Consciousness of Theseus?

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
21

It is always changing and yet remaining the same.

Not mental constructs, as I am thinking of it in purely mechanistic terms. As if the brain is an instrument, composed of other instruments. The mind is the product of that, so if you make two, you get two products ~ like any machines! Hence the ‘name’ doesn’t describe anything, its what the ship of Theseus or Theseus himself >is< that counts, and that is a product of the machine.

Ergo you should be able to change any and over time, all of the parts, and still be left with the same ship.

If you make a duplicate, then its the sister ship and the consciousness of Theseus is a copy and not Theseus et al.

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22

I would say if you changed a finger, according the materialism, or physicalism, you are slightly different. Given how much the brain makes up of a person, vastly more so.

Right. For physicalists, this is not a hypothetical. The brain is changing allt he time. You are not the same person after some number of years. In fact often physicalists and even functionalists will argue for the persistance of identity through time based on memory. But memories are evidence of changes.

If all the matter in your body changes, which it will in 7 years, will it be you?

dualists and idealists may not need to answer that question, but physicalists do.

23

Every sub-atomic particle exchanges all the affectance/energy/mass of which it is made every second. You don’t need to wait to become a new person.

You see a light in the night sky. It seems to be hovering, slowly moving a bit. You discuss the light that you saw with a friend. He tells of someone else who had seen a different light the night before. You discover that the color of light was different, one was reddish and the other was bluish. You and your friend then discuss the red and the blue night lights with your old college professor.

The professor laughs a bit and apologizes. He begins an explanation, but then he interrupts himself. “Wait…” he says, “How many lights did you see?” You explain that there was only one red light and one blue light. “And for how long did you see these lights?” You explain that you watched it for perhaps 30 seconds. So he asks how that could be, “The light that enters your eye cannot go back out and come in again for 30 seconds. How did the image persist?”

Now you are figuring that the professor was merely being pedantic and perhaps getting a little too much “the old professor”, so you explain, “Okay, okay, we saw something in the sky that was glowing.” “Are you sure that it was merely one light each night?” he asks.

The professor, who had picked yet another PhD, this time in Philosophy, then explained that some students were experimenting with laser phasing and producing spots of light mid-sky. When the phasing of the lasers was correct, the humid air at the point of convergence would glow. Of course the air and moisture that is glowing is never the same molecules, as they float freely and quickly around, in and out of the glowing region. So again, the professor asks, “Each night, how many lights did you actually see?”

How many lights were actually there?

…same question as Theseus’ ship. Nothing is ever exactly identical to itself for more than an infinitesimal of time. The mind could not even begin to track the changes. Thus the mind tracks only what is relevant: “It is the same basic configuration in basically the same location with roughly the same relevance to me, thus it is the same object by declaration of rational definition.”

24

Moreno

Sure, but if we are replacing function exactly, then you’d have to assume there is something else manifesting the consciousness, for there to be any difference.

If you had an accident and a lump of your brain was removed, if they said, we can give you a new bit, wouldn’t you take it? And be the same, more the same than if you had lost some function?

See below…

James S Saint
Your story is the same as my perspective based reality theory I made a thread about a while back, everyone sees a different rainbow!

For me this ever-changing-ness or fluidity, denotes that only a non circular pattern making manifests consciousness. The brain [and reality ~ as you say]has plasticity, and is constantly changing, and yet it is that very ‘flux’ that consciousness is held.

  • and that is why it doesn’t matter if you change parts of the ‘machine’, one by one until you arrive at a new ‘machine’!

  • you could possibly mutate the genes into virtually anything, and it would still be the same subjective experiencer, or ‘you’. there has to be something which denotes a break, and one subjective observer is replaced by another [?] for that to not be true.
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25

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What the Ship of Theseus reveals is that our words and names are not the things in themselves, but identifying labels that we choose to apply as our need dictates.

The Nile river is always the Nile river because the river is defined as the flow of water at that location between those general points. There is nothing about the definition requiring particular water molecules. There only need be “some water flowing” for it to be a river.

Similar with Heraclitus’ man and the Ship of Theseus. The same applies to any particular H2O molecule, to any bucket of water, as well as to every particle and object ever named. It is the pattern that is named, not necessarily all “elements” within.

ALL names are category and pattern labels identifying whatever their definition has specified. The specification for James S Saint does not indicate or require that each molecule be the same from moment to moment, but rather that there be a reasonable continuum of any changing or exchanging and that after the change, there is no significant difference to our concerns. So we can validly say that it is the same James S Saint, H2O, River, Man, or Ship because our definitions for our words, labels, and names allow for insignificant changes and exchanges.

26

I will explain the ship of Theseus.

Consciousness and the mind is like a bus on the road. Consciousness is trapped inside the mind in the same way a person is trapped inside a bus. When the bus moves 100 miles per hour the person moves inside it because the person is encased in the bus. But if a couple of windows are open the person’s eyes may leave the bus momentarily (OBE’s from drugs). If the bus explodes, then the person usually dies with the bus and there are many other persons in many other buses at the same time to pick up where it left off.

If the bus driver changes a tire, or replaces a window or gives the bus a new paint job, the consciousness remains inside the same mind, it does not transfer to a mind which was most similar to it’s last form, because the fundamental structures which are trapping it inside of the bus are not removed.