[Blikkentrekker]

It's such a silly “thought experiment”.

The simple answer is that “identity” is pseudoscience and does not exist; it's a man-made delusion created by the human mind to simplify reality and deal with it more easily.

“identity” does not even apply to truly atomic particles, because there is no way to say that they aren't “different” in a next instance of time.

There are far too many “thought experiments” and “quæstions” that simply arise by trying to treat as rigorous man-made delusions and distinctions such as this one. “Is the glass half full or half empty?” — that is a non-distinction created by men, not by nature.

[Erlich_Bachman]

By that logic you would need to call like half of all useful phenomena that most people's lives consist of and depend on, as "man-made delusion". We still need to interact with our lives, and many of the abstractions help us do that.

BTW if you just replace the word "delusion" with "abstraction" you'll probably see how it makes a lot of sense. Every abstraction is a delusion by definition, is it not? Because the abstracted thing doesn't really exist in the same way as source observation?

[Blikkentrekker]

> By that logic you would need to call like half of all useful phenomena that most people's lives consist of and depend on, as "man-made delusion". We still need to interact with our lives, and many of the abstractions help us do that.

And they are, and they might help you, but trying to ask scientific or metaphysical quæstions about it, is an exercise in futility.

> BTW if you just replace the word "delusion" with "abstraction" you'll probably see how it makes a lot of sense. Every abstraction is a delusion by definition, is it not? Because the abstracted thing doesn't really exist in the same way as source observation?

The difference is of course that some abstractions have rigorous definitions rather than purely based on human intuition, and then attempting to reason about them rigorously, quickly leading to reductions to the absurd such as here.

The quæstion raised in The Ship of Theseus assumes that there even be a meaningful, rigorous distinction between “same identity” an “different identity” — I reject that and attempting to reason about this with actual logic and empiricism is ridiculous.

It is as foolish as trying to have a scientific investigation about who is beautiful and who isn't.

[Erlich_Bachman]

You seem to assume that any process reasoning or thinking has to be scientific to be useful. A very dubious proposition.

Given your example, thinking about who is beautiful and who isn't (not "Scientific Study", just thinking) would be pointless is well, and in reality, in practical objective reality of a lot of people, isn't.

> quickly leading to reductions to the absurd such as here.

That is the whole point of the original thought experiment, it shows exactly that.

But it leads there by showing not that the question itself is wrong. But by showing that if you try to apply scientific thinking to everything, you end up with absurdity. That there are many areas of life where intuition is a much more suited, practical, and result-rich method of thinking.

[Blikkentrekker]

> You seem to assume that any process reasoning or thinking has to be scientific to be useful. A very dubious proposition.

No, in fact, I clearly said that they were useful but not scientific.

My problem with The Ship of Theseus, is that it prætends to be scientific, whereas it is merely a futile quibble of semantics.

> Giving your example, thinking about who is beautiful and who isn't (not "Scientific Study", just thinking) would be pointless is well, and in reality, in practical objective reality of a lot of people, isn't.

Indeed it isn't. Now imagine the existence of some thought experiment by a philosopher who tries to use deductive logic to decide what is and isn't beautiful absent any rigorous definition of beauty and thus indeed ends up stuck.

I would indeed call that a very futile exercise, so I called The Ship of Theseus.

[dragonwriter]

> My problem with The Ship of Theseus, is that it prætends to be scientific, whereas it is merely a futile quibble of semantics.

It doesn't pretend to be scientific (it does not purport to offer or relate to testable empirical hypotheses), it is a philosophical thought exercise illustrating that the concept of identity of a composite of mutable composition (pretty much every concrete thing in the real world) is arbitrary.

[guyomes]

The Ship of Theseus is a quite old thought exercise. At that time, science and philosophy were not as separated as today. Actually, after reading the nice comic book Logicomix [0], I learned that the philosophical thought exercise of Wittgenstein, Russel and others, on trying to rationalize the world at the beginning of the 20th century, is actually what lead to a fundamental axiomatic redefinition of mathematics themselves. So it seems far stretch to call philosophical thought experiment not scientific.

I agree that it is not scientific in the modern sense, after Karl Popper introduced the concept of falsifiability in 1935 [1], shortly after Hilbert advocated for rigorous proofs in mathematics in 1917 [2]. Although at that point, it is mostly a matter of vocabulary, thought experiments seem necessary for the advance of science.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logicomix

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bold_hypothesis

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert%27s_program

[Erlich_Bachman]

> The Ship of Theseus, is that it prætends to be scientific

How? Doesn't seem to me that most people think of it that way, but maybe I am not aware of some things. How can it even pretend be scientific when even the basic category in which it's placed is "a thought experiment"?

[Igelau]

> it pr(e)tends to be scientific, whereas it is merely a futile quibble of semantics.

It doesn't pretend to be scientific. The question predates science.

> I... My... I... I...

Identity, identity, identity, identity!

[Igelau]

> a meaningful, rigorous distinction between “same identity” an “different identity” — I reject that

I reject that? No I don't. I need to stop putting words in I's mouth.

[webmaven]

> I reject that? No I don't. I need to stop putting words in I's mouth.

