Ship of Theseus

[t3knomanser]

The Ship of Theseus is one of those old philosophical saws. It came up in conversation the other day, and so I skimmed the Wikipedia article, only to be surprised that none of the sources cited took the same attack to the problem that seemed intuitive to me

Comments

[manycolored]

Makes perfect sense to me. The only thing I'd add is that you talk about the outside observer's object orientedness. I'd say that many things in the universe that do not have the capacity to understand or philosophize are still object-oriented.

For example, take a shipworm, which devours wooden hulls. The wood that it bores into and consumes is really nothing more than a transient, local pattern in the cosmic stuff (just because I can't remember the names of the phenomena, don't assume I'm going mystical on ya!)

But that pattern being wood (and a particular kind and condition of wood) is essential to the shipworm's getting its home and dinner. The shipworm doesn't conceptualize ships or woodenness, but neither does its lack of concepts render it capable of making do with some other arrangement of subatomic bits and bobs.

Maybe that's just a matter of scale. Shipworms and ships are on the same scale (things big enough and slow enough that Newtonian physics is reasonably accurate at making predictions) so they are "real" objects to each other, and the four dimensional model has a certain utility for describing them.

[t3knomanser]

A shipworm is a cognitive entity, albeit one with very different capacity from a human. Whether or not it's actually building an object oriented model of its environment is something I don't think we could really discuss without a serious investigation into termite intelligence. But it is definitely a modeling entity. Just like a human builds a model of the outside world, a shipworm has the capacity to build an internal model of the outside world. The vocabulary is certainly different, and so are the priorities.

I'd argue that it probably isn't object oriented, as much as a reactive system, aware of organizing events and inputs in terms of preferences. If you think about it, a shipworm's experience on Theseus's ship is one of an environment where the food supply is constantly replenished. The board it was eating yesterday is replaced by a new one. One day, the board it's sleeping in is replaced, and used for firewood, and the shipworm's world ends. The discussion of, "is this the same ship" is utterly without meaning to an intelligence focused on being a shipworm.

But I do agree, that being able to build an object model of the world and being able to philosophize are two very different things.