Ramble #6: Ship of Theseus, abortion, the same river, and identity

“In the metaphysics of identity, the ship of Theseus* is a thought experiment that raises the question of whether an object that has had all of its components replaced remains fundamentally the same object” (Wikipedia). If, over the years or centuries, all the parts of Theseus’s ship have been replaced, can it remain the same ship? Many deep thinkers (including Heraclitus, Plato, Hobbes, Locke and Noam Chomsky) have conceived their own very different answers to this “paradox.”

My best idea is that we, humans, have a need and conceit about identity. We feel the ship is itself even if it’s blown apart and half of it is replaced. But at sixty, seventy, eighty percent replaced, we’d fear that its identity, its “spirit” if you will, would be extinguishing. I’ll bet that we more sensitive folks might mourn its disappearance and extinction.

But a person – wouldn’t we always see him as himself if everything were replaced but his brain? We’d see that soul, or heart, or I, or we’d cleave to his own sense of being himself, and that would be all we’d need to know it was he.

Consider, though, that a person’s sense of self-identity consists of his own desire to see his changeable thoughts and transient feelings as unified or coherent in some manner. Without the glue of that desire, which could be called ego, doesn’t the paper bag containing Self get wet, weak and somewhat fall apart?

Isn’t the flowing river never the same but a name, never itself, while the riverbed holds onto its identity a little longer?

When I take my walk at night, I may have the oddest awareness: My identity is primarily amorphous and largely insubstantial. I have never not wanted to be alive, but I’m aware that I’m limited by my history to a narrower range of emotions and a scant capacity for ideas. Weightier would be my bounty of felt-sense nuance, the body’s probably countless hues of feeling. This really helps me in my therapies.

If we were insular persons, if our minds had never been imprinted with consensus and lessons from our history, there would be no morality but the sense of love and care on a sub-molecular continuum. Some of us would love the lives of all strangers, some would care only about their neighbors, others about their families or spouse, others only about themselves. Some about no one. Many women would think: “There is a precious human being in me,” five hours or fifty days after conception. As many or more would not. Identity would be in the eye of the beholder, reified according to the infinite gradations of heart.

This wouldn’t eliminate problems: Because those who love and care less would not leave these women alone. Those of moral death would legislate their bodies.

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* Thanks to my highly alert and smart teen client who regaled me with this ancient thought experiment that, in all my sixty-seven years up to that session, I had never learned of.