Isn’t the human body exactly that
I’m pretty sure I’m not my 10 year old self. Even though i have since off their memories
this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2026
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Apart from specific non-proliferating cells, statistically all of your entire body's cells will have been completely replaced every 7 years*.
So we're all exactly like that... just over such a long period of time we don't notice it.
*For the quickest proliferating cells in your body, like your skin cells, this is a matter of just weeks.
iirc nerve cells basically live forever. So I'm the end, you'll completely regenerate, except for your nerve cells
Yeah but those cells still have proteins making new parts.
And new neurons are being made all the time, just more slowly and in specific places that then migrate to where they're needed, so as not to disrupt too much of the neural mesh (and thus completely derail memories or other models).
Some of the atoms/molecules in your body have probably already cycled through the entire food web and come back to you ... probably multiple times, especially if you don't move around a lot and you eat locally produced food.
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Pretty much, yeah. Though the amount of self-awareness varies wildly.
With consciousness not being fully understood it's possible you're a different person every time you wake up or just randomly between thoughts or maybe you're everyone and you just quickly round robin context switch or maybe you don't have a consciousness and I'm the only one who has one?
Put the weed down /s
Or at least post the strain
living beings isnt a matter thing, and more of a wave of matter that propagates by getting more matter and shedding old one.
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You already are a ship of theseus that is sentient. Every cell in your body is replaced around every 7-12 years.
And we are fully dependent on things like bacteria too. Some of which affects us through the gut-brain pathway.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and oddly enough I feel profoundly different every decade or so. Wouldn't almost recognize my younger self.
I'm not even convinced I wake up the same me that fell asleep.
Except the ones in your brain, they're very rarely if ever replaced. And I think most people would agree that your brain is the most important part of your body for your identity
I think the 'point' of the ship of thesius is often missed. Grouping things together to be one entity is thought process done in our brains for ease of understanding, but it doesn't exist in the real world.
I think the ship of thesius thought experiment is there to show that there are times where things can't be distinctly grouped. When things don't fit nicely into groups we shouldn't force them, but abandon the that grouping as it isn't applicable to the situation.
There are 3 types of continuity.
- Continuity of material
- Continuity of identity
- Continuity of memory
Teleport me, and I can continuity of identity and memory. The same applies slower to material replacement.
(Mind) Clone me and I have continuity of memory only. I would consider this me me, but close enough to count, unless the original was still in play.
Wipe my memory and I have continuity of identity and material. Legally it's still me, but I would consider the disconnect the loss of myself.
Basically, I want continuity of memory and identity, but only memory is critical to it. Thomas has his memories intact, and has continuity of identity. He's definitely still Thomas.
Body swap would be continuity of memory, but not identity or material.
It depends if the swapped mind considered themselves me or not (clone's brain?). If not then perceived identity would follow the mind, even if the legal identity didn't.
If it were a clone's mind, we would have to come to some sort of understanding on the subject.
It can quickly get convoluted. E.g. if I became a digital identity, would I be willing to split off versions of myself for particular tasks, only to absorb them later. Conversely, could I function as such an entity? How long would I need to diverge before I became a truly separate entity in my own mind?
The book "Accelerando", by Charles Stross plays with this. He refers to them as eigen-minds. A collection of minds overlapping within a single identity. How liable is a diverged eigen-mind from its alternates, when it comes to contracts and debts?
Cloning is just making a new person with your DNA, it's not continuity of any of those
Hence why I put "mind" in brackets. I was more referring to Hollywood style "cloning" variants.
I'd argue that identity and memory are the same thing. Like if you lose your memory, your identity becomes as strange as anyone else's. Or if you're a copy of someone else, you won't know it unless you were told and would think you're just that person when you wake up. Like if there was a transporter malfunction where it didn't destroy the original copy. You'd have one copy at the original site thinking the transport just didn't work and another one at the destination going about their life while Harry wonders how to tell Janeway.
Identity is as much a social structure as a personal one. E.g. in star trek, when Will riker is duplicated. Both have continuity of memory, but Thomas has his continuity of identity broken. Though he doesn't realise this until he meets his eigen twin, who's been continuing on. Even though both are nominally identical at the moment of creation, Will's continuation of his career maintained continuity of identity. Thomas Riker had his broken by being stranded. Hence why Thomas changed his name, while Will continued using Will.
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If they made a spare of each of Thomas's parts, replaced them one at a time, and then reassembled all his original parts, would there be two Thomases with all his thoughts and memories?
Why not just assemble all of Thomas' spare parts immediately, without dismantling the original? Same end result, should be indistinguishable.
So with a human, if you could make all the parts and assemble them, it wouldn't result in the result having all the memories because the brain part doesn't work that way - it stores memories and experiences that the fresh parts wouldn't have. We know Thomas is sentient, but as far as we've seen, all his parts are just train parts (maybe face notwithstanding); we have never seen that there's a brain part.
So I'm going to postulate that there's some essence of Thomas that persists through the part swaps. What's unclear is whether or not those individual pieces that are swapped out retain the essence of Thomas and would be recreated if they were reassembled.
it stores memories and experiences that the fresh parts wouldn’t have
What if we place the human fresh parts in the exact molecular state, that the original is in ? If my understanding is correct, our memories are somehow encoded with whatever chemical biology is happening in the brain, and if we suppose we can imitate those chemical states with the fresh parts, shouldn't we get the same memories/consciousness ?
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I mean, ideally the repair would fail and you'd have two dead trains. Anything else is vaguely sickening
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I read a whole lot of Oz books back when I was growing up (there's tons of them), and the Tin Man is an example of this. Nobody dies in Oz (don't ask me about the movie), which can lead to some pretty horrible situations. The Tin Man was a regular guy and a lumberjack. One day he gets cursed by someone and he lops off his foot. He can't find it and he gets a tin prosthetic. He then lops off the other foot. And then his legs, his arms, and his torso. He gets tin prosthetics for all of them. Then he lops off his head and gets a tin replacement for that, too.
The reason he never found his body parts is because someone else was collecting them. I think it was a witch? And she would assemble the parts with Meat Glue, which repaired them. And eventually she got his head, which she placed onto his intact body and he lived again, whole and hearty. And then there were 2 people who shared the same memories, the same identity, where there was once one. Oz books were full of body horror.
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That whole universe is horrifying. Remember when they closed off that one guy behind a brick wall because he wouldn't work hard enough?
It's worse than that - he wasn't being lazy, he was convinced that if he came out of the tunnel, the rain would ruin his paint. Even after it stopped raining, he still wouldn't come out just in case it started raining again.
Basically he had a mental illness, and his punishment was to be bricked up and forced to watch the other trains going past. One is friendly, one says it serves him right. Because he has no steam, he's unable to communicate. And all the time his paint is slowly getting ruined anyway because he's stuck in the tunnel.
As someone who's had a breakdown, it really resonates in a different way than it did when I was a kid.
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Cyberpunk addresses this with cyberpsychosis. If you get too chromed up you lose too much of your humanity and develop a dissociative disorder.
Unless your name is V
V kills more than any cyberpscho they encounter.
True
just have to believe we are all more than the sum of our parts
Time to add that to my kids' bookcase next to The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant.
I have replaced nearly every cell from the time of my deepest regrets. There is a certain gratification to it. I'm still me though. I am transitory, a wave passing by, shaped by the past.
Every day you get the chance to be a new and better person.
Or maybe - just maybe - we're more than the sum of our parts.
He's more machine now than man; twisted and evil.
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