I think I've mentioned dad's axe here once or twice before. The one on which my bro replaced the head and a decade or two later, when it came into my possession, I replaced the handle...This raises a puzzle that has been spoken of since ancient Greece, at least. The Athenians who used to debate it used as their example a ship that they had in the harbor, supposedly the same one that Theseus himself used on his voyage to defeat the Minotaur and save the Athenian youths from being sacrificed. Every part of the ship had been replaced over the centuries (as with our own USS Constitution), but had been done so in such a way as to recreate the old piece as faithfully as before. Annually this ship sailed to the island of Delos for a ritual festival celebrating, among other things, Theseus' salvation of Athens.
Yup , I surely cherish 'dad's axe.
The ship plays an important role in the history of philosophy for another reason. It was because the garlands for this annual voyage had been put on the ship before the conclusion of Socrates' trial that he was not executed until the entire voyage was completed. The laws of Athens did not permit executions during this sacred festival, which began when the garlands were displayed on the ship, and did not conclude until the ship had returned from Delos. For that reason, Socrates was kept in prison for quite some time. If Plato is right, it was a very fertile time for Socrates' discourse with his students; or possibly, it was the point at which Plato realized he needed to start writing some of this stuff down.
Socrates himself wrote nothing down. He doesn't seem to have cared for the written word, apparently because he thought of the written word as dead. What he wanted (as professor Gregory Nagy of Harvard puts it) was the life of the living word: he wanted the arguments to live in the minds and speech of his students, who would carry them forth and continue to debate these high questions of the soul, the nature of the world, the nature of mathematical objects, of virtues, and other good things. Plato met him halfway by writing them down, but in a form that preserves the structure of a dialogue between people trying to figure it out. This is why Plato reads so differently from Aristotle, who gives you the old arguments but then explains his position on them clearly. Most of the time Socrates in Plato's works ends with an admission that he hasn't quite got the whole answer, but wouldn't it be nice to start fresh there again some time?
One of the last questions he takes up is the question of the nature of the soul, and he proposes an idea very similar to my own -- it occurs to me now that the chief difference between them is accidental, because my idea of it was available to me because we have different technologies to use as analogues for how it might work. His model is a lyre -- which produces a harmony -- and mine is a technology like a radio or television, which can be tuned differently so as to receive different signals. I think that may even answer at least some of the problems he raises for the harmonic model, though it leaves open the question of what is producing the signal that can be received by a properly tuned body.
Is that an answer to the problem of the ax or the ship? It seems to me it is. In fact, it happens all the time to us: every day, we eat food, from which our body takes elements and makes itself new again. Over time every part of you is replaced. We have no problem saying that it is the same you, do we? We do this with animate rather than inanimate objects because they have a soul: an organizing activity, I mean, which itself is doing the constant work of rebuilding and maintaining itself. The ship doesn't have a soul, but it has an organizing activity, which is found in its maker and maintainers. As long as we continue to remake the ship, it is the same ship.
But what if we stop? Can we rebuild the Constitution once it is gone? To say that is to say that if we should die, but some future being should remake our body in such a way that it was again tuned to receive our soul, then we would live again. That happens to be the orthodox position on the resurrection of the body, as a matter of fact, but is it true? Or would we necessarily be different, and not the same, in the way that a new Constitution would be a different ship?
10 comments:
But what if we stop? Can we rebuild the Constitution once it is gone? To say that is to say that if we should die, but some future being should remake our body in such a way that it was again tuned to receive our soul, then we would live again.
We already do this: we clone sheep. Not quite, as true cloning goes, but pretty close. Is the new sheep the same as the original?
We're drawing close to looking at this more directly: we're on the verge of cloning (true cloning) a long-extinct bacterium and nearly on the verge of figuring out how to clone a mammoth.
Will these be the same as the original?
When we clone humans (and we will, regardless of the ethics), will the two humans, both living, be the same (eliding, for now, cloning a dead human)? Will the original soul inhabit both? (Case of Conscience bears on this obliquely.)
It seems to me that the answer starts out as "yes and no," it depends on the definition of "same," and it depends on how long the "same" lasts.
Physically, they're likely to be identical, and in the case of the ship or axe (assuming the same measure of "sameness" from careful reconstruction/repair) the question is answered.
With living beings, they'll start out the same, but only physically. The clone will be a tabula rasa mentally, and the difference will become immediate and growing. Even were we able to copy exactly the mental contents into the clone, the differences would be immediate and growing from the two beings' necessarily differing histories from the moment of...conception.
