Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
Speaker 1: is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. In It's Saturday,
Speaker 1: time for a vault episode. This classic episode of Stuff
Speaker 1: to Blow Your Mind originally aired August one, and it's
Speaker 1: our Ship of Theseus episode. Yeah, this one's This one
Speaker 1: is a lot of fun, Like this one gets to
Speaker 1: It's essentially grounded in a thought experiment, A very old
Speaker 1: thought experiment, but one that remains interesting, especially when implied
Speaker 1: when applied to things that that seemed hard to break
Speaker 1: up into constituent parts like the like the self and
Speaker 1: the mind. Yeah. Like here we are revisiting this episode.
Speaker 1: Uh you know what A what a year down the line,
Speaker 1: a little over a year having replaced parts of our
Speaker 1: bodies being slightly different people as we unveil it once more.
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, in incinerated has such
Speaker 1: negative vibes. I mean it's not incinerated, it is turned
Speaker 1: into its atomic constituents, all right. And then I can't
Speaker 1: just keep both though, I can't double sleep and have
Speaker 1: have have one of me here in the States and
Speaker 1: the end the other me is is in Asia somewhere.
Speaker 1: I don't know. That seems like it would lead to
Speaker 1: bad sci fi action movie scenarios where one of you
Speaker 1: must eliminate the other on the commands of the moon King. Well,
Speaker 1: you know, it's it's tempting still just to to cut
Speaker 1: out all of that air travel, because air travel can
Speaker 1: be taxing, it can be exhausting. Um and yet at
Speaker 1: the same time, by virtue of being taxing and exhausting,
Speaker 1: I'm never quite the same person when I reached the
Speaker 1: other end of that flight, especially if it's a long flight, right,
Speaker 1: because I may enter into the flight being like a
Speaker 1: little anxious, but maybe on some level like looking you know,
Speaker 1: looking forward to that you know, long period in which
Speaker 1: I can just listen to music and read. And then
Speaker 1: on the other side, then I am I'm potentially tired.
Speaker 1: I'm potentially you know, blust out from you know Xenix
Speaker 1: and Steve Roach albums, um, you know, three hours plus.
Speaker 1: But I'm not quite the same person, right, I'm I've
Speaker 1: changed a little bit, so I might as well be
Speaker 1: this teleported other self. That is, that is a diversion
Speaker 1: from who I am now. I don't know, when you
Speaker 1: get to the end of a flight, even if it's
Speaker 1: been unpleasant, do you really have the sensation that you
Speaker 1: have died? Uh, it depends I guess how much turbulence
Speaker 1: I have to endure. I mean, that's always the question
Speaker 1: about the teleporter machine, right, I mean, it's the question
Speaker 1: that everybody had to start wondering about Star Trek. I guess.
Speaker 1: I guess there was probably a blissful period early in
Speaker 1: Star Trek history where nobody wondered if the teleporter machines
Speaker 1: killed you, But pretty soon people had to catch on, Right,
Speaker 1: is it just is it just killing you and then
Speaker 1: making a copy of you somewhere else that will continue
Speaker 1: with your behaviors, but your life ends when you step in. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And it's just everyone's gotten to the point where they're
Speaker 1: cool with it. They just don't think about it. Then
Speaker 1: they just step into the teleporter and let's suite annihilation
Speaker 1: wash over them. I'm just I'm ready to die, make
Speaker 1: a copy of me somewhere. I don't know, it does
Speaker 1: seemed like people would be like that. I mean, most
Speaker 1: of the time, people have the sensation that their experiences
Speaker 1: are continuous and they want it to continue to be continuous.
Speaker 1: I guess in track, as long as there's not an afterlife,
Speaker 1: you're good, right, So just never know, it's just blind
Speaker 1: leap of faith, right, And of course, I mean we have,
Speaker 1: as we've talked about on the show before, we have
Speaker 1: no idea how the say the baton of consciousness is
Speaker 1: handed off from past self to present self, to future self,
Speaker 1: and from one moment to the next. I mean, maybe
Speaker 1: maybe it's the case that every time you go under
Speaker 1: general anesthesia, you die, and then a different person wakes
Speaker 1: up with all of your thoughts and memories. Maybe you
Speaker 1: are the copy that woke up after the last time
Speaker 1: you went under anesthesia. Maybe that happens every time you
Speaker 1: fall asleep. You'd really have no way to know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that that is certainly a point when the curtain drops
Speaker 1: and who who knows exactly what's going on with the set, right,
Speaker 1: or at least what's going on with the set is
Speaker 1: is very much an area of interest to uh, to
Speaker 1: scientists 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 a 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 jelly? Well no, I don't
Speaker 1: think so, because I don't think travel into the past
Speaker 1: as 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 and myths for your your thought experiments.
Speaker 1: And in fact, one of the oldest thought experiments is
Speaker 1: that we had that we have is uh is very
Speaker 1: much in this vein the ship of theseus the ship
Speaker 1: of theseus. Right. So this is one of the most
Speaker 1: classic paradoxes in the history of philosophy. And it also
Speaker 1: goes to a thing that I think, for some reason,
Speaker 1: it seems the Greeks were particularly interested in, which was
Speaker 1: the nature and identity of things? I mean, of course,
Speaker 1: the nature and identity of things is always a topic
Speaker 1: for philosophers to investigate, but the ancient Greek philosophers seemed
Speaker 1: really concerned with what made a thing itself? What were
Speaker 1: the properties or the essences of a thing that gave
Speaker 1: it its identity? How did you know that you were
Speaker 1: really Robert? How did you Robert know that you earned
Speaker 1: that you had the merit of being called Robert? Why
Speaker 1: why wasn't something else Robert? And so they had these
Speaker 1: ideas of essences and forms and all this stuff is
Speaker 1: deeply concerned with what makes something itself and when you
Speaker 1: can call it what it is? You know, this makes
Speaker 1: up an interesting side question here. Do you think of
Speaker 1: yourself as Joe? That's a good question, and there are
Speaker 1: actually a couple of ways to answer it. I mean,
Speaker 1: I would say in when I step back and think
Speaker 1: of myself, I do I guess I think of myself
Speaker 1: as Joe, as a self. You know, there's some there's
Speaker 1: some soul Joe out there that is the core of
Speaker 1: who I think I am and my main qualities and
Speaker 1: all that. And of course you're not always the best
Speaker 1: judge of yourself, so other people could probably describe that
Speaker 1: person better than I could. But there's there's another sense
Speaker 1: of how you think of yourself in which I don't
Speaker 1: think I think of myself as Joe moment to moment.
Speaker 1: I think of myself as the most recent contents of
Speaker 1: my consciousness. So I'm just a moment to moment. I'm
Speaker 1: not Joe. Moment to moment, I am whatever I'm thinking about.
Speaker 1: That's a good way of putting it. Well. When I
Speaker 1: try and answer the question myself, I think, well, I'm not.
Speaker 1: I don't only think of myself as Robert. I think
Speaker 1: of myself kind of as the me. You know, I'm
Speaker 1: just I'm just this I in in a given scenario.
