same man?

[scientistdukebastard]

Christopher M. Brown, Aquinas and the Ship of Theseus:

Imagine a ship, whose sole function is to make a yearly voyage to a neighbouring country in order to honour a heroic deed from the past. The ship in question is composed of wooden planks, and her shape might be described as very distinctive. After a few years of making her yearly voyage, the ship's planks begin to weather. The crew decides that henceforward, before the ship sets sail each year, they will replace the weathered planks of the ship with new ones. Eventually, all of the planks of the original ship are replaced.

Now someone (say her name is Merry) collects the planks that are disposed of from the original ship each year, until some years later, Merry has collected all of the planks from the original ship. Furthermore, Merry decides to put the planks she has collected together in her back yard, giving those planks the same distinctive configuration they had when they composed the original ship at the time of her first voyages.

Given the information in this story, someone might well wonder which ship is numerically identical to the original ship. Is it the continuous ship, which continues to make the yearly voyage to the neighbouring country and whose spatio-temporal history is continuous with that of the original ship, or is it the reconstructed ship, which is composed of the same set of planks as the original ship? Indeed, they cannot both be numerically identical to the original ship, since the continuous ship is out to sea, and the reconstructed ship resides in Merry's (very dry) back yard!

Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See:

I remembered once, in Japan, having been to see the Gold Pavilion Temple in Kyoto and being mildly surprised at quite how well it had weathered the passage of time since it was first built in the fourteenth century. I was told it hadn't weathered well at all, and had in fact been burnt to the ground twice in this century.

"So it isn't the original building?" I had asked my Japanese guide.

"But yes, of course it is," he insisted, rather surprised at my question.

"But it's been burnt down?"

"Yes."

"Twice?"

"Many times."

"And rebuilt."

"Of course. It is an important and historic building."

"With completely new materials."

"But of course. It was burnt down."

"So how can it be the same building?"

"It is always the same building."

I had to admit to myself that this was in fact a perfectly rational point of view, it merely started from an unexpected premise. The idea of the building, the intention of it, its design, are all immutable and are the essence of the building. The intention of the original builders is what survived. The wood of which the design is constructed decays and is replaced when necessary. To be overly concerned with the original materials, which are merely sentimental souvenirs of the past, is to fail to see the living building itself.

David Wong, John Dies At the End:

Solving the following riddle will reveal the awful secret behind the universe, assuming you do not go utterly mad in the attempt. If you already happen to know the awful secret behind the universe, feel free to skip ahead.

Let's say you have an ax. Just a cheap one, from Home Depot. On one bitter winter day, you use said ax to behead a man. Don't worry, the man was already dead. Or maybe you should worry, because you're the one who shot him.

He had been a big, twitchy guy with veiny skin stretched over swollen biceps, a tattoo of a swastika on his tongue. Teeth filed into razor-sharp fangs, you know the type. And you're chopping off his head because, even with eight bullet holes in him, you're pretty sure he's about to spring back to his feet and eat the look of terror right off your face.

On the follow-through of the last swing, though, the handle of the ax snaps in a spray of splinters. You now have a broken ax. So, after a long night of looking for a place to dump the man and his head, you take a trip into town with your ax. You go to the hardware store, explaining away the dark reddish stains on the broken handle as barbecue sauce. You walk out with a brand new handle for your ax.

The repaired ax sits undisturbed in your garage until the next spring when, on one rainy morning, you find in your kitchen a creature that appears to be a foot-long slug with a bulging egg sac on its tail. Its jaws bite one of your forks in half with what seems like very little effort. You grab your trusty ax and chop the thing into several pieces. On the last blow, however, the ax strikes a metal leg of the overturned kitchen table and chips out a notch right in the middle of the blade.

Of course, a chipped head means yet another trip to the hardware store. They sell you a brand new head for your ax. As soon as you get home with your newly-headed ax, though, you meet the reanimated body of the guy you beheaded last year. He's also got a new head, stitched on with what looks like plastic weed trimmer line, and it's wearing that unique expression of "you're the man who killed me last winter" resentment that one so rarely encounters in everyday life.

You brandish your ax. The guy takes a long look at the weapon with his squishy, rotting eyes and in a gargly voice he screams, "That's the same ax that slayed me!"

Is he right?