# Ship of Theseus

## Concept

-- Updating...

-- Am I still me?

## Ship of Theseus

It is a myth/thought experiment about a ship. The ship is changed part after part over time. At some point, nothing from the original ship is left. So, is it the same ship?

Modern idea to spice up things : You keep the ship's parts you removed. And you build a new ship. Which one is the Ship of Theseus, if any?

There are theories about it. The ship may be an entity that is distinct from its parts, the parts and the ship only occupying the same space. Or spacetime. If the ship is defined at a point in time and space, there is not one ship, but an infinity of spacetime ships.

And it's real. Some bridges have been dismantled and reconstructed in other places. Most of the time they keep the name of the bridge. You could have a Manhattan bridge in L.A., possibly. Or could you, really?

Because that's all bullshit, to me. Ships do not exist in a vacuum. They are defined externally. Humans build them, sail them, name them, repair them. There is no objective "ship", a universal definition across time and space. There is a shallow definition made by and for human in dictionaries : A vessel of considerable size for deep-water navigation. And other in laws. It is contextual, semantic and external.

Because this thing is... a thing. It is in the eye of the beholder. That's why the next topic takes another dimension.

I installed my Debian 15 years ago. It survived disks, CPUs, GPUs, motherboards, dist-upgrades. There even is a copy running elsewhere. It now sits on NVME raid. Technically, there is barely a byte in common. But is still the same Debian. It is **my** Debian : I installed it 15 years ago.

## The mind

The mind is largely an internal state. And quite early on, it has been understood that brain injury may lead to severe changes. Legally, we are fine, the person keeps the same identity. Seems fair. But mentally, if there is a before and an after, which one is the real self?

Quite easily, we can say both. In our framework of reference that I would not be shy and call out : the soul. This is this higher-level, permanent entity that makes any change on what is basically meat almost irrelevant.

And I will tell you, I can't guarantee we have a soul.

But Cyberpunk literature works on a level that is materialistic and spiritual. It is not a ship, but there is no guarantee of permanent backup outside the system.

## The cybermind

Cyberpunk is a lot about : how much can you change and stay yourself... or even human.
The related questions become : how much can you change it and get away with it?
If the owner of the mind, a corporation or individual, changes, isn't it a change on a core feature that is agency? Even if the mind does not change?

And so Cyberpunk goes in all direction. What if copied in a machine? A ghost in the shell. What if... it always was a machine. What if improved, like the S.F. book Flowers for Algernon?

Would you even change parts of your body, your interface to this world, your interaction, most of what you feel be through a component? What if your eyes are sold and you buy cheap black & white eyes? It would literally change your vision of the world!

## The local mind

You have changed. I mean reading this page. Not massively so. But demonstrably so. See, the mind, or the brain, is not read-only. It is not as if you can read a page and your mind gets away unaltered. Synapses, wires, there is change. Associations are made, not like a database, something more like a potential that the future will rewrite and activate or not. If the change reading this page was a percent, it would be zero, for all purposes. Almost.

Now, imagine you are doom scrolling 3 hours a day. That music is not what you want to listen to, but what does not make you stop listening, what fits in a compilation, more the music that won't bother you rather than the album of the day. Let's say you in fact do that most of the day. For music, movie, video, everything comes and at best given 5 choices you click on one, or swipe. Everything you like and want to do becomes dull and continuous. Your engagement is measured as disengagement from your own life. Engagement enforced by destroying your attention span.

Well, I can ask you...

### How much is left of you?