How many of you know about the Ship of Theseus? Let me remind you of Theseus from the Greek mythology — he was a Greek warrior, who defeated Minotaur inside a maze, with the help of Princess Ariadne.
But the ship of Theseus has really nothing to do with Theseus at all. This is one of the famous thought experiments (probably originated from a discussion between Heraclitus and Plato).
The ship of Theseus actually questions the identity. It is assumed that the original ship, by which Theseus came to kill Minotaur, is kept somewhere in a museum, and it’s getting damaged. Now for repairs, if the timbers of the ship are replaced by newer logs one by one, one day all the original timbers will have been replaced by newer ones.
So here comes the question: can the repaired ship still be called the ship of Theseus?
This series is all about weird thoughts, and I have some complicated thoughts on this repairing method.
Suppose, to repair the original Ship of Theseus, the curators organized an event, where they requested commoners to provide new timber and they promised to give original old timber in return for that. People will surely come for it because the timber of the original Ship has a historic or archeological value. Curators maintain a public ledger where they keep a record of who provided which new timber and got which old timber in return.
Suppose Alice provides a new timber no. 14 and got an old timber no. 9. Now Alice came home and made a miniature model of the ship of Theseus by old timber 9. Now, which will be the more genuine Ship of Theseus?
Complicating this thought a little more (if you’re up to it): let’s assume that every single timber provider turned the old timber that they got into miniature Ships of Theseus! Now which is the most genuine one?
If we think of the value, the newly repaired ship is tagged by the curators as the Ship of Theseus, whereas the original timbers are now a multiple miniature ships. So where does the real value lie?
Now if we consider curators as the centralized authority, who is telling everyone that this new ship has the same value as the older one, we can consider the new timber providers as the agents of decentralization, where the actual value is getting generated by the proof of work. Meaning that in case of decentralization, the original timber and the miniature copy are both strong arguments that these are the real ships. These new timber providers cannot get away with saying that they have the original Ship of Theseus without these strong arguments. However, in the case of the centralized authority, they are using their power more than they are using strong arguments to conclude that they still have the original Ship of Theseus.
So, what can we conclude from this? The exclusivity of the original Ship of Theseus has gone, so does it lose its value? Or is the centralized decision of repairing it with newer timbers responsible?
