The Ship of Theseus Thought Experiment and Star Trek Transporters
What is the self and when aren’t we us?
What makes something that thing? I don’t mean part of the same class, but rather a specific thing. What makes an individual them, rather than someone else? What makes an object, such as a boat or a house, a specific one? These questions are nothing new, but it’s still difficult to find a satisfying answer.
The ship of Theseus is a common thought experiment which looks at the nature of “self” and “not self.” Consider a ship. We’ll call it The Boat. If we replace a damaged plank of wood with a new piece of wood, is the ship still The Boat? Most people would agree that the ship is indeed the same one. But what if we replaced half of the planks of wood? Do we still have The Boat, or is there a new ship? And what if over time, every single plank of wood was replaced? A lot of people would probably argue at this point that the ship is not the same one. But I don’t necessarily agree.
What if we dismantled the ship, took it apart, piece by piece? Now we no longer have a ship. It seems clear that even if we have the parts of The Boat, there is no The Boat. There’s a point in time where The Boat does not exist. The old adage of something being more than the sum of its parts holds in this discussion. A boat, a house, a person…