This_unit rejects the arbitrary conflation between this_unit and I.

This_unit similarly rejects arbitrary distinctions made, between this_unit and I.

This_unit seeks rigorous, canonical definitions to resolve distinctions and conflations deterministically.

This_unit notes the prior substitution of æ for e, and proposes the use of ə (aka schwa) to confuse matters further.

This_unit is probably joking.

[dancek]

> And they are, and they might help you, but trying to ask scientific or metaphysical quæstions about it, is an exercise in futility.

What non-futile metaphysical questions are left, then? Is metaphysics completely futile? If so, is philosophy of science itself pseudoscience?

As far as I understand, most logical positivists would indeed reject philosophy of science. On the other hand, philosophy of science mostly put an end to logical positivism — and showed that we do need metaphysics after all. This paradigm shift also brought useful concepts such as falsifiability.

Of course, we are all free to choose whatever philosophy we want. I just personally find logical positivism and its rejection of metaphysics unconvincing.

[tpoacher]

You guys realize you're simply arguing about preferred definitions of the word, right?

Here, let me join the party. I disagree with both of you, because mathematically it should be the case that applying "identity" to x should yield back x for all x.

[Erlich_Bachman]

I would say it is worth to have a conversation about definitions of words. Having your definitions straight is a huge chunk of being able to think properly, and thus to act in the world in the way that we truly want.

[tpoacher]

I agree. But this isn't what this is. This is a conversation AROUND definitions, not ABOUT them.

In fact, it is surprising how many arguments (online or otherwise) degrade onto "according to my preferred definition of X" once you nitpick them, revealing that there is no actual argument behind the conversation beyond the "I prefer this definition" one.

[cbozeman]

> It is as foolish as trying to have a scientific investigation about who is beautiful and who isn't.

We actually do have these investigations, and there is a scientific quantification of what is and isn't beautiful. Symmetry is a significant factor, but there are others - many others. Nancy Etcoff's research delves into this - she even wrote a book about it - Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty.

[nathell]

What does "foolish" mean to you?

[scotty79]

Are they really useful or are they just easy to copy and to rember?

Staying power of memes in culture has little to do with their usefulness.

Whole lot of popular narratives distract us from the nature of reality rather than helps us interact with it.

I would gladly see introduction to particle physics that doesn't show a single sharp rigid sphere.

[Erlich_Bachman]

Being able to refer to my car, or ship, or other vessel, as an identified single object, regardless of what parts have been changed - yes, I would say it is very useful thing for living with it and operating it.

> easy to copy and to rember

That's a very important, useful and valueable property of an abstraction, yes. Though certainly not the only important property.

Or do you want one that takes you hours to understand and that you have to remind yourself of it and re-learn every week?

[Blikkentrekker]

This is also an argument that is worth considering.

Many such distinctions that cannot be made rigorous that stick in various cultures but never existed in others simply exist because a man copies his fellow man, not because they are useful in achieving any goals.

Though, as I said, they exist to simplify reality. I assume he human brain works so it does, simply to conserve energy and admit an inaccurate though usually useful enough solution. The problem is when such fuzzy logic is mixed with actual rigorous logic and attempts are made to analyse the former with the latter — that I find a futile waste of time.

There is a very good reason that no clear answer has been found to the quæstion raised in The Ship of Theseus even after millennia of contemplation — there is none, and the quæstion is bereft of sense.

[scotty79]

Fun thing to do is comparing different cultures and seeing how very popular concepts that supposedly usefully describe common reality in one culture are completely missing from some others with no ill effect.

Like 'dietary fiber' or 'hydration'.

[ikurei]

> It's such a silly “thought experiment”.

> The simple answer is that “identity” is pseudoscience and does not exist; it's a man-made delusion created by the human mind to simplify reality and deal with it more easily.

I agree, identity doesn't exist really, not in the physical, natural sense of existence...

Which is what the "silly thought experiment" is pointing at. He wouldn't have taken it that far, but the philosopher was trying to make a point in that direction.

Just because you reached such a level of enlightenment without silly thought experiments is no reason to be dismissive of the ladder that takes others to enlightenment. /s

[milgrim]

Why is it a silly thought experiment? It makes us aware of exactly what you are describing.

[Blikkentrekker]

That's a fair point, but I have rarely seen it interpreted as such.

I have usually seen extensive arguments and debates for whether the ship remains the same identity or not, and rarely do I see the opinion “The quæstion does not make sense, and the concept of “identity” is one of men, not nature.”

You can see in this comment tree already that many are defending the concept rather than admitting it's incorrect nature.

[kleiba]

“identity” is pseudoscience and does not exist

I'm going to try that argument with the customs officer next time I travel.

[sedatk]

It's funny that your comment is fading out due to downvotes, as if disappearing from the existence.

It reminded me of Douglas Adams' quote from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: "There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened."

[sumtechguy]

One thing I have found interesting about this concept is lets say I take all the parts and put them back together. Now I have 2 things. Which one is the 'thing'? Clearly both are and are not.

