Ship of Theseus Concepts

The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

by Iain McGilchrist · 8 Oct 2012

a heap, how can it ever be that (by, for example, the time 100,000 grains are reached) a heap has come into being? The Ship of Theseus paradox. Plutarch wrote in his life of Theseus: The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned had thirty oars, and was preserved by

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can be found, an ignorance of process, which becomes a never-ending series of static moments: these are signs of left-hemisphere predominance. Or the Ship of Theseus. Here again the problem is caused by a belief that the whole is the sum of the parts, and disappears as the parts are changed

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as still the same temple though they are rebuilt every 20 years: presumably the Japanese would have had no problem answering the paradox of the Ship of Theseus (see p. 138 above), because they naturally see the world as a process rather than a collection of things – like Heraclitus’ river, always changing, but

The Science of Language

by Noam Chomsky · 24 Feb 2012

commonsense intuitions should give answers to every question. There's a long tradition going back to Plato, Heraclitus, Plutarch, and on and on about the ship of Theseus. Over the centuries, people have made up impossible conundrums about when we would say that it is the same ship. A standard thing that you

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call common sense. It has a relation to the world, of course, but it's not the same thing. If these questions – what's the ship of Theseus, what's a person, what's a tree, and so on – if they're re-interpreted as they should be, cognitively, epistemologically rather than metaphysically

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philosophy is [still] Kripkean essentialism – Putnam's version – which is based on questions like is water H2O? Well, it's like your intuitions about the ship of Theseus. You have whatever you have. It's not going to tell you anything about H2O (the stuff described by scientists) any more than talk about

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the ship of Theseus is going to tell you about ships from a physicist's point of view. It's telling you about how you look at and interpret

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, what scientists strive to maintain – in the concepts for objects and events of mathematics and the natural sciences. Chomsky's brief discussion of the traditional Ship of Theseus thought experiment later (pp. 125–6) illustrates this. When Theseus rebuilds his wooden ship by replacing over time one plank and beam after another and

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young born into that social group. Chapter 20 Page 111, On differences between natural language(s) and natural sciences Note that the discussion of the ship of Theseus, of the concept PERSON, of WATER, and the like are within the scope of what Chomsky thinks of as syntax, broadly conceived. They focus on

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–257 adverbial account of 256, 260 configuration by the mind 258 sensory-motor systems 14, 42, 48, 51, 78, 203adaptations of 77 and parameters 54 ship of Theseus 125, 271, 288 simple recurrent networks, Elman 283 simplicity 59–64, 86, 89, 243–246, 265, 281in Chomsky's work 80–85 different notions of

Rope: How a Bundle of Twisted Fibers Became the Backbone of Civilization

by Tim Queeney · 11 Aug 2025 · 264pp · 88,907 words

, who is head of estates and fabric at Canterbury Cathedral, he pointed out that the treadwheel in the tower at Canterbury is something of a ship of Theseus. This is the idea that if a wooden ship is maintained for a long period, it will need various parts replaced as they rot, until

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: Is it the same ship? Philosophers have pondered this question and devised many answers. The USS Constitution in Boston is an American example of a ship of Theseus. It carries the same name as the original 1797 frigate, but all its timbers have been replaced in more than two centuries of maintenance, repairs

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of clipper ships Egyptian galleys Greek iron and steel lashing in leaks in masts of naval stores for Norse Polynesian replacement of parts of, in ship of Theseus idea rigging on Roman sails of silk Simler, Josias Simon, William L. Sixtus V, Pope skipping rope slack-rope performers slavery Smith, Andrew Solomon, Frank

How Will You Measure Your Life?

by Christensen, Clayton M., Dillon, Karen and Allworth, James · 15 May 2012

a wonderful conundrum left to us by the Greeks. It was first put to print by the author Plutarch, and it’s known as the Ship of Theseus. As a tribute to the mythical founder of their city—famed for slaying the Minotaur—the Athenians committed to keeping Theseus’s ship seaworthy in

Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

by Reid Hoffman and Chris Yeh · 14 Apr 2018 · 286pp · 87,401 words

people I hadn’t seen for months. I’ve never seen a building that promoted collaboration and creativity as well as this one.” Build a “Ship of Theseus” The other main lever for cultural development is the organization’s people management practices. After all, the strongest influences on organizational culture are often who

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deck isn’t carved in stone; Netflix continues to revise it on a regular basis. One of the reasons for evolving your culture is the “Ship of Theseus” paradox. The ancient historian Plutarch coined the term in reference to the ship on which the mythical hero Theseus returned to Athens after slaying the

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none of the original wood remained. Plutarch reported that philosophers argued strenuously, and without resolution, over whether the ship of replacement parts was still the Ship of Theseus. (Amusingly, the philosopher Thomas Hobbes complicated matters by asking what would happen if the original wood parts were preserved after being replaced, and were then

