Are You The Ship of Theseus?
If you’re familiar with thought experiments stemming from Western Philosophy regarding the metaphysics of identity or Marvel’s WandaVision, (weird sentence) then you might be familiar with the Ship of Theseus.
In its simplest terms, this thought experiment questions whether an item is still the same item once all of its parts have been replaced. In this example, if the ship has all its pieces replaced over the course of several years is it still the same ship as when it started? Some of you might say “yea duh”, some might say “hmm no”, others might say “who cares it’s a fictional ship.”
To that last one, I say, “good point” but what if we’re no longer talking about the ship? What if instead of the ship of Theseus we’re talking about- you?
How much of you physically or mentally has to change before you are no longer… you?
“WHO ARE YOU?!”
Think back to who you were ten years ago, five years ago, even just right before the pandemic, how have you changed in that time? Would the “you” from back then like the current you? Is that “you” even still the same you?
Ch-Ch-Changes
Since we’re thinking retrospectively let’s look introspectively at our bodies. In 2005 researcher Jonas Frisen published a paper entitled “Cell” which led to a common myth that the cells in our body replace themselves every seven years.
Fortunately, that’s not exactly true. Frisen actually stated the cells in your body replace themselves on average every 7-10 years with many at varying rates and some never do in your entire lifetime. I call those the ride-or-die cells… literally.
Think back to a meal you had ten days ago chances are your stomach would have no idea it ever happened, and even your taste buds would wonder what the hell you’re talking about. Within 10 days both the cells in your stomach and taste buds are effectively new. But if that meal created new fat cells, they’re going to hang around your waist for about 8-10 years because our bodies hate us and life isn’t fair.
And they’re not the only ones that hang out for a while, your skeleton effectively replaces its cells over the course of a decade, every decade. Your skeletal muscle cells replace themselves on average about every 15 years but the upper layers of your skin replace their cells about every 40 days.
The Sum of Our Parts
So the question becomes, if most of our cells are leaving us how much of them do we have to lose permanently before we no longer feel like- us?
Well, that’s an interesting question since we have people who have lost body parts and now have prosthetics. Many have reported feeling whole while others have a type of detachment because they’re unable to feel with that prosthetic limb. Yet, there are also people who suffer from Body Integrity Dysmorphia (BID).
Sufferers of BID have all their limbs but feel like one of their limbs doesn’t belong. Some even have the urge to amputate that limb while other sufferers feel like their limb is already gone. It’s as if you wake up one morning and you feel like your own hand isn’t yours.
But where are you feeling it? Where does “feeling” come from?
If you said your heart, well then, bless your heart. The sensation of feeling something starts at touch receptors in your skin then travels along your sensory nerves to the neurons in your spinal cord and then makes its way to the front door of your brain. It’s a bit more complicated than that but you get the point, just like your actual brain.
That small piece of meat controls all the physical and nonphysical mental cognitions like ideas and opinions that you have. So are you, just a brain physically connected to mostly interchangeable parts but with a non-physical consciousness full of ideas, thoughts, and memories- well now wait a second.
The Unreliable Reliability of Memories
What if you lost all your memories, could you still call yourself you?
Let’s pretend a man named John has been in an accident and when he wakes up he now has amnesia. He has all his body parts, and no exterior damage, but is he still John? Sure, his license, birth certificate, and family may know him as John but would he know himself as John? Would you still be you if you woke up tomorrow with no memories? What if you only remembered half your memories?
The funny thing is, that’s already the case.
Our memories are notoriously bad, some of you probably couldn’t recall that meal from ten days ago that I asked you to recall just a few minutes ago. Some of you probably don’t remember me asking you to recall that meal a few minutes ago. Extrapolate that for your entire lifetime. Chances are you would remember less than fifty percent of your life and that’s a good thing.
“Honestly I don’t remember clicking on this article- wait why am I outside?”
Those who can remember large portions of their lives have a rare condition called hyperthymesia with only about 60 confirmed people in the world living with it. And some of them don’t consider it a gift like Jill Price, who called her memory, “non-stop, uncontrollable and totally exhausting”. Imagine having to remember and relive every bad or hurtful event in your life, it’s not fun.
Because it’s such a big topic, we’ll get into different memory types in a future article but most of the memories you’re able to recall are either recent or still exist because of important events or sentimental value. But even then our memories are highly influenced by various factors.
Renowned Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus has dedicated her life to studying memory, and in the early 1990s along with her graduate student James Coan, they discovered it was possible to implant false memories into some people.
So if you can replace cells, lose body parts, and forget memories, maybe we’re meant to be a constantly changing sum of all our parts based on our experiences, and in the end, that’s what makes us- us. As long as you can keep most of your brain intact you’ll always be you… which raises some serious questions about teleportation in the future if we ever get there.
But that’s a long way out unless Jeffrey Bezos decides he wants to invest billions into teleportation technology instead of playing pretend astronaut with the other billionaires…