Speaker 1: Unless I am like you're you're saying essentially becoming the
Speaker 1: thoughts that I am having. And then I'm even further
Speaker 1: away from this. When I when I'm forced to think
Speaker 1: of myself as Robert, it is because Uh, the external
Speaker 1: world is is making me do it, because that is
Speaker 1: what they call me, and that is what I continue
Speaker 1: to be called because I just, I guess, don't feel
Speaker 1: passionately enough about it to change it. Well, one of
Speaker 1: the reasons we wanted to talk about the idea of
Speaker 1: identity in the Ship of Theseus is that the external
Speaker 1: world is increasingly going to be forcing us to think
Speaker 1: about questions like this because of new technological capabilities that
Speaker 1: are coming online. So this has yet another conversation that
Speaker 1: we're having, sort of in the wake of a conversation
Speaker 1: you saw in New York this year at the World
Speaker 1: Science Festival. But this is a great topic that's worth
Speaker 1: exploring from the bottom up. So I say we go
Speaker 1: all the way back to Theseus and then work our
Speaker 1: 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 mythology. You know, he's
Speaker 1: always the most important, but the least interesting character in
Speaker 1: a given story. That's my initial response anyway. But he
Speaker 1: also went into the maze and fought the minotaur. Right, yeah,
Speaker 1: not only thought the menotor, but but what is he
Speaker 1: is the slayer of the minotaur, solver of the Manillan
Speaker 1: maze as well. Solver. That's the corporate speak idea, right,
Speaker 1: he didn't slay the minotaur. He solved that problem, right,
Speaker 1: He was able to execute on on his strategy. Yes,
Speaker 1: but then he also escaped from the maze right by
Speaker 1: by 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 minotaur. I mean, that's pretty impressive in 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
Speaker 1: um one of the things about the maze is that
Speaker 1: depends on depends on which telling you're looking at. If
Speaker 1: you go back far enough, it's less of a maze.
Speaker 1: It could be something else, something less extravagant. But as
Speaker 1: the tradition builds, the maze becomes this, this fabulous, fabulous
Speaker 1: dungeons and dragons dungeon scenario, you know, which I love.
Speaker 1: But but I guess that's always something to keep in
Speaker 1: mind with with these tales, is this not it fits
Speaker 1: in with what we're talking about here today. Mythological story
Speaker 1: is not this one thing that hasn't passed on. It
Speaker 1: is a thing that is built upon on a thing
Speaker 1: that changes over time. Ah well, well, that brings us
Speaker 1: to the central concept, right the ship of Theseus, so
Speaker 1: to quote from Plutarch in his his Lives, he wrote
Speaker 1: you 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, or the hokey variant
Speaker 1: is is Grandfather's Acts, which imagine a number of our
Speaker 1: listeners have heard as well, why is this hokey? It's
Speaker 1: just it's like it only has two parts to it, Like,
Speaker 1: there's so the Grandfather's Acts as the idea. Hey, here's
Speaker 1: Grandfather's Acts. But the handle rotted away. We had to
Speaker 1: replace that, and then also the blade brokes we had
Speaker 1: to replace that. Both parts of this two part tool
Speaker 1: 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
Speaker 1: about say, artifacts in the museum, A lot of historical
Speaker 1: artifacts in a museum are not going to be exactly
Speaker 1: the 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 that think, and then you have to
Speaker 1: choose which era you want to recreate. You know, there's
Speaker 1: certain eras that they're certainly not talking about recreating. But
Speaker 1: but then, yeah, once you've restored it, then you also
Speaker 1: lose the the iconic ruins that exist today that then
Speaker 1: in that in a way are more i guess you
Speaker 1: could say, honest reminder of what was there before. Well,
Speaker 1: in a way also the ruins are part of what
Speaker 1: the Parthenon is is. I mean, the Parthenon is a
Speaker 1: thing that exists over time, and if you take away
Speaker 1: the ruins, you have in a way destroyed the Parthenon,
Speaker 1: even if you take them away to rebuild it. I
Speaker 1: think of that. It makes me think of the Colossi
Speaker 1: of Memnon. We discuss which to remind everybody, these were
Speaker 1: These were a pair of of ancient coloss i. One
Speaker 1: of them fell over in ancient times. But then what's
Speaker 1: also restored poorly in ancient times? Uh so what do
Speaker 1: you do? Do you get up you decide one day
Speaker 1: that you're just gonna restore them both to how they
Speaker 1: may have once looked? Do you restore them both to
Speaker 1: the ruins? I mean there are these are all a
Speaker 1: part of the essentially the life cycle of these statues
Speaker 1: over time. Yeah, so this question is actually meaningful. If
Speaker 1: you want people to be able to experience history, what
Speaker 1: is the thing that gives them the most authentic experience
Speaker 1: of history? Is it the decayed version as it stands
Speaker 1: or is it a restored version? And the same thing
Speaker 1: is true of the ship. If you want people to
Speaker 1: be able to see the ship of theseus because it
Speaker 1: has this great historical significance. Do you replace the rotting
Speaker 1: parts or do you just let it rot? And if
Speaker 1: you just let it rot, does it eventually disappear? Of
Speaker 1: course it does. I think that's one of the reasons
Speaker 1: I like the Ship of Theseus more than I care
Speaker 1: for a grandfather's acts, because it's more gradual. There's so
Speaker 1: many more parts involved. There's more of a question of
Speaker 1: at what point, uh, you know, is it more new
Speaker 1: than old? At which point in this gradual process does
Speaker 1: its lot? Does it lose its identity? Yeah? I see
Speaker 1: what you're saying. It's sort of incorporates the paradox of
Speaker 1: the heap into the question of whether a thing that
Speaker 1: is replaced in the same way as the original thing,
Speaker 1: because you're you're you're asking is there a transition point?
Speaker 1: At what point is you know, if fifty percent of
Speaker 1: the mass of the ship has been replaced, now, is
Speaker 1: it no longer the Ship of Theseus? Like it's a
Speaker 1: dollar bill, you know, do you have more than half
Speaker 1: of it to have it be worth a dollar? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Like this this comes up some more scenario comes up
Speaker 1: when we start thinking about species and does speed ceation?
Speaker 1: At what point does this cease to be one species
Speaker 1: and truly become a different species. Well, this just highlights
Speaker 1: the idea, the fact that species is sort of an
Speaker 1: artificial distinction. I mean, it has some utility for biologists,
Speaker 1: but it's a species, not a thing you find in nature.
