The Theseus 101. #rant #teacher #philosophy #education #Unlearn16

Added: 2026-06-03

[00:00:00]Hey, how you doing? It's time you learned about the ship of Theseus. I'm going to go get the board, you put on your philosopher hat, you know, the cool one with the brim to the side.

[00:00:09]No, you got to take off the red hat. No philosophers wear red hats.

[00:00:14]Yeah, so I'm learning how to be a theory of knowledge teacher for the IB course.

[00:00:19]So, if I have to do the learning, you know, the reality, you have to do the learning with me. Let's go. The ship of Theseus.

[00:00:27]No, we're not going to fight about the Odyssey in this video. The ship of Theseus is an ancient philosophical thought experiment. Here's the question.

[00:00:38]Is an object still the same object if all of its pieces have been replaced? I know, it's a hard question. I think you guys are ready for the top caliber learning here, right? So, get it in gear. Let's see what you got. Of course, I'm going to lead you through the thought experiment. I'm just going to like dangle you out there and let you learn it all by yourself. We're going to begin with the fundamental paradox put forward by the philosopher Plutarch.

[00:01:11]I was so focused on saying Plutarch right, now I don't even know if I said it right, but I forgot the L in Plutarch. So, please, while you're going on, understand that I watched the entire video, I saw I missed the L, I came back to correct it, but I'm not going to redo the whole video. So, just put an L in there in your notes. I'd hate for your notes to be spelled wrong.

[00:01:28]Let's start with the process.

[00:01:31]You got the good pens for this lesson.

[00:01:34]Here we go. Over centuries, the ship, the wooden ship, the planks began to decay. And as time progressed, they started replacing each of the decaying planks individually. When I was a kid in Canada in high school, they made us read Farley Mowat's The Boat Who Wouldn't Float.

[00:01:56]That's not the point of this Tik Tok, but nonetheless the boat thing reminded me of it. Now the question.

[00:02:03]If at the end of replacing all of the planks, every single component has been swiped out, is this boat still the Theseus?

[00:02:15]Or is it something new all together? At the end of the lesson, we have more philosophers to contend with. One of my favorite philosophers, Thomas Hobbes, added his own twist to the scenario to make it a little more interesting.

[00:02:30]You're ready for this? What if as the pieces were discarded, another individual picked them up and built an entirely new ship with them?

[00:02:44]So the reconstructed ship, now is built by all of the old parts of the Theseus, is this the Theseus or is the new ship the Theseus?

[00:02:54]Is it the physical or is it the essence of the ship?

[00:02:58]Remember when Joey took all the couch couch cushions and Chandler yells, "You took my essence!" To push this question even further, we're going to have some real-world application. Are you ready for your mind to blow? Number one, human biology.

[00:03:13]Because all of your cells regenerate over time, in fact I think every 7 years you're a completely new person, are you still the same person? Is your essence the same or have you become something new? Number two, and it's going to get messy, technology and AI. This is where I put in a plug for Battlestar Galactica, just saying. If you replace the hard drive, the motherboard, and the screen of your computer, is it still the same computer or a completely new device? Number three, organizations and the law. If a company replaces its full staff and product line, is it the same business entity?

[00:03:52]The question of essence matters. And just to wrap all of this up, the Wikipedia page pertaining to the ship of Theseus has been edited over 1,700 times to the point where there is zero original text that was initially a part of this summary and exists today. So, it's the modern embodiment of the exact same philosophical principle. Did your head explode? Mine did.