List of Ship of Theseus examples

This is a list of popular culture examples of the Theseus paradox that are not covered in the main article.

Books

Nonfiction

The French critic and essayist Roland Barthes refers at least twice to a ship that is entirely rebuilt, in the preface to his Essais Critiques (1971) and later in his Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975); in the latter the persistence of the form of the ship is seen as a key structuralist principle. He calls this ship the Argo, on which Theseus was said to have sailed with Jason; he may have confused the Argo (referred to in passing in Plutarch's Theseus at 19.4) with the ship that sailed from Crete (Theseus, 23.1).

In the book Last Chance to See by Douglas Adams, he discusses the Gold Pavilion Temple in Kyoto, which is an example similar to the Shinto shrine (discussed in the main article), and realised the following:

"The idea of the building, the intention of it, its design, are all immutable and are the essence of the building. The intention of the original builders is what survives. The wood of which the design is constructed decays and is replaced when necessary. To be overly concerned with the original materials, which are merely sentimental souvenirs of the past, is to fail to see the living building itself."

Theseus's paradox bears also on the question of virtual human identity discussed in Douglas Hofstadter's and Daniel Dennett's The Mind's I: Fantasies and reflections on self and soul (1981). Speculations concerning mind uploading suggest it is possible to transfer a human mind from an organic brain to a computer, incrementally and in such a way that consciousness is never interrupted, e.g. by replacing neurons one by one with electronics designed to simulate the neurons' firing patterns. Yet the result of this process is an object entirely physically distinct from the starting point.

The Talmud presents the paradox with three practical implications to Jewish law, and concludes that it is indeed considered as if it was a different object.^[1]

Fiction

In the Oz books by L. Frank Baum, the lumberjack Nick Chopper's axe chopped off all his limbs one by one, and each time a limb was cut off, a smith made him a mechanical one, finally making him a torso and a head, thus turning him into the Tin Woodman, an entirely mechanical being, albeit possessing the consciousness of the lumberjack he once was.^[2] In The Tin Woodman of Oz he seeks out his old girlfriend, to find that she has married Chopfyt, who was created partly from the leftover parts of Nick Chopper.

In the novel John Dies at the End the starting chapter presents the experiment as a riddle with an axe that has its handle and its head replaced.^[3]

In the Discworld series by Terry Pratchett:

• In The Fifth Elephant, the dwarfish king compares changing a society's laws or customs to replacing components in an ancestral axe.
• In Lords and Ladies, there are numerous references to the supposed inability of witches and wizards to cross the same river twice. The River Ankh in the city of Ankh-Morpork is the only river that is possible to cross twice because it is polluted and slow-moving to the point of being solid. The wizards refute this by demonstrating that an agile wizard can cross and recross a small river many times an hour.
• Senior witch Granny Weatherwax possesses a flying broom whose handle and bristles have been replaced many times, yet remains unreliable to the point that she has to run up and down very quickly to essentially "bump-start" it.
• Pratchett also directly references the paradox in The Fifth Elephant, The Bromeliad and The Carpet People.

The short story The Man That Was Used Up by Edgar Allan Poe is about a man who reconstructs himself after going through a war.

Robert Graves employs the "grandfather's axe" version of the paradox in his historical novel, The Golden Fleece, first published in 1945.^[4]

Isaac Asimov's Bicentennial Man applies this to humanity; the title character being a robot gradually rebuilt by prostheses intended for humans. When contrasted with a human who has been "rebuilt" by the same prostheses, the question of the distinction between man and robot is explored.^[5]

In the 1986 book Foundation and Earth by Isaac Asimov, the ancient robot R. Daneel Olivaw says that over the thousands of years of his existence, every part of him has been replaced several times, including his brain, which he has carefully redesigned six times, replacing it each time with a newly constructed brain having the positronic pathways containing his current memories and skills, along with free space for him to learn more and continue operating for longer.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series by Douglas Adams makes continuing sport of classic paradoxes. In the trilogy's fourth book So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish, Marvin the Paranoid Android says of himself: "Every part of me has been replaced at least fifty times..." (except for the diodes down his left side, which hurt). In the sixth book of the series, character Trillian has had so many body parts and functions replaced by technology that she doubts she is still the same person, referring to her present self as New Trillian and the past as Old Trillian.

Japanese manga and animated series Ghost in the Shell cyclically returns to this paradox of a "human" in which people often have their organic body parts replaced by artificial parts, sometimes going so far as to have their entire body replaced with a prosthetic one, leaving the brain as the only remaining original part. This is covered in detail on Philosophy of Ghost in the Shell.

The plot of the James Blish novel "Spock Must Die!" hinges on this philosophical dilemma.

In Peter Watts' interstellar sci-fi novel Blindsight, the crew's ship is called Theseus. It features technology to create and replace its own parts when broken, and can heal and replace crew members' organs and tissue when they are injured.

Likely hinted at in the Star Wars Legends novel Bloodlines by Karen Traviss. In the book, Boba Fett notes that the only original part of his ship Slave I that survives from his father's days was the pilot's chair.