Speaker 1: It's just sort of a useful concept, a useful concept
Speaker 1: to describe something that is an ongoing process, which you know. Ultimately,
Speaker 1: one of the questions who are asking here today is
Speaker 1: to what extent can the same be said about identity? Now,
Speaker 1: of course, lots of philosophers have explored the idea of
Speaker 1: the ship of theseus. You know, philosophers get real worked
Speaker 1: up about whether something is what it is. So Plato's
Speaker 1: Cradlest Dialogue in some ways deals with this concept um
Speaker 1: and Thomas Hobbes dealt with it too, right, that's right
Speaker 1: English philosopher Thomas Hobbs, who have fifteen eight through sixteen
Speaker 1: seventy nine. He added another and in my opinion, very
Speaker 1: fun level of complexity to this thought experiment. He said,
Speaker 1: what if you not only gradually replaced all of the
Speaker 1: part 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, though 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 you still
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 and 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 lads. 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 hop 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, quote, wherefore, the beginnings of individualization is not
Speaker 1: always to be taken either from matter alone or from
Speaker 1: form alone. And all this gets down to is this
Speaker 1: idea of identity over time as opposed to identity in
Speaker 1: 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, hey, 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 running at me, what should I do
Speaker 1: to avoid him? But then we we end up extrapolating
Speaker 1: that via mental time travel and memory. We're taking it
Speaker 1: into the future. We're taking it into the past, and
Speaker 1: we're considering knees and hiss and situations that are not
Speaker 1: identical to the present. That's a great point. But more
Speaker 1: than that, what would it mean for a thing to
Speaker 1: be identical to the present? I mean, is there such
Speaker 1: a thing as an identical moment to the president or
Speaker 1: the identity of a thing. Even so, I want to
Speaker 1: talk about a cool article I saw. This was published
Speaker 1: in aon magazine in November seventeen by Kelso vay Era,
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 Vora'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 counter, how much it obeys you
Speaker 1: when you tell you to do something. I don't know
Speaker 1: how much cats ever do that. That's probably not part
Speaker 1: of cat identity. Yeah, she's not much for obeying. But
Speaker 1: ve Era argues that perhaps substance metaphysics is just not
Speaker 1: the best way of thinking about the world, and it
Speaker 1: actually leads to confusion and paradox And so he gives
Speaker 1: this example of the question of the you know, you know,
Speaker 1: the classic do you see this glass of water is
Speaker 1: half empty or half full? But about that glass of water,
Speaker 1: Veera writes, quote, but what if the isolated frame a
Speaker 1: glass of water fails to give the relevant information? Anyone
Speaker 1: would prefer an emptier glass that is getting full to
Speaker 1: a fuller one getting empty. Any analysis lacking information about
Speaker 1: change misses the point which is just what substance metaphysics
Speaker 1: is missing. So he articulates the view of process philosophers,
Speaker 1: people who believe that the fundamental constituents of reality are
Speaker 1: not things but processes. It's not that a thing exists,
Speaker 1: it's that a process is in a particular state at
Speaker 1: a particular time. As the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead put it,
Speaker 1: we should think of the world as a collect s
Speaker 1: of occurrences instead of things. And this resonates with me
Speaker 1: a lot. I actually think about this view fairly often,
Speaker 1: especially when I'm reading about fundamental physics. But speaking of
Speaker 1: the Greeks that I mean this also has a there's
Speaker 1: a long tradition of this kind of thought. If you
Speaker 1: go back to hero Clydas, who propounded the principle of
Speaker 1: panta ray. Everything flows. Existence in a way is like
Speaker 1: a river, and you can't step into the same river
Speaker 1: twice for multiple reasons, not just because the water of
Speaker 1: the river has flown past and and changed, but because
Speaker 1: you've changed when you step into the river again. And
Speaker 1: I think the important thing about this thing about process
Speaker 1: metaphysics is that this doesn't have to change anything about
Speaker 1: our understanding of the physical laws of nature, and as
Speaker 1: far as far as I can tell, it's totally compatible
Speaker 1: with them, and some would actually say more compatible with them.
Speaker 1: It's also certainly more in keeping with our understanding of biology,
Speaker 1: which tells us that they're not actually fixed kinds of
Speaker 1: animals or plants or bacteria, but there's instead this process
Speaker 1: of change over time, and that the change produces frequencies
Speaker 1: of different alleles as its cycles through ever changing states. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and then of course you also think about the various
Speaker 1: chemical reactions that are are necessary, the various um, you know,
Speaker 1: all the things that that that affect our mind stated
Speaker 1: even any given point of the day, you know, when
Speaker 1: we try and decide who we are, or essentially trying
Speaker 1: to like pick out what is the ideal version of
Speaker 1: me that they manifest at any given point in the
Speaker 1: you know, the currently or in the near future or
Speaker 1: the near past. Is it the you know, is it
Speaker 1: the I haven't finished my second drink or I'm on
Speaker 1: my second cup of coffee? You know me that that's
Speaker 1: that's the only version that I'm going to account that
Speaker 1: I'm going to count. What's the platonic form of Robert?
Speaker 1: You're trying to seek out some ideal form of yourself
Speaker 1: that you've created as an abstraction that doesn't actually match
Speaker 1: who you are or what you're doing at any given
Speaker 1: moment in time. In fact, try to think of an
Speaker 1: object that you can identify that has an identity that
Speaker 1: does not fundamentally change its former nature over time. A
Speaker 1: seed turns into a sapling, and then into a tree,
Speaker 1: and then it dies, and then it rots and goes
Speaker 1: into the ground. And this is the case of every
Speaker 1: biological thing you can think of. But then, of course,
Speaker 1: on a longer time scale, other things are like that, stars, asteroids, planets,
Speaker 1: black holes. You know, things change over time. Even even
Speaker 1: black holes evaporate over time. You've got hawking radiation. Well,
Speaker 1: just I think too about the very stones that we
Speaker 1: build our monuments and our grave stones out off. We
Speaker 1: build things out of stone because it makes them more permanent.
Speaker 1: You know that that that it will live on after
Speaker 1: we're gone. And that's true. These things tend to exist
Speaker 1: on a scale that goes beyond the limits of of
Speaker 1: our biology, of pure mortal existence. And yet at the
Speaker 1: same time we change the stone to make it into
Speaker 1: the graves gravestone, and any walk through the cemetery will
Speaker 1: remind you that these things to fade uh and and
Speaker 1: and are eroded or are shattered when when tree limbs
Speaker 1: fall upon them. Uh so yeah, everything spoiler, everything changes.
Speaker 1: It's great to walk backwards through time in a cemetery,
Speaker 1: to 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 ghouls 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 per furs
Speaker 1: chicken McNuggets but will if they're forced to eat a delicious,
Speaker 1: fresh cooked me a lot of produce and all that.
Speaker 1: But yeah, so I was trying to think of an
Speaker 1: example of a counter example, right, is there something that
Speaker 1: doesn't change over time? And I was like, well, you know,
Speaker 1: you've got maybe fundamental elementary particles. They don't really they
Speaker 1: don't have characteristics, they're all identical, they're interchangeable. Maybe they
Speaker 1: don't change over time. But thinking back to the entire
Speaker 1: history of the universe, that's not actually true. Like during
Speaker 1: the Plank Epoch at the beginning of time, as far
Speaker 1: as we know in the local universe, quarks and electrons
Speaker 1: hadn't been formed yet. This is a time of hot
Speaker 1: condensed energy when we did not have quarks, and then
Speaker 1: later you get quark glue on plasma and all that.
