Take the ancient wooden ship sailing on the seas. The planks of it do eventually rot and so the sailors replace them one by one. Eventually, they replace every piece of wood. Is the ship the same ship then? And if another person gathered the old planks taken off this ship and built a new ship from them, then which one would be the “original” Ship of Theseus?
This centuries-old brain teaser has tormented thinkers for centuries, and it’s not just about ships. It’s us. Our body, our mind, our self keep changing. Cells of our body die and regenerate. Our thoughts change, our personality changes, our memories forget or get clearer. So the question then inevitably arises: are we the same person if every part of us changes?
One of the solutions to this is the concept of continuity. The ship continues to exist not because its planks are original but because it enjoys a continuous history. You can continue to be yourself because there’s an uninterrupted thread from your childhood self to your present self even if practically everything about you isn’t precisely the same. This fallacy assumes that identity is not established in terms of material sameness but in terms of a continuous narrative.
But suppose a new boat was built out of the old one? That form has the same stuff, but no unbroken journey. Transferred to humans, this poses a scary question: if continuity or memory is cut off—i.e., by amnesia—are we the same person, or another person in the same body?
A second answer to the question is functional. You are a ship when you travel over the sea, carry people, and span the waters. Identity here depends not on parts but function. You remain “you” because you operate in the world as you are, making choices, forming relationships, and living in a social world. The details vary, but not the function.
But this perspective lacks the intuition that supports it. We all sense a “core self,” something more than continuity or function. But when asked to specify what this core is, it’s hard to do. Is it memory? Is it personality? Is it soul? Or is the self like the ship, an illusion compounded of the story we keep telling about ourselves?
Psychology comes into the picture. Our sense of self is ultimately story-based. We remember bits of our past and build them into a story of what we are. But it’s a censored story, rebuilt, sometimes untrue. Just as the Ship of Theseus paradox forces us to ask what is actually the ship itself, so too does life force us to ask: is identity real, or simply a story we keep in the hope of attaining solidity in an ever-changing cosmos?
Perhaps the Ship of Theseus instructs us that identity is not a matter of material or memory, but of accepting flux. We are not static entities but rivers, always moving, never twice in the same way, and still, nevertheless, one flow identifiable. Change does not annihilate identity; it confirms it.
Are we then the same self if we are wholly transformed? Maybe not in the most literal way. Maybe that’s the wrong kind of thinking. Instead of seeking after this static, unmoving self, maybe identity is the process of becoming again and again. Like the ship, we are both new and old, both what we displaced and what we’re building.