The Ship of Theseus is an ancient Greek thought experiment which attempts to drive at the core of what identity is.
It goes like this: a wooden ship, let’s say the Ship of Theseus, slowly starts to wear and decay as it is used over months and years. As time goes on, the ship’s parts are replaced as they get to a point beyond repair. The question is, if this process continues and the whole ship is replaced, piece-by-piece, then is the replaced ship the Ship of Theseus, or is it something else?
Take a few moments to consider how you’d approach answering this question.
This thought experiment has remarkably wide applicability to basically any object or thing which we consider distinct from the environment.
Think about a person or a pet. Is this person or pet the same person or pet after a few years have gone by, given all of the atoms of their body have now been replaced by the food they have assimilated and the air they have respired?
It seems we are approaching the problem of identity from an angle with faulty assumptions.
It would be far more objectively true to frame objects themselves as transforms of the environment; that is, objects and beings are merely a manifestation of the universe as a whole. The problem of identity merely arises when we attempt to artificially draw boundaries between the object and what is not the object, as defined by the human mind.
There are of course patterns that are largely stable through time which is why it’s useful to draw distinctions between the object or being and what is not. We give each other names because our bodies and psyches are largely stable through time, and we are creatures that love to simplify the world into useful stories and constructs, that can be thought of as tools.
There is evolutionary pressure of the human mind to perceive objects as distinct so they’re more easily utilised as tools or perceived as threats, so that unnecessary energy that isn’t optimised for survival needs can be conserved. This is why for millennia, the problem of identity has been framed from such a mistaken, but all too human, bias.
Now we come to the conclusion that identity must be a construct of the human mind, and has no truthful meaning outside of the pragmatism of everyday life.
Of course, this is not a case to discard identity, as it is incredibly useful and intuitive for us humans to functionally meet our survival needs. It must not be forgotten, however, that identity is ultimately an illusion, or construct, of the human mind, essentially evolved from pattern-recognition that other animals have instincts for too.
Therefore, there is no problem of identity, because identity itself is merely a construct of the human mind that has no fundamental reality to it. One need only make a radical paradigm-shift to understand reality as a unity that includes morphing forms that are under the illusion of separation from the totality, as if a being is alive, it must operate under the illusion of separation in order to survive optimally so as to propagate into the future under intense evolutionary pressure. Not only this, but the organism must perceive artificial distinctions of the environment as to more easily distinguish what is a help and what is a hinderance to survival so that it can compete evolutionarily.
This is the more fundamental truth that underpins and supersedes our illusory notions of identity.
A “ship” is only defined as a ship because it is a time-stable tool that we can use to survive more optimally in the world, and it has distinct features that are easily recognisable by the human mind. If we were to see it for what it is just one level more fundamentally, it would be merely a pattern constructed out of trees. One level more fundamentally? It would be a transformation of the air and soil into microscopic and macroscopic patterns (which we happen to use trees as the evolutionarily hardened intermediary that does the hard work). A “ship” is merely the human mind trying to tame the chaos of nature into some semblance of order – which it only artificially can be, nested inside the more fundamental and far more powerful truth that is nature.
