• Gloria@sh.itjust.works
    29·
    6 hours ago

    I was not proficient with this topic, so had to look it up:

    The Ship of Theseus, also known as Theseus’s Paradox, is a paradox and a common thought experiment about whether an object is the same object after having all of its original components replaced over time, typically one after the other.

    In Greek mythology, Theseus, the mythical king of the city of Athens, rescued the children of Athens from King Minos after slaying the minotaur and then escaped onto a ship going to Delos. Each year, the Athenians would commemorate this by taking the ship on a pilgrimage to Delos to honour Apollo. A question was raised by ancient philosophers: After several hundreds of years of maintenance, if each individual piece of the Ship of Theseus were replaced, one after the other, was it still the same ship?

    • AFK BRB Chocolate@lemmy.worldEnglish
      14·
      4 hours ago

      I like the answer by some philosopher that we have a sense of object permanence. If your neighbor replaced different parts of his house over several years until they all were replaced, you’d likely say it was the same house because at every point in time, it was there. But if one day he knocked the whole things down and rebuilt it exactly the same as it had been, you’d say it was a different house because there was that moment when it wasn’t there.