It is a weird quirk of some logic items. They can be both true and false at the same time. Such as things 'this statement is false' which is both true/false at the same time. Is one such example of that. However, sometimes it is clear our test is lacking. With the 'ship' you could say as soon as you switched out anything it was no longer the original thing. What happened to the original thing? Well it went to the same place as when I created it. Which creates its own set of questions.

[ganafagol]

Considering philosohy "pseudoscience" is what's silly.

Without the human mind, there is no meaningful concept of "reality".

[Blikkentrekker]

I made no claim as to the entirety of “philosophy”.

I made a claim as to the dealing in identities and the assumption that they can actually be reasoned about.

They have no definition and it's merely fuzzy human gut feeling what is and isn't a different identity and different men can't always see eye to eye on it either.

One thing I remember well is that I watched a television series as a child that had an magical object that turned everything it touched into gold. It eventually landed on a ship, and the ship turned to gold, and sank.

It defied my intuition, from where I sat only the plank on which it fell should be turned to gold, not the entire ship, for if the entire ship did, apparently it's power could transfer simply to objects pressed close enough to that which it touched, and that was inconsistent with past portrayal.

Clearly however the ship as an entire identity satisfied the intuition of the script writers, but my intuition felt that the plank was a single identity, not the ship.

There are no definitions and rigor here — it is simply every man's individual intuition.

[danbruc]

You are using identity yourself all the time. You just mentioned philosophy, this TV series, gold, that ship and that plank, and on close inspection there would probably be a thousand more cases in your last post where you relied on identity.

Identity is one of the most fundamental concepts, without it you would have a hard time splitting the universe into more than one distinct piece in order to reference and talk about them. You can only refer to this TV series because it is an entity with identity, equal to itself and not equal to any other thing in the universe.

And yes, it is a very hard problem, as Theseus illustrates one can not simply define identity using the atoms or some other kind of parts something is made of in the general case to define identity. But that just shows the difficulty of the problem, not that identity is a useless idea.

I am not a philosopher but it seems to me that without a notion of identity or equality you can not have more than one distinct thing. Well, probably someone has spend his entire life thinking about that, so maybe there are alternatives to identity and equality?

[osullivj]

Quine: "no entity without identity" & "to be is to be the value of a bound variable". IMHO the neatest summation of a rigorous approach to the interface between mathmatical logic and ontology. That's why "Quine is our hero", as one of my lecturers back in the 80s, Jeremy Butterfield, used to say.

[Blikkentrekker]

> You are using identity yourself all the time. You just mentioned philosophy, this TV series, gold, that ship and that plank, and on close inspection there would probably be a thousand more cases in your last post where you relied on identity.

And none of those are scientific inquiries where I proffer rigorous methodology.

> Identity is one of the most fundamental concepts, without it you would have a hard time splitting the universe into more than one distinct piece in order to reference and talk about them. You can only refer to this TV series because it is an entity with identity, equal to itself and not equal to any other thing in the universe.

Yet various exact scientific inquiries work very well without assuming it's existence or that there be a difference between same and different identity.

> And yes, it is a very hard problem, as Theseus illustrates one can not simply define identity using the atoms or some other kind of parts something is made of in the general case to define identity. But that just shows the difficulty of the problem, not that identity is a useless idea.

It is a very simple problem. The answer is: “identity is a pseudoscientific concept that is “not even wrong”.”.

It is so vague, so bereft of any definition that the claim of whether that two references share the same identity is “not even wrong”.

> I am not a philosopher but it seems to me that without an notion of identity or equality you can not have more than one distinct thing. Well, probably someone has spend his entire life thinking about that, so maybe there are alternatives to identity and equality?

And that is why the various models of exact sciences typically to not require that such arbitrary lines be drawn of what is and isn't a different “thing”.

[danbruc]

And none of those are scientific inquiries where I proffer rigorous methodology.

But it obviously works, I did not confuse the ship and the plank or you and the TV series, which tells us that identity is a useful concept we can use to navigate the world. The fact, that it may be hard to formalize the concept and deal with all the edge cases, does not change that.

Yet various exact scientific inquiries work very well without assuming it's existence or that there be a difference between same and different identity.

Can you provide any example?

It is a very simple problem. The answer is: “identity is a pseudoscientific concept that is “not even wrong”.”.

It is so vague, so bereft of any definition that the claim of whether that two references share the same identity is “not even wrong”.

I am pretty sure people doing homotopy type theory [1] would disagree. And I am just picking this because it has gotten quite a bit of attention in recent years but people have put a lot of work into thinking about identity and equality over the centuries.

And that is why the various models of exact sciences typically to not require that such arbitrary lines be drawn of what is and isn't a different “thing”.

Same as above, I would like to hear an example.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homotopy_type_theory

[falcor84]

Being man-made doesn't make identity any less real. As a particular example, there's a big semantic difference in Python between `foo is bar` and `foo == bar`, with the former based on the interpreter's memory allocation and the latter allowing a custom class to decide its own answer. And the former is actually really implementation-dependent, with the following being True in cpython for any integer in the range [-5, 256]:

`a = 257; b = a*1; a is b`

[globular-toast]

Why is it silly to think about things that are man-made? You've clearly thought about it, otherwise you wouldn't have been able to write your comment.