Speaker 1: But so, I don't know, I don't know if you
Speaker 1: can actually think of a thing that is an object
Speaker 1: that has never changed and will never change. Even in
Speaker 1: mythology and religion, you're often hard pressed to find that
Speaker 1: one constant that doesn't change. I think probably, I guess
Speaker 1: if you if you look at you know, Monotheistic Judeo
Speaker 1: christian Um and Islamic interpretations of God. Then you have
Speaker 1: something that is supposedly unchanging over time from the very
Speaker 1: beginning to the very end. But in it's like most
Speaker 1: other religions and cosmologies. You know, God's beget begot, God's
Speaker 1: and and then they all have these essentially life cycles
Speaker 1: that they're going through. Well, I would say even the
Speaker 1: fact that monotheistic gods enter into narratives makes them not
Speaker 1: exactly unchanging. You can't tell a narrative about something that
Speaker 1: doesn't change. If it enters into a new covenant with
Speaker 1: with humanity, then that's hopefully a change. Hopefully there was
Speaker 1: some change in uh, in attitude there that we can
Speaker 1: view as positive. I'm sure there are a million ways
Speaker 1: of splitting that theological hair, but uh, but anyway to
Speaker 1: come back to the idea of process philosophy, process metaphysics,
Speaker 1: thinking of things not as objects. This is not a
Speaker 1: world of things, but a world of processes going through changes.
Speaker 1: How how should this change the way we think about
Speaker 1: the ship of theseus, so Vieira writes. To explain why
Speaker 1: things change without losing their identity substance, philosophers need deposit
Speaker 1: some underlying core, an essence that remains the same throughout change.
Speaker 1: It is not easy to pin down what this core
Speaker 1: might be. As the paradox of theseus ship illustrates, and
Speaker 1: then he explains the ship as we already have. But
Speaker 1: he writes, is this the same ship even though materially
Speaker 1: it is completely different? For substance philosophers, this is something
Speaker 1: of a paradox. For process philosophers, this is a necessary
Speaker 1: part of identity. Of course, it is the same ship.
Speaker 1: Identity ceases to be a static equivalence of a thing
Speaker 1: with itself. After all, without the repairs, the ship would
Speaker 1: have lost its functionality. It would have become a ruin
Speaker 1: or a shipwreck. Well, it just wouldn't be a ship anymore. Yeah,
Speaker 1: uh so Yeah, ships change, parts get replaced, and that's
Speaker 1: part of the process of the ship. There is no
Speaker 1: thing ship. Ship is. A ship is an ongoing process
Speaker 1: of change, just like you and me are. And Naviera
Speaker 1: defends against the idea that processes are just transitions between
Speaker 1: different fundamental substance realities by pointing out one thing we
Speaker 1: mentioned a little bit earlier than the paradox of the heap.
Speaker 1: Uh if you've never read about this before, the paradox
Speaker 1: of the heap basically says, okay, you've got a heap
Speaker 1: of sand. Now you remove one grain of sand at
Speaker 1: a time, and every time you remove a grain of sand,
Speaker 1: you ask is it still a heap of sand? And
Speaker 1: at some point you will only have one grain of
Speaker 1: sand left. That's obviously not a heap. But you can't
Speaker 1: point to a moment where suddenly the heap was not
Speaker 1: a heap anymore. The same thing happens with biological entities
Speaker 1: and evolution. One of the great images that are Richard
Speaker 1: Dawkins is used in explaining the history of an organism
Speaker 1: is try to imagine your ancestors going all the way
Speaker 1: back down the generations, where you hold hands with your mother,
Speaker 1: and then your mother holds hands with her mother, and
Speaker 1: it goes back like that forever. At what point, where
Speaker 1: will you find the moment where mother gave birth to
Speaker 1: a daughter of a different species than her. It will
Speaker 1: never happen every At every point, the mother was giving
Speaker 1: birth to something that was pretty much the same animal
Speaker 1: she was. But these changes accumulate over time, and you
Speaker 1: can't if you zoom in, you'll never see the change.
Speaker 1: I mean, at some point, the thumb is no longer opposable.
Speaker 1: I guess that that might play a role. Well, but
Speaker 1: it's not going to be a transition from opposable to
Speaker 1: not opposable. It'll be it'll be a gradual transition. That's
Speaker 1: something that maybe is not even noticeably less opposable, but
Speaker 1: does just slightly less and eventually it just becomes a
Speaker 1: fist bump. Oh, there you go. Can't hold hands anymore,
Speaker 1: You just fist bumping mom all the way back to
Speaker 1: the protozoa. But that can't be right, right, because the
Speaker 1: fist bump is the thing you arrive at, not a
Speaker 1: thing you came from. Fist bump is the future. But well,
Speaker 1: but who's to say. Who's to say that the fist
Speaker 1: bump wasn't the predominant mode of greeting in among archaic humans.
Speaker 1: They might have even done the explosion, who knows, Yeah,
Speaker 1: or the snail. That's what all those hands on the
Speaker 1: cave walls are the explosion. Alright, On that note, we're
Speaker 1: going to take a quick break. But when we come back,
Speaker 1: we will summon the swampman. Than all right, we're back.
Speaker 1: So we've been talking about the ship of DC. Is
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, at a moment of revelation or salvation, you know,
Speaker 1: a road to damask this kind of thing. To what
Speaker 1: extent is it a true change or is it a
Speaker 1: or are we like forcing the change upon ourselves. We're
Speaker 1: saying that we changed, but on 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 Artrek teleporter
Speaker 1: that just kills you and makes a newer, better copy
Speaker 1: of you, would people really go for it? I don't know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: It's kind of like, you know, occasionally there'll be a
Speaker 1: story where somebody, like generally they've read a book or something,
Speaker 1: but they've made this phenomenal change that used to be
Speaker 1: a terrible person and now they're a good person, and
Speaker 1: they're out there preaching the word about how everyone should
Speaker 1: be a good person too. And it makes you think
Speaker 1: at times, well, I was never a terrible person. How come?
Speaker 1: How come Terry Gross isn't talking to me? You're the
Speaker 1: brother in the prodigal Son story exactly. I never This
Speaker 1: isn't fair. Yeah, I was good the whole time. Where's
Speaker 1: my uh, where's my celebration? Ain't that life where jealous
Speaker 1: creatures aren't? But anyway, so, yeah, we we need to
Speaker 1: talk about the swampman, Robers. We've put the swampman off
Speaker 1: for far too long. So the swampman is a variation
Speaker 1: on the ship of theseus idea applied to the human mind.
