Plank by Plank

Existence and identity are deep topics. One is reminded of Descartes’ immortal declaration of “I think, therefore I am.” In a way, that’s where we are headed in this chapter. The concept of personal identity makes you confront how you choose to define it, and also forces you to think about how you choose to define yourself.

We start with the thought experiment of Theseus’ Ship, which asks you to evaluate at which point a ship is still that same ship if you continually remove its components, and even more so if you remove the components and then replace them with entirely different ones. So it forces you to consider what you use to construct an identity. Is it just the individual components? Is there something about a ship that can be more than the sum of its parts? And what about us—what makes us a particular person, and if removed from our physical body, what would we then become?

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