Publications

In Michael Rea's Material Constitution, there is a scenario in which Socrates and Plato exchange the parts of their carriages one by one until, finally, Socrates's carriage is made up of all the parts of Plato's original carriage and vice versa. The question is whether, or at what point, they exchanged their carriages.^[6] This thought experiment is "a model for the philosophers": some say, "it remained the same," others say, "it did not remain the same".^[7]

In Hans Moravec's Mind Children, an example of mind uploading is given - a human brain is replaced a single neuron at a time by a nanorobot and computer that perfectly simulates the behaviour of the neuron and its neurotransmitters.^[8] The end result is a completely digital copy of brain in simulation. However, there are other factors such as the fact that the intricate structure of the brain is changing as the brain learns, so a simulated brain may not learn the same way.

In The Three Basic Facts of Existence, Piyadassi Thera uses the teachings of Dharma to suggest that nothing in the universe is ever the same:^[9]

"The same man cannot step twice into the same river; for the so called man who is only a conflux of mind and body, never remains the same for two consecutive moments".

In Johann A. R. Roduit's poem 'Flesh & Foil', the imagery of the Ship of Theseus is used to illustrate the consequences human enhancements could have on someone's physical body.^[10]

Television series

In the Only Fools and Horses episode "Heroes and Villains", the road sweeper Trigger declares he has won an award for keeping the same broom for 20 years — "17 new heads and 14 new handles".^[11][12]

In the 2011 documentary series Curiosity, an episode entitled "Can You Live Forever?", elaborates on the concept of replacing the human body, piece by piece. Adam Savage, the episode's host, presents the audience with several plausible scenarios.

In An Idiot Abroad, Karl Pilkington ruminates over the restoration done to the Great Wall of China after discovering monkey bars that had been installed in the tourist area. Pilkington decides that the wall isn't very impressive because "it's not even the same bloody wall is it?"

Science fiction

In the Futurama episode "The Six Million Dollar Mon," accountant Hermes Conrad replaces his body parts one by one with robotic ones. Dr. Zoidberg requests to keep the discarded body parts, fashioning them into a marionette of Hermes, which he uses for a stand-up routine. When Hermes goes to replace his brain with a robotic one, Zoidberg puts the old brain into his marionette body, bringing Hermes back to life as his old self and leaving his previous body to be taken over by the new brain.

In Star Trek:

• In the episode "Life Support" of the Deep Space Nine series, the complete replacement of the human brain is considered the destruction of the individual.^[13]
• The USS Enterprise, the starship featured in the original Star Trek television series, was very heavily refitted before its first appearance in film, the 1979 movie Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Almost nothing from the original TV version of the ship survived into the refitting. Captain Willard Decker, the ship's new commanding officer, describes it as "an almost totally new Enterprise."

In the Doctor Who episode "Deep Breath", the Doctor postulates that a broom that has had its handle and brush replaced several times is not the same broom, "but you can still sweep the floor", when talking to an android who has replaced every part of himself several times.^[14]

Films

The 1999 movie Bicentennial Man, based on the novel, stars an android who develops a personality and replaces his entire physiology with cybernetic-organic parts, so that he is the same character but now mortal.^[5]

In the 2008 animated film WALL-E, it's suggested that possibly every single piece of the character WALL·E has been replaced by himself prior to the story.

In the 2009 film, Gamer, Michael C. Hall's character Ken Castle develops a nanotechnology method to supplant one's biological central nervous system with a synthetic one, cell by cell. The percentage of supplanted cells in an individual's brain varied by character, depending on the desired function (i.e.- wirelessly receive information like a computer, or send it, in the case of Ken Castle). Although not fully expressed in any character of the film, Castle ultimately presents the audience with the concept of fully supplanting one's biological brain with an entirely synthetic one. Midway into the film, Theseus' Ship Paradox does come into question when the character of Gina Parker Smith (Kyra Sedgwick) shares that she would rather have the new parts removed, a statement that prompts Trace (Alison Lohman) to explain that such an attempt would kill the individual because it would mean removing a part of one's brain.

The 2012 movie John Dies At The End based on the novel, begins with a narration recounting the axe variant of the paradox.

The 2013 movie Ship of Theseus portrays the paradox through intertwined stories of human organ donation.^[15]

Music

Sugababes, a British band,^[16] "were formed in 1998 [..] but one by one they left, till by September 2009 none of the founders remained in the band; each had been replaced by another member, just like the planks of Theseus’s boat."^[17] The three original members reunited in 2011 under the name Mutya Keisha Siobhan, with the "original" Sugababes still in existence.^[12][18]

Membership of the British pop band The Pipettes has gradually changed such that none of the founding members are any longer part of the band.

Yes no longer features any original members.

Games

The 2013 game The Swapper's staple mechanic is a cloning device that allows the player to create perfect clones and swap consciousness between them. The majority of the game takes place aboard a spaceship named "Theseus", which is a heavy nod to the thought experiment's involvement in the game's use of themes such as the subject of consciousness and a lost sense of originality.^[19]

The 2015 psychological horror game SOMA features dialogue and text records that presents the player with the paradox of the human body, as the cells of the body are all being replaced at different rates - the body and mind is always growing and changing. As every second passes, a person is never physically the same, but they always represent the same person, "a continuous flow of thought and perception keeps an unbroken chain of continuity that we know as our self".^[20][21]

References