So we come to the soul. There's no doubt in my pea-brain that we can, and will, clone successfully, down to the veriest atom in the small toe of a foot. But they're the same only if the same soul inhabits both. And if the same soul inhabits both, the differences in histories will make them different in the superficial ways, but the soul will leave them identical in the important ways.
(As an aside, there was an SF short story about a successful effort to clone Mozart, expecting to get a new classical music composer. What they got was a drunken, marijuana-using rocker who turned out hit after hit. The essence of Mozart adapted to the times in which he lived. CJ Cherryh's 40,000 in Gehenna, Cyteen, and Regenesis also explore this, among other things.)
At a not too overly arrogant guess, I'd say we're about two decades away from learning the answer empirically.
Eric Hines
There's so much of interest here, I hardly know where to start.
First, I have to comment on the bit about Socrates and Plato- that Socrates wrote nothing- intended for his wisdom to be a living thing itself carried in the vessel of the memories of men, which I'm sure he understood also made certain it would be altered over time by each vessel. We only know about Socrates, perhaps because Plato wrote it down (how curious it's because of the Thesian Trireme), so that begs the question- when we strive to leave something that lasts- perhaps our truest desire- must it be a 'thing' or can it be the ephemera of ideas? Would the wisdom of Socrates lived on if it had never been written down that he said those things? More questions beg more questions, it seems...
Perhaps there is also a relationship to the idea of the nature of things and an ideal or true state to which those things align themselves. Is an axe used to the point of requiring three new handles and two new heads actually more true to the nature of being an axe, than the one that got pulled straight from the production line to the museum of the axe company, and therefore never used? Does one then become a true axe, closer to the ideal, and the other- does it become something else- not an axe, closer to some other ideal?
For me, there's also the issue of architectural historical preservation. I've generally felt that trying to preserve the 'original' object was usually a waste of time, and not important in and of itself, and that rebuilding in the spirit of that which was deemed valuable about the historical structure should be a better course. A perfect example is the Ennis-Brown house by Frank Lloyd Wright. It's constructed of concrete blocks designed by Wright, and when they built it they used decomposed granite to color the concrete mix to match the site, but this introduced impurities and a bad chemical mix that over time was literally disintegrating. It took 6.4 million dollars to restore the house, introducing some hidden structural elements, restoration and more often replacement of damaged blocks, and new windows and roof. I always figured it would make more sense to rebuild the building from the ground up with blocks of good quality, using the same structural design as Wright, rather than hiding structure to support a compromised design, but the folks that are drawn to preservation don't tend to like ideas like that, do they? I’d argue, in the context of this discussion, that a rebuilt house with blocks avoiding the flaws encountered by Wright would be more ‘true’ than one that hides structure to make it work- that turns the house into a Hollywood façade of sorts (and what do you know, this house has quite a Hollywood career- Blade Runner being the preeminent work it’s appeared in).
Mr. Hines:
And if the same soul inhabits both, the differences in histories will make them different in the superficial ways, but the soul will leave them identical in the important ways.
The most important way in which an individual could be identical with another is to share consciousness. If the two don't have the sense of being the same person in two places at once -- and that seems nearly impossible -- then they are in fact two individuals. The differences in history, as you put it, are going to result in bodies that are differently 'tuned.'
So I don't think you can get a solution like 'they will be the same, but at the same time there will be differences.' At least with a conscious being, we have a clear standard for what it would mean to be the same being.
Douglas:
...when we strive to leave something that lasts- perhaps our truest desire- must it be a 'thing' or can it be the ephemera of ideas?
If you can leave an idea that lasts, even the kind of idea that people have different opinions about and argue about for centuries, you've left something much more lasting than a physical thing (at least potentially). It is possible for an idea to be lost, but it is certain that a physical thing will be destroyed eventually. Even in the case of the ax or the Delian ship, the time comes when the thing is no more. But the ideas they were discussing, we are still discussing, and in principle there's no reason they can't last as long as conscious beings continue to exist.
So perhaps the question is whether it is right to refer to ideas as 'ephemeral,' or whether the ideas aren't the things that last after all. Even in the case of the ship or the ax, it is the idea of the ship that caused the Athenians to engage in the activity of making and remaking it. The organizing principle for the thing was an idea in the minds of men.
I don't think you can get a solution like 'they will be the same, but at the same time there will be differences.'
Nor was I proposing such a solution, unless you're suggesting that the soul itself evolves and changes over time. I have no basis for suggesting either way on that.
Eric Hines
No, I don't think that. I think the soul is eternal. It's the body that changes over time -- thus tuning in to a different expression of the soul, as a radio can be tuned to a (slightly or very) different frequency.
I think the soul is eternal.