Speaker 1: And this is originally a concept that was introduced by
Speaker 1: the philosopher Donald Davidson in a presentation called Knowing One's
Speaker 1: Own Mind, originally, I think in the Proceedings and Addresses
Speaker 1: of the American Philosophical Association. The version I found was
Speaker 1: reprinted in the American Philosophical Association's Centennial series from but
Speaker 1: the original one was back in the eighties seven, and
Speaker 1: so Donald Davidson was raising this question, what is the
Speaker 1: relationship between the identity of a thing in the history
Speaker 1: of that thing. Are you ready to go to the swamp, Robert,
Speaker 1: let's to the swamp? Okay, Davidson says, suppose lightning strikes
Speaker 1: a dead tree in a swamp. I am standing nearby.
Speaker 1: My body is reduced to its elements, while entirely by
Speaker 1: coincidence and out of different molecules, the tree is turned
Speaker 1: into my physical replica. My replica, the swamp Man, moves
Speaker 1: exactly as I did, according to its nature. It departs
Speaker 1: the swamp encounters and seems to recognize my friends and
Speaker 1: appears to return their greetings in English. It moves into
Speaker 1: my house and seems to write articles on radical interpretation.
Speaker 1: And no one can tell the difference. But there is
Speaker 1: a difference. My replica can't recognize my friends. It can't
Speaker 1: recognize anything, since it never cognized anything in the first place.
Speaker 1: It can't know my friends names, though of course it
Speaker 1: seems to. It can't remember my house. It can't mean
Speaker 1: what I do by the word house, for example, since
Speaker 1: the sound house it makes was not learned in the
Speaker 1: context that would give it the right meaning, or any
Speaker 1: meaning at all. Indeed, I don't see how my replica
Speaker 1: can be said to mean anything by the sounds it makes,
Speaker 1: nor to have any thoughts. It's a nice creepy little tale.
Speaker 1: Uh that is summoning. Uh. You know memories of the
Speaker 1: philosophical zombies that we've discussed, the p zombies. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: so it's the question with the p zombies is it's
Speaker 1: assumed in the P zombie thought experiment that that they
Speaker 1: behave exactly like humans, except they're not conscious. I guess
Speaker 1: Davidson's asking the question of can thing that behaves exactly
Speaker 1: like a normal person but has no prior experiences actually
Speaker 1: be having thoughts, actually be uh speaking meaningful sentences if
Speaker 1: it's just randomly producing phenomena identical to what a person
Speaker 1: would produce if they arrived at those behaviors by the
Speaker 1: normal means. And so to be clear, if we if
Speaker 1: we follow through with this, if we really imagine what
Speaker 1: he's saying, a perfect Adam for Adam copy of you
Speaker 1: would be externally indistinguishable from you, and would presumably behave
Speaker 1: exactly like the original you. There's nothing we know of
Speaker 1: that would make it behave differently, but it would not
Speaker 1: exist in a context in which its behavior would have
Speaker 1: any meaning. It might have a long heartfelt conversation with
Speaker 1: a close friend of yours, and it would behave exactly
Speaker 1: like you would and say the exact same things the
Speaker 1: original You would have said in that conversation, but it
Speaker 1: in fact would never have met this friend before. So
Speaker 1: does the swamp Creature. I 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 becomes swamp
Speaker 1: Thing in Alan Moore's amazing run with the swamp Thing comic.
Speaker 1: Huh um. Actually went back and read this again. The
Speaker 1: very first issue, I guess you'd say this is is
Speaker 1: titled The Anatomy Lesson. It's from February. Yeah, I haven't
Speaker 1: read it. Actually, I feel bad because Christian once gave
Speaker 1: me a huge stack of comics to read that did
Speaker 1: include a run of Swamp Thing. I'm sure it was Moore's,
Speaker 1: but I never made it to that one though. I
Speaker 1: did read All Star Superman, which was great and I
Speaker 1: think sort of lightly brushed against some of the same
Speaker 1: philosophical questions about the identity of a person through time
Speaker 1: travel and all that. But I gotta read swamp Thing now.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, it's it's It's definitely worth checking out. It's
Speaker 1: probably been a decade since I read All of it,
Speaker 1: but I did pick up the anatomy lesson and gave
Speaker 1: it another read, and it is indeed wonderful. This is
Speaker 1: the one that originally hooked me when I when I
Speaker 1: read it for the first time, and I wound up
Speaker 1: spending way too much money at the time on all
Speaker 1: of the Alan Moore swamp Thing books. Uh, none of
Speaker 1: them disappointed. But this first story is just perfect. It's
Speaker 1: a it's an intelligent little horror story that cast the very,
Speaker 1: the very identity of swamp thing in a new light.
Speaker 1: So he's not just Alc Holland, a man who is
Speaker 1: mutated into a plant man following a science lab explosion
Speaker 1: in the swamp. No is More describes it. The wonder
Speaker 1: chemical here transforms the plants, and when Holland's burnt corpse
Speaker 1: sinks into the swamp, the plants eat it and regrow
Speaker 1: a body that believes itself to be Alc Holland. So
Speaker 1: the organs don't work, the 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 seven, 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 extraordinary gentlemen show up in the philosophy journals. Now, well,
Speaker 1: I would actually love to see um swamp Thing and
Speaker 1: Swampman meet up. I think that sounds like exactly the
Speaker 1: kind of thing that Alan Moore could return to rite
Speaker 1: at some point. In fact, I'm a little surprised it
Speaker 1: didn't happen, except Swampman would be completely indistinguishable from Donald Davidson, right,
Speaker 1: so it would basically just be Donald Davidson meets swamp Thing,
Speaker 1: except it's not the original Donald Davidson. I mean, it's
Speaker 1: a weird thing to consider. I spend a while trying
Speaker 1: to This is one of those weird kind of thought
Speaker 1: experiments that pokes you and you have to sit there
Speaker 1: for a while thinking like, wait a minute, is this
Speaker 1: Is this truly illuminating or not? I mean, I was
Speaker 1: like trying to decide and I still don't think I've
Speaker 1: made up my mind. But it is strange. What does
Speaker 1: it mean to have a thought? Because we typically believe
Speaker 1: that a thought is about something, So say, for example,
Speaker 1: you have the thought I do not like the smell
Speaker 1: of hard boiled eggs. We consider it part of the
Speaker 1: definition of this thought that you're aware of the existence
Speaker 1: of hard boiled eggs and you have smelled them, or
Speaker 1: at least you think you have, and you do not
Speaker 1: like the smell. But if a being with an atom
Speaker 1: for adom replica of your brain has that thought and
Speaker 1: yet it has never smelled this smell, is it really
Speaker 1: having that thought? What is it doing with its brain?
Speaker 1: You know, it would 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 could 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've
Speaker 1: had a hard boiled egg, I have seen an ostrich
Speaker 1: I've seen a picture of an ostrich egg. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: can therefore extrapolate what it would be to eat one
Speaker 1: and 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: our 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 we have internal context.
