape our our nervous systems to find that
Speaker 1: correct balance. But inherent in that tension is the idea
Speaker 1: that some amount of stability over time is preferable. That's
Speaker 1: like better for us as an organism. You don't want
Speaker 1: to be radically open to change all the time. Then again,
Speaker 1: maybe that that only matters over long time scales. And
Speaker 1: then is that I guess you could also want to
Speaker 1: it's the average person just going to be open to
Speaker 1: the appropriate amount of change. Like I think back to uh,
Speaker 1: this is a line from Terence McKenna, but he said, um,
Speaker 1: if there's something that needs to be done, you will
Speaker 1: find yourself doing it, um, which is is one of
Speaker 1: those statements that seems kind of kind of obvious, but
Speaker 1: at the same time it's I keep coming back to
Speaker 1: and thinking, well, yeah, I guess I would like And
Speaker 1: if you say, well, there's this thing I should have
Speaker 1: done and I didn't do it, well maybe you didn't
Speaker 1: need to do that thing, and that's why you have
Speaker 1: reached this point where you're looking back on it like
Speaker 1: that what does it mean to need to do something? Yeah, Wow,
Speaker 1: we've really gone all the way into the navel on
Speaker 1: this this episode. Um, lots of hands not touching themselves.
Speaker 1: All right, Well, on that note, I think we're gonna
Speaker 1: exit here. But before we do, well, we're not gonna
Speaker 1: have time to touch base. Uh, you know on every
Speaker 1: example of the Ship of Theseus as it's been expressed
Speaker 1: in various works of art or fiction. But but I
Speaker 1: do want to pinpoint a couple of them here real
Speaker 1: quick for starters. Uh, the book blind Side by Peter
Speaker 1: Watts that we both read. I didn't realize until I
Speaker 1: started looking into this, or I didn't remember that the
Speaker 1: spaceship that they're on is the Theseus and yeah, and
Speaker 1: it is capable of rebuilding itself. And then you also
Speaker 1: have a member of the crew who has had half
Speaker 1: his brain rebuilt. So there are a number of of
Speaker 1: elements there. Well. Also, just generally in the works of
Speaker 1: Peter Watts, characters are very much Ship of Theseus style brains.
Speaker 1: Maybe we've had lots of neural augmentation and all that. Now,
Speaker 1: the teleporter problem variant that we talked about that's been
Speaker 1: explored on the Outer limits, and to a large extent,
Speaker 1: the Christopher Nolan film The Prestige. There was a character
Speaker 1: on Star Trek Deep Space nine named Antos who was
Speaker 1: a Bajore and spiritual leader who had to have his
Speaker 1: brain gradually replaced with cybernetics, and this eroded his previous
Speaker 1: sense of self and this had a negative impact on
Speaker 1: his relationship with Kira, the Joran character on that show.
Speaker 1: Must I've never watched Deep Space, but it's pretty great.
Speaker 1: I didn't. I have to say, I do not specifically
Speaker 1: remember this episode, but I used to watch it all
Speaker 1: the time. It was like every evening at like nine
Speaker 1: pm or something in syndication. Our producer Alex has often
Speaker 1: schooled me on Space nine. Not we're gonna get an
Speaker 1: email on this one for sure. Uh. There's an episode
Speaker 1: of Futurama titled The six Million Dollar Man in which Hermes,
Speaker 1: one of the characters, gradually replaces his entire body with
Speaker 1: robotic parts, while Zoidberg, the you know, crustacean alien doctor.
Speaker 1: He's been stitching the discarded parts together into little Hermes
Speaker 1: of introl Coast dummy. And so there, you know, you're
Speaker 1: left to wonder which one is the original, which one
Speaker 1: is Hermes, is it the robot or this grotesque meat puppet?
Speaker 1: And then one of the examples that I was most
Speaker 1: impressed we have mainly because I just had no idea
Speaker 1: about the depth here on this, but the tin Woodman
Speaker 1: from the Wizard of Oz books, the books by L.
Speaker 1: Frank Baum. Oh i've ever read the books? I have
Speaker 1: not either, but when I started looking into this, Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's this whole narrative about the tin Man. How the
Speaker 1: tin Man has a like his ax was was cursed
Speaker 1: by the wicked witch. And then he like accidentally like
Speaker 1: chopped away, you know, part of his body and then uh,
Speaker 1: then it was replaced with tin. And then he ends
Speaker 1: up chopping away another part of his body and it's
Speaker 1: replaced with tin. And he just keeps losing pieces upon
Speaker 1: pieces of his body until he's all ten except for
Speaker 1: his heart. And then one day he cuts himself in half,
Speaker 1: I believe. And so now now his heart has been bisected,
Speaker 1: and that's why he needs the the heart he has
Speaker 1: to reclaim like this, this this portion of his humanity
Speaker 1: that has been lost in this gradual replacement, essentially a
Speaker 1: cybernetic replacement of himself. Oh wow, I never thought of
Speaker 1: Frank Baum getting into cybernetics. Yeah, he's essentially transhumanist. Right.
Speaker 1: Are you one of the people who's a big fan
Speaker 1: of Return to Oz. I know people who are into that.
Speaker 1: I've never seen it, but I remember seeing the trailer
Speaker 1: as a kid, being like a little freaked out by
Speaker 1: those people with wheels for hands. So I should see it.
Speaker 1: It sounds exactly like the thing I'd be into. We
Speaker 1: should do a science of Return to Oz episode. Well,
Speaker 1: let's not commit until we know we're getting into Okay, Now,
Speaker 1: those are just a few fictional examples of the ship
Speaker 1: of theseus. I'm sure all of you listening out there
Speaker 1: you have examples you'd like to bring up as well. Um,
Speaker 1: so we would love to hear from you. In the meantime,
Speaker 1: be sure to check out Stuff to blow your mind.
Speaker 1: That is where you will find all the episodes of
Speaker 1: the podcast. You'll find links out to very social media accounts.
Speaker 1: You'll find a link there at the top for our
Speaker 1: store where you'll get to check out some some shirts,
Speaker 1: some merch. Another wonderful way to support the show. And uh,
Speaker 1: of course, if you want to support the show, an
Speaker 1: easy freeway to do it is to just simply rate
Speaker 1: and review us wherever you have the power to do that.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much, as always to our wonderful audio
Speaker 1: producers Alex Williams and Tarry Harrison. If you would like
Speaker 1: to get in touch with us directly to let us
Speaker 1: know feedback on this episode or any other, to share
Speaker 1: your own thoughts about the ship of theseus and how
Speaker 1: that applies to the human mind, the human brain and consciousness,
Speaker 1: to suggest a topic for a future episode, or just
Speaker 1: to say hi, you can email us at blow the
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