I’ve been talking to people about the ship of Theseus and the transporter problem and the subject of what makes something distinct. Are there any good sources accessible to a non-philosophy person that talk about this issue? Preferably not from a religious lens but I’m open to whatever fits best.
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I’m not a philosopher – rather I’m a programmer – so this might come across as a bit odd, but this essay on state in Clojure was something I found helpful.
If you take nothing else away from it, try to hang on to this way of thinking about identity:
By identity I mean a stable logical entity associated with a series of different values over time.
An additional insight I derived from programming is that people often equivocate on the meaning of “the same”. There is not just a single, inherently correct way to determine if two things are “equal”. There are actually a lot of different ways to implement an equality check, and multiple different methods of checking can seem natural in a situation – even though they return incompatible answers. The Ship of Theseus is an example of such a mismatch in different methods of checking equality.
Thanks! I have some programming experience so I’m looking forward to that.
Ohh identity over time is a fun topic. lots of content. I recommend reading through the stanford encyclopedia page (which is written in reasonably plain english) on the topic. That way you can narrow down which versions of the question you’re most curious about and then drill into the ones you’re most interested in.
Personally I think we have to accept essences in some form
Thanks! That sounds like a great starting point.