Speaker 1: They're kind of like a software that that that that
Speaker 1: that that he's carrying around with him. Yeah, and even
Speaker 1: if he you know, even if it's just a copy
Speaker 1: of the original software, it's still the software. Well, it's
Speaker 1: kind of like if you imagined a software, a piece
Speaker 1: of software created by randomly generating characters to create lines
Speaker 1: of code that would execute eventually, and so at some
Speaker 1: point you could randomly create a piece of software that
Speaker 1: does things. Could you call that software? Could you say
Speaker 1: that it has a purpose, Could you say that it
Speaker 1: has functions? Could you say that it uh that it executes?
Speaker 1: I mean, obviously we don't think software is conscious. I
Speaker 1: guess the question of whether the swampman would be conscious
Speaker 1: is a different kind of thing. Well, if if Swamman
Speaker 1: goes home and and then and says hi to to
Speaker 1: these friends, I feel like he's he's as human as
Speaker 1: anybody else. Really, I think that would be Daniel Dennett's take.
Speaker 1: So Dinnett has addressed the challenges and usefulness of this
Speaker 1: thought experiment about Swampman, despite how popular it's been. Davidson
Speaker 1: first offered it, I think in eight seven, and uh
Speaker 1: though a lot of people have picked up on it
Speaker 1: since then. Davidson apparently told Dnnett at some point that
Speaker 1: he regretted introducing it because he believed it caused a
Speaker 1: lot of unenlightening back and forth without proving much. So
Speaker 1: then it's got a critique of this thought experiment. He says,
Speaker 1: You know, a lot of thought experiments basically try to
Speaker 1: function like science experiments, so you can coct a bizarre,
Speaker 1: implausible scenario with the purpose of isolating a variable. You
Speaker 1: want to put something some particular variable. You want to
Speaker 1: be able to turn one knob up to eleven and
Speaker 1: control everything else, and you know, run everything else down
Speaker 1: to zero, so that you can test your intuitions about
Speaker 1: what happens and with changes in that variable alone, and
Speaker 1: so the variable isolated in this thought experiment is the
Speaker 1: history of an object such as a person. Right, you say,
Speaker 1: materially identical. Only thing that's different is how the atom's
Speaker 1: got that way. And then you know, he admits that
Speaker 1: a lot of times thought experiments like this are really useful.
Speaker 1: I think about how physicists like Einstein and Galileo and
Speaker 1: Newton abuse thought experiments. Uh. They use intuitions and math
Speaker 1: to determine fundamental facts about the laws of nature before
Speaker 1: anybody had actually confirmed them with physical experiments. So thought experiment,
Speaker 1: it's based on bizarre scenarios and intuitions, can be very powerful.
Speaker 1: But other times thought experiments testing bizarre scenarios are are
Speaker 1: just creating unnecessary confusion. And in his discussion of Swampman,
Speaker 1: then it asks us to consider the cow shark. Robert,
Speaker 1: have you ever seen a cow shark? I have not. Well,
Speaker 1: here here's how you know if you have. The cow
Speaker 1: shark is created when a normal cow gives birth to
Speaker 1: an animal that is Adam, for Adam exactly like a
Speaker 1: shark that you would find swimming in the ocean. Now,
Speaker 1: is this newborn animal a cow or a shark? I'm
Speaker 1: gonna say it's a shark. It looks like a shark,
Speaker 1: if it swims like a shark, it's a shark. Even
Speaker 1: if it came out of a cow. Oh, well, so
Speaker 1: you got you're challenging some definitions, right, because some people
Speaker 1: would say, well, white sharks are born to shark parents.
Speaker 1: Even if a shark looks kind of weird, it's still
Speaker 1: a shark, right if it's parents were sharks. Well, that
Speaker 1: kind of logic will get you eaten by a shark,
Speaker 1: I'm thinking. But then denn It adds another wrinkle. He says, Okay, well,
Speaker 1: let's say this shark is them for Adam, a shark,
Speaker 1: but with the exception that it has cow DNA and
Speaker 1: all of it cells. Now is it a cow or
Speaker 1: a shark? It's a very peculiar shark, I would say, now,
Speaker 1: dnn It asks this question with with the idea that
Speaker 1: if you ask this to a biologist, they would probably
Speaker 1: not think this was a very meaningful question, right, because
Speaker 1: in reality, a cow will never give birth to an
Speaker 1: animal in the perfect form of a shark that has
Speaker 1: cow DNA and all of its cells. It's not logically impossible,
Speaker 1: meaning it doesn't involve an inherent contradiction, but it's just
Speaker 1: never ever going to happen in nature, and thus we
Speaker 1: don't learn a lot about biology by testing our intuitions
Speaker 1: about cows and sharks this way, because our intuitions about
Speaker 1: biology have evolved to function in the world where this
Speaker 1: never happens and never will happen. In other words, the
Speaker 1: very tools we're using to solve this puzzle of is
Speaker 1: it a cow is it a shark are shaped by
Speaker 1: a world where this question will never arise because it
Speaker 1: is physically impossible. Now, you could come back and you
Speaker 1: could say, wait a minute, haven't we solved real world
Speaker 1: physics problems by creating physically impossible thought experiments things like
Speaker 1: a like a sleigh traveling at the speed of light
Speaker 1: for relativity, or objects that fly through the air with
Speaker 1: zero friction. And the answer is yes. But Dinnett says,
Speaker 1: you know, those experiments involved much less of an uncontrolled
Speaker 1: departure from reality than the cow, shark or the swampman.
Speaker 1: The physics experiments carefully name and limit their violations of
Speaker 1: reality so that you can take that violation and calibrated
Speaker 1: as part of the experiment, and then real world experiments
Speaker 1: can be devised to test the conclusions of the thought
Speaker 1: experiments after you're done. Not so for cow shark and swampman. Really,
Speaker 1: you know, dinn It says, uh, there's sort of a
Speaker 1: general rule of thumb, and It's quote the utility of
Speaker 1: a thought experiment is inversely proportional to the size of
Speaker 1: its departures from reality. So he does not really seem
Speaker 1: concerned with Davidson's worries about whether swampman can actually have
Speaker 1: thoughts or known the meanings of words, or even be
Speaker 1: a person, because swamp may is physically impossible in the
Speaker 1: context that we've developed words and concepts like thought and meaning.
Speaker 1: In person, a person has thoughts which are derived from evolution, development,
Speaker 1: and experience, and a swampman does not exist within that context.
Speaker 1: So I'm curious when you think about Dennett's critique here.
Speaker 1: I think he makes a good point, but I'm gonna
Speaker 1: have to come back on it. Well, I do feel
Speaker 1: like there is this sense that some of some thought
Speaker 1: experiments are of course very useful, and then the further
Speaker 1: you you get, you kind of get into that territory
Speaker 1: of their fun. They're great to think about it, you know,
Speaker 1: It's like saying, oh, my hands can touch everything but themselves. Man,
Speaker 1: you know they're it's it's great, but I know what
Speaker 1: my hand can touch itself. I'm poking my palm right now.
