Question of Identity

A ship called Mutiny has its planks and other pieces replaced slowly, one-by-one, over decades.

The parts are not thrown away, but stored on land in a warehouse.

Eventually, the warehouse has enough pieces to construct a full ship.

The Mutiny wrecks on an island, but miraculously all the ship's parts wash ashore.

The owner of the ship orders the people at the warehouse to construct the pieces into the ship, not knowing the fate of his wrecked crew.

At the same time, the wrecked crew of Mutiny rebuilds the ship as the people of the warehouse construct the same ship, with the same exact schematic.

They each finish their ship at the same time.

Which one is the original Mutiny?

Imagine you ended your story earlier than you did.

After half of the parts of the original Mutiny have been replaced:
* The new parts are part of the Mutiny.
* The parts in the warehouse are no longer part of the Mutiny.

Immediately prior to the shipwreck
* the Mutiny is at sea, not in a warehouse.
* the original Mutiny is a thing of the past, due to extensive modification.

Therefore, after both shops are rebuilt:
* The Mutiny is the ship rebuilt from the shipwrecked parts.
* The ship rebuilt from the parts formerly of the original Mutiny is not the Mutiny.
* Neither is the original Mutiny.

The problem of the ship of Theseus (which you call Mutiny I guess) assumes one assumption that I don't think is true, which is that the concept of the ship being original or distinct is meaningful. Imagine another case, I have a ball, and you have a ball, and the balls are indistinguishable from each other. We both throw our balls around with each other, and after sometime we both want to take our balls and go home, but we can't tell the difference between them, there is no my ball and your ball, just two identical balls. It's the same answer with the ship, there's no original ship, and no copy, just two ships, the distinction isn't meaningful.

The answer is already provided.

"

bwam wrote:

A ship called Mutiny has its planks and other pieces replaced slowly, one-by-one, over decades.

The parts ...

You have defined these as "parts."

"

The Mutiny wrecks on an island..

You have defined this as "The Mutiny."

"Original" is meaningless.

The Mutiny is the ship that the survivors constructed.

Names are important.

"

ScrotieMcB wrote:

* Neither is the original Mutiny.

Correct.

Now if the ship called Mutiny had never wrecked, but the warehouse had still constructed an identical ship... using this logic, we know that the ship at sea, called Mutiny, is the real one.

"Identity is continuous" is the takeaway....

"

j33bus wrote:

The problem of the ship of Theseus (which you call Mutiny I guess) assumes one assumption that I don't think is true, which is that the concept of the ship being original or distinct is meaningful. Imagine another case, I have a ball, and you have a ball, and the balls are indistinguishable from each other. We both throw our balls around with each other, and after sometime we both want to take our balls and go home, but we can't tell the difference between them, there is no my ball and your ball, just two identical balls. It's the same answer with the ship, there's no original ship, and no copy, just two ships, the distinction isn't meaningful.

Ahh, that's what the original name was. I made-up a new one, not remembering the original version of the story. :)

I def disagree that being the "original" or being "distinct" is meaningless, tho.

Whichever one scuttles the other.

"

Morkonan wrote:

The answer is already provided.

"

bwam wrote:

A ship called Mutiny has its planks and other pieces replaced slowly, one-by-one, over decades.

The parts ...

You have defined these as "parts."

"

The Mutiny wrecks on an island..

You have defined this as "The Mutiny."

"Original" is meaningless.

The Mutiny is the ship that the survivors constructed.

Names are important.

The pedantic linguistic play isn't the point, but rather the information being relayed, and the question being asked.

The sailors would continue to call the ship they were sailing on "Mutiny," so calling it such would be fine. And any warehouse worker would reasonably refer to the ship pieces as just that: parts ("pieces") of the ship.

Neither. The name was already taken and unavailable.

One will be "The_Real_Mutiny" and the other "xXx_Mutiny69_xXx".