This is quite an
interesting case presented by my
Minds and Machines professor.
A
man named
Theseus owns a relatively old
boat and feels he should
fix it up.
Theseus hires a
carpenter to
remove one
plank from the
boat and
replace that
plank with a new
plank immediately afterwards. The
carpenter does this for every
plank on the
boat,
removing and
replacing each one at a time.
Once the
carpenter has
replaced every
plank of the
boat is the
boat still
Theseus' original
boat or is it an
entirely new
boat? And if the
carpenter were to
construct another
boat out of the
planks that had originally been in
Theseus'
boat, would this
second boat be
Theseus' original
boat or a new one?