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used to build a second ship!) All companies are like the Ship of Theseus. Employees join, stay for one or more tours of duty, and leave, only to be replaced by new employees. A stable, low-growth company might

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too slowly, and it will hold you back from adapting to new businesses and the changing world around you. Evolve it too quickly, and the Ship of Theseus illusion breaks down, and people no longer feel like they belong. In the words of the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, “If we are to preserve

Robot Rules: Regulating Artificial Intelligence

by Jacob Turner · 29 Oct 2018 · 688pp · 147,571 words

AI, boundary issues will arise: when, if ever, might a human lose their protected status? This raises similar problems to the Roman historian Plutarch’s “Ship of Theseus Paradox”:The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned from Crete had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to

The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam

by Douglas Murray · 3 May 2017 · 420pp · 126,194 words

constantly, subtly changing has deep European roots. The philosophers of Ancient Greece understood the conundrum, summing it up most famously in the paradox of the Ship of Theseus. As recorded in Plutarch, the ship in which Theseus had sailed had been preserved by the Athenians who put in new timber when parts of

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the ship decayed. Yet was this not still the ship of Theseus even when it consisted of none of the materials in which he had sailed? We know that the Greeks today are not the same people

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pots that anything and anyone can be endlessly poured in with the results always coming out the same. To return to the analogy of the ship of Theseus, the ship can only be said to remain the ship if it remains recognisable. For that to happen, when the ship needs mending it needs

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here sexual exploitation here, here, here see also rape and sexual assaults Shah, Asad here shallowness, European here, here, here, here Sharia law here, here Ship of Theseus paradox here, here Sicily here, here, here, here, here, here, here Skala Skamnias, Lesbos here slavery here, here Slovakia here, here Slovenia here Smith, Jacqui

What Kind of Creatures Are We? (Columbia Themes in Philosophy)

by Noam Chomsky · 7 Dec 2015

me to pronounce and interpret certain events in the world. In these terms, many classical paradoxes become difficult or impossible to formulate, from Plutarch’s Ship of Theseus to Kripke’s puzzles, all stated in terms of referentialist assumptions. As Norbert Hornstein suggests, we might reframe the observation, taking the problematic features of

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, 100, 102; Newtonian, delay of in supplanting Cartesian physics, 88; Russell on limits of, 100–103. See also chemistry, unification of with physics Plutarch, and Ship of Theseus paradox, 50 Poincaré, Henri, 108 Politics (Aristotle), 79 Popkin, Richard, 89–90 positivists, on collapse of mechanical philosophy, 88 pragmatic approach to inquiry, 53–54

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, 16, 24, 125. See also communication Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of, 126 Shalom, Steven, 72 Shays’s Rebellion, 77 Shelley, Percy B., 73 Ship of Theseus paradox, 50 sign language, structural similarity of to spoken language, x, 13, 14 simplicity principle of scientific method, and computational procedure, xii–xiii, 16–17

The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity

by Byron Reese · 23 Apr 2018 · 294pp · 96,661 words

gets amnesia no longer exists. Perhaps the continuity of your physical form makes you, you. Whenever that possibility is posed, the thought experiment of the ship of Theseus is sailed in. I will give you an abbreviated version: There is a famous ship in a museum. As pieces rot over the centuries, they

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saved in a storeroom and someone pieces them all back together to form a derelict ship of Theseus. What do we say then? There are two ships of Theseus? The point of the whole thing should be obvious: you are a breathing ship of Theseus. Given that your cells replace themselves, you literally aren’t the same matter you

The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI

by Ray Kurzweil · 25 Jun 2024

relates to replacing an object’s parts gradually over time dates back to a thought experiment first posed about 2,500 years ago, called the Ship of Theseus.[43] Ancient Greek philosophers imagined a wooden ship whose planks were slowly replaced with new planks, one by one. It seems quite natural to conclude

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continuously existed with only incremental changes but has no parts from the original? Or the one that was re-formed from the original parts? The Ship of Theseus is a fun thought experiment when it comes to ships or other “dead” objects, but it doesn’t have particularly high stakes. The identity of

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–33, 133, 139, 160 personal identity. See identity pessimism, 120–21 pesticides, 181, 202 petroleum, 59 philosophy of mind hard problem of consciousness, 80–82 Ship of Theseus, 91–92 photovoltaics, 129, 172–73, 175, 181, 214 global installed capacity, 155, 156 module cost per watt, 155 percentage of world electricity, 156 SolarWindow

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Negligible Senescence) Research Foundation, 257 sepsis, 243 sexual reproduction, 95, 271, 334n sex workers, 197, 198, 217 Shakespeare, William, 77, 115 Shaw, J. C., 15 Ship of Theseus, 91–92 shoes, 3D-printed, 184, 186, 208 Shogi, 42 SIMD (single instruction, multiple data), 248–49 Simon, Herbert A., 15 Singer, Peter, 153 single