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12/8/2016 8:35:12 PM
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Thought Experiment: The Ship of Theseus

It is a new ship once any piece is replaced

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It is a new ship once all pieces are replaced

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It's the same ship no matter how many replacements

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This is one of my favorite philosophical questions. At what point is something different? [quote]The ship of Theseus, also known as Theseus' paradox, is a thought experiment that raises the question of whether an object that has had all of its components replaced remains fundamentally the same object. The paradox is most notably recorded by Plutarch in Life of Theseus from the late first century. Plutarch asked whether a ship that had been restored by replacing every single wooden part remained the same ship.[/quote] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus

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  • Someone backs into my car in a parking lot and KO's the front bumper. So I get a new bumper. Preferably OEM. Same car. The engine in my car dies. Say I have a 1986 Toyota Corolla. If I replaced it with [i]exactly[/i] the same parts that came out of it. Same car. Important bit there, I feel. "Exactly the same". My car got stolen. So I decide to build it nut for bolt from scratch. Exact spec. It might be "new". But it is ultimately the same as the one that got stolen. Same car. However, if I replace the engine in that Corolla with and S2000 engine, it becomes a fundementally different car. As soon as you replace a part with something that isn't original spec, it then begins to become something different. I feel like that's a purist argument though. Some people are of the mind that as long as the chassis is maintained, it's fundementally the same car. I don't quite buy that because if you take heart out, and replace it with something different, the characteristics are altered. The personality changes. That's a different ship in my book.

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