Speaker 1: Well maybe, but this is why this was that was
Speaker 1: from Futurama. I think with the one of the the
Speaker 1: aliens eats a hippie and becomes high, and it's like,
Speaker 1: my hands can touch everything but themselves. Um So it's yeah,
Speaker 1: kind of a fall paradox. But you know, there's so
Speaker 1: many of these things that they I do. I do
Speaker 1: kind of side within it here. It does feel like
Speaker 1: some of the more extravagant thought experiments do get into
Speaker 1: 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 swampman, and it's
Speaker 1: not a cow shark. It's a thing that I can't
Speaker 1: be sure we should rule out. So this is a
Speaker 1: question that it's entirely possible we could face in reality
Speaker 1: in the near technological future. All right, so let's take
Speaker 1: another break and when we come back we will discuss
Speaker 1: this a bit more. Alright, we're back, So before we
Speaker 1: keep going, though, Joe, I do want to point out, um,
Speaker 1: your So what you do when I said that, when
Speaker 1: I quoted the Alien and Future rum and said that
Speaker 1: the hand can touch everything but itself, you demonstrated your
Speaker 1: hand touching itself, But actually your fingers were touching your palm.
Speaker 1: Was your hand actually touching your hand? Maybe there's more
Speaker 1: weight to this, uh, this paradox than I thought. Well,
Speaker 1: maybe there are no such things as hands. Is there
Speaker 1: a hand or is it just like a team upon
Speaker 1: which you have fingers and palm playing? You know, that's
Speaker 1: another example that sometimes comes up for the ship of
Speaker 1: 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 sport 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
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 a 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 disassembled and reconstructed ships that we're
Speaker 1: talking about. I'm a vessel composed of certain parts of
Speaker 1: my past, and many of these parts will constitute the
Speaker 1: ship of my future. And so when we ponder such
Speaker 1: 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? Propert 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: feel like it's almost hilarious sometimes. How easily many techno
Speaker 1: utopians and digital immortality enthusiasts just seemed to assume that
Speaker 1: your consciousness can be transported onto some kind of hardware
Speaker 1: or machine. I think that 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 uh as a smaller
Speaker 1: panel discussion, was 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 affiliate aided professor in the
Speaker 1: Department of Philosophy at New York University, and he brought
Speaker 1: up the whole if you can upload it, is it
Speaker 1: you question and pointed to the gradual replacement of neurons
Speaker 1: one by one is a potential approach. Uh. And it
Speaker 1: makes sense, right, don't just make an immortal robot version
Speaker 1: of me? Now gradually change me piece by piece into
Speaker 1: an immortal robot almost like almost like tricked me into
Speaker 1: being an immortal robot. You know, don't just don't just
Speaker 1: hoodwink me all at once, like like you know, slip
Speaker 1: in there. That's an interesting question. So yeah, I imagine
Speaker 1: if somebody just made a robot copy of you and
Speaker 1: then said well, now this is you, you would say, no, wait,
Speaker 1: that's don't turn me off. That's not me. But if
Speaker 1: they replaced you one part at a time, it's possible
Speaker 1: that might give you a feeling of continuous experience that
Speaker 1: the rest that the other process wouldn't. But I mean
Speaker 1: that depends on you know, they're all these different models
Speaker 1: of what's the physical substrate of consciousness? Right? Is consciousness? Uh?
Speaker 1: Is 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 emerge within the sci fi
Speaker 1: realm before they become you know, cognitive science, thought experience,
Speaker 1: etcetera swamp thing and swamp Man potentially being an example
Speaker 1: of this. I mean, this is one of the great
Speaker 1: things about science fiction, is it gives us space to
Speaker 1: explore these concepts before they're actually technologically feasible. Yeah. Uh,
Speaker 1: and you know it is it kind of gets into
Speaker 1: that whole Daniel Dennett situation too. Sometimes it's it's just
Speaker 1: there to amuse you and like, you know, twist your
Speaker 1: mind around. But if it twist your mind enough, you know,
Speaker 1: sometimes you end up it becomes this, uh, this pure
Speaker 1: thought experiment. Um. Well. Yeah, and along the same lines,
Speaker 1: I think maybe what you're getting at is that sometimes
Speaker 1: science fictional explorations of concepts can become the opposite of enlightening.
Speaker 1: They just become confusing, they become a bad road to take,
Speaker 1: or they just become art. You know. I think of
Speaker 1: like some of the Borhees stories where you have somebody
Speaker 1: that's dreaming within a dream, the circular ruins and all
Speaker 1: these there are elements to them that are similar to
Speaker 1: thought experiments. But I would never say that a Borhe's
Speaker 1: story is a thought experiment. I guess you could. I mean,
Speaker 1: I guess an interesting question in the story, I'd have
Speaker 1: to like go back and think story by story, But
Speaker 1: I'll library library of Babbel's kind of a thought experience. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean you could almost say it's a philosophy paper,
Speaker 1: you could. Yeah, alright, maybe I take all that back.
Speaker 1: Let's see, I need to reread to some bore Yes preaps.
Speaker 1: But but but you know what I'm saying, like it
Speaker 1: can become I feel like some of these ideas, it's
Speaker 1: almost like there's a crossroads likely right, where are you
Speaker 1: gonna push it? Are you gonna push it into this
Speaker 1: realm of of of sort of you know, boiled down
Speaker 1: thought experimentation or is it art? Is it meant to
Speaker 1: to make you think and explore new ideas, but not
Speaker 1: in like necessarily a you know, a regimented fashion is
Speaker 1: most sci fi, just like speculative meta ethics papers that
Speaker 1: are it's formulated in a way that people want to read. Well,
Speaker 1: it comes back to time COP. Time COP is not
Speaker 1: a thought experiment. And yet at the same time, when
Speaker 1: I first saw it as a kid, and in time
Speaker 1: and time over the years, I'll stop and I'll think, well,
Speaker 1: that part when when the two villains melt together, is
Speaker 1: that right? How would that work? Like? I'm it's you know,
Speaker 1: it's poorly constructed ultimately, but it does make me think
Speaker 1: like a lot of bad movies, do I guess? But
Speaker 1: but back to the gradual replacement of neurons and uploading
Speaker 1: them and all, um, yeah, it comes back to the
Speaker 1: ship of theseis idea during this replacement? Is gradual replacement?
Speaker 1: Does it at some point cease to be me? And
Speaker 1: And what if there is this dark point in the transition,
Speaker 1: the moment of unconsciousness, does that signal the end of
Speaker 1: your consciousness in the beginning of the next Uh? Is
Speaker 1: that which comes after not you? And if it's not,
Speaker 1: then again coming back to what you said earlier about anesthesia.
Speaker 1: How are we supposed to interpret that is that the
Speaker 1: individual before and after anesthesia are those ultimately separate uh entities.
Speaker 1: I mean, ultimately there's this slippery kind of concept in
Speaker 1: here that I feel like his key that that is
Speaker 1: causing a lot of the trouble, And it's the idea
Speaker 1: of I don't know if there's already a name for it,
Speaker 1: but 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 fear of death
Speaker 1: 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 you
Speaker 1: of three seconds from now continuing the existence of you
Speaker 1: right now? Well, I mean, because if we're talking about
Speaker 1: just the physical body, we also have to remember that
Speaker 1: the body does replace itself largely with a new set
Speaker 1: of cells every seven seven years to ten years, and
Speaker 1: some of the most important parts are revamped even more rapidly.