That might be part of my confusion on your position. Life is eternal, too, but it evolves constantly. Being forever isn't the same as being the same forever.
But if the soul is statically eternal, that's what I was getting at when I said identical in the important ways.
Eric Hines
That only makes sense if there can be two people with the same soul running around.
There's a little ambiguity here, because in English we use the word 'soul' as an overarching term for two very different kinds of Greek concepts: the anima, and the psuche (or 'psyche'). The anima is a kind of life-force, which isn't eternal but comes and goes: it is the difference between the man and his corpse.
What the Greeks meant by psuche might be better translated as 'spirit,' and unlike the anima, this is where you get the idea that we in English often render as 'an individual soul,' or in the specific case, 'your soul.' This is what might be eternal (it is the psuche of Patroklos that comes to visit Achilles after his death, for example).
In addition to all of these terms there's a third Greek concept in play, which is nous or intellect. This isn't individual, but it is eternal: we all participate in it, which is why we can communicate ideal concepts to one another. It's why we can pick up Socrates' logos and fight about it, even today.
So when I say that the soul is eternal, I mean that I think you could tune a new body to the same soul -- that the psuche continues to exist, just as nous continues to exist. A body can receive it if it is properly attuned.
But it's much bigger than the expression we see of it, just as a television signal contains not just the program you are watching (i.e., the one to which the television is tuned), but all the programs it might show. That is why, if the body should change, the expression of the soul changes. We see differences in the young man and the old one, or between the healthy man and the same man when injured or sick. If the body could be perfected, we might see the soul expressed in its best and fullest aspect. Where it isn't, we see a soul expressed in a way that has imperfections. But that doesn't mean the soul, the signal, is imperfect. It means the receiver is.
Perhaps the radio tuner analogy is a little lacking in this respect- the radio transmission doesn't affect the physical radio receiver- but perhaps the soul (anima or psyche?- not sure) does affect the physical body- think of identical twins- born of the same original egg and sperm cells- same DNA at conception, and yet, even the most identical twins aren't perfectly identical, physically, and certainly in their psyches. If we allow for bidirectional affects of the soul and the body, then it might work. Of course, if we believe the soul to be eternal, then we'd then be positing that the temporal can affect the eternal, which seems to me on the face of it to have problems.
Grim, yes I agree that it's apparent that both can last for some time beyond their creator's temporal existence, and that ideas may indeed last longest (though there are artifacts extant for which we do not know for what they stood for), but I suppose I want to say that there is a relationship between the physical artifacts and the ideas we leave- that there is wisdom in the relevance we give relics and symbols, and that it's not something we can neatly cleave in two. This is a particularly important question to me as an Architect and understanding how we relate to the objects in our lives, and how they carry meaning and significance. I'm just trying to more deeply understand that relationship. This touches on what was briefly commented in a post a little while ago about action and thought (and is it enough to be solely a thinker?). Doing can create a physical manifestation of our ideas, or it can produce some jumble of poorly conceived things, or it can address the merely practical (which I suppose can be a philosophical position on how to create, a la the Frankfurt kitchen), so this gets at the question of how and why we do things of a creative nature. More specifically for me right now, I’m struggling with the state of architectural theory currently (which I mostly find to be a lot of buzzwords and self-stimulation for egos’ sake), and the lack of a real understanding of traditional forms and methods, and how to view all that in the moving technological landscape we live in, that changes materials and methods faster than we can gain mastery of them. It’s a little discouraging when I’m not sure, as an architect, what architecture is supposed to be anymore.
...if we believe the soul to be eternal, then we'd then be positing that the temporal can affect the eternal, which seems to me on the face of it to have problems.
Well, that's orthodox too, of course: your soul is supposed to be judged eternally based on what you did as a temporal being.
But philosophically, it's a problem because the eternal (as opposed to the sempiternal, that which goes on-and-on through time) isn't supposed to change. This is because change is measured by time, so if there is no time (i.e., if you are outside of time) there is no possibility of change.
There are three ways I can think of offhand to resolve the problem.
1) The change isn't in the soul, but in the way in which the soul is being expressed. That is, you aren't really becoming a different person as you age or change, it's just that a different part of you is shining through.
2) Time isn't necessary for change as we usually believe it to be. Then the eternal could be changed without needing time.
3) You could have a metaphysical structure in which possibilities all exist in a way, and the question is which one is currently actual. Then you aren't changing the soul at all, you're just running down a different (pre-extant) path.
A more mundane comment:
"(as with our own USS Constitution)"
When I toured it last I was told that much of what was below the waterline, including the keel, was original, and that as long as the keel was original they considered it the original ship.
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