Speaker 1: But that's that's the more original ship of theseus idea.
Speaker 1: That's gradual replacement, and so we tend to be on
Speaker 1: board with that, right you know, I mean, I refuse,
Speaker 1: you refuse, I won't do it. There's some people who
Speaker 1: who who believe the body is just well, it makes
Speaker 1: me think of our old friend Connor McLeod, the Highlander.
Speaker 1: So in order to live like five centuries, is it
Speaker 1: just more or less like our body, Like everything is
Speaker 1: just you know, some cells are dying and being replaced
Speaker 1: or are his cells just super strong? Are they the
Speaker 1: same cells? Is he like also largely identical to the
Speaker 1: original Highlander except he had a haircut? Well, I mean
Speaker 1: this makes me think about our episode about neuroplasticity, about
Speaker 1: how neuroplasticity is a balancing act. Like, you want the
Speaker 1: brain to be able to change and adapt to a
Speaker 1: certain extent so it can adapt to new scenarios and
Speaker 1: learn and all that, But you also don't want the
Speaker 1: brain to be so radically open to change that it is.
Speaker 1: You know, it can just be ravaged by trauma and
Speaker 1: things like that. You know, you know what I mean.
Speaker 1: So there's weakness in being elastic, but there's also strength
Speaker 1: and being elastic. And I guess evolution tried to shape
Speaker 1: our our nervous systems to find that correct balance. But
Speaker 1: inherent in that tension is the idea that some amount
Speaker 1: of stability over time is preferable. That's like better for
Speaker 1: us as an organism. You don't want to be radically
Speaker 1: open to change all the time. Then again maybe that
Speaker 1: that only matters over long time scales. And then it's
Speaker 1: that I guess you could also want to it's the
Speaker 1: average person just going to be open to the appropriate
Speaker 1: amount of change. I think back to. Uh, this is
Speaker 1: a line from Terence McKenna that he said, um, if
Speaker 1: there's something that needs to be done, you will find
Speaker 1: yourself doing it, um, which is is one of those
Speaker 1: statements that seems kind of kind of obvious, but at
Speaker 1: the same time it's I keep coming back to and thinking, well, yeah,
Speaker 1: I guess I would like. Man, if you say, well,
Speaker 1: there's this thing I should have done and I didn't
Speaker 1: do it, well, maybe you didn't need to do that thing,
Speaker 1: and that's why you have reached this point where you're
Speaker 1: looking back on it like that. What does it mean
Speaker 1: to need to do something? Yeah? Wow, we've really gone
Speaker 1: all the way into the navel on this this episode. Um,
Speaker 1: lots of hands not touching themselves. All right. Well, on
Speaker 1: that note, I think we're gonna exit here. But before
Speaker 1: we do, well, we're not gonna have time to touch base. Uh.
Speaker 1: You know, on every example of the ship of Theseus,
Speaker 1: as it's been expressed in various works of art or fiction.
Speaker 1: But but I do want to pinpoint a couple of
Speaker 1: them here real quick for starters, the book blind Side
Speaker 1: by Peter Watts that we both read. I didn't realize
Speaker 1: until I started looking into this, or I didn't remember
Speaker 1: that the space ship that there on is the Theseus.
Speaker 1: That's kind and it is a joke, I guess, yeah,
Speaker 1: and it is capable of rebuilding itself. And then you
Speaker 1: also have a member of the crew who has had
Speaker 1: half his brain rebuilt. So there are a number 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.
Speaker 1: Now the teleporter problem variant that we talked about, that's
Speaker 1: been explored on The Outer Limits and to a large
Speaker 1: extent the Christopher Nolan film The Prestige. There was a
Speaker 1: character on Star Trek Deep Space nine named Antos who
Speaker 1: was a Bajor and spiritual leader who had to have
Speaker 1: his brain gradually replaced with cybernetics, and this eroded his
Speaker 1: previous sense of self and this had a negative impact
Speaker 1: on his relationship with Kira, the Joran character on that
Speaker 1: show I must. I've never watched Deep Space, but it's
Speaker 1: pretty great. I didn't. I have to say, I do
Speaker 1: not specifically remember this episode, but I used to watch
Speaker 1: it all the time, like every evening at like nine
Speaker 1: pm or something in syndication. Our producer Alex has often
Speaker 1: schooled me on to Space nine. 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: the 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 introlcos dummy. Oh no. And so there, you know,
Speaker 1: you're left to wonder, well, which one is the original?
Speaker 1: Which one is Hermes? Is that this the robot or
Speaker 1: this grotesque meat puppet? And then one of the examples
Speaker 1: that I was most impressed we have mainly because I
Speaker 1: just had no idea about the depth here on this,
Speaker 1: but the tin Woodman from the Wizard of Oz books,
Speaker 1: the books by L. Frank Baum. Oh, I've never read
Speaker 1: the books. I have not either, but when I started
Speaker 1: looking into this. Yeah, there's this whole narrative about the
Speaker 1: tin Man, how the tin Man has a like his
Speaker 1: ax was was cursed by the wicked witch and then
Speaker 1: he like accidentally like chopped away, you know, part of
Speaker 1: his body, and then then it was replaced with tin.
Speaker 1: And then he ends up chopping away another part of
Speaker 1: his body and it's replaced with tin. And he just
Speaker 1: keeps losing pieces upon pieces of his body until he's
Speaker 1: all ten except for his heart. And then one day
Speaker 1: he cuts himself in half, I believe. And so now
Speaker 1: now his heart has been bisected, and that's why he
Speaker 1: needs the the heart he has to reclaim like this,
Speaker 1: this this portion of his humanity that has been lost
Speaker 1: in this gradual replacement essentially a cybernetic replacement of itself.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, I never thought of Frank Baum getting into cybernetics. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's essentially transhumanist. Right. Are you one of the people
Speaker 1: who's a big fan of Return to Oz? I know
Speaker 1: people who are into that. I've never seen it, but
Speaker 1: I remember seeing the trailer as a kid, being like
Speaker 1: a little freaked out by those people with wheels for hands,
Speaker 1: so I should see it. It sounds exactly like the
Speaker 1: thing i'd be into. We should do a science of
Speaker 1: return to OZ episode. Well, let's not commit until we
Speaker 1: know we're getting into. Okay, Now, there are just a
Speaker 1: few fictional examples of the Ship of Theseus. I'm sure
Speaker 1: all of you listening out there you have examples you'd
Speaker 1: like to bring up as well. Um, so we would
Speaker 1: love to hear from you. In the meantime, be sure
Speaker 1: to check out stuff to all your mind. That is
Speaker 1: where you will find all the episodes of the podcast.
Speaker 1: You'll find links out to your various 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 simply rate and
Speaker 1: 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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