The Theseus Paradox

“Ship of Theseus” is one of the finest movies I have seen in recent times. An intense and thought-provoking narration of three different stories that beautifully converge towards the end to represent the Theseus’ paradox.

For the ignorant: “The ship of Theseus, also known as Theseus’ paradox, is a paradox that raises the question of whether an object which has had all its components replaced remains fundamentally the same object. The paradox is most notably recorded by Plutarch in Life of Theseus from the late 1st century. Plutarch asked whether a ship which was restored by replacing all and every of its wooden parts remained the same ship.” (Source: Wikipedia)

Now the paradox could raise several questions. First of all is it the same ship? If not, then at what point would you call it a different ship? When 50% of its components are replaced? Or 100%? Or 10%? To arrive at any such number we would need to understand-What in fact constitutes a ship?

Let us take the analogy to a human being. Say a person gets a kidney/heart/cornea transplant. Will that change the person in any way at all? Will the person behave differently in the same external environment that she deals with? How about when more than one body parts are transplanted? At what point will the person change completely, cease to be the person she was to begin with. Or will the person remains the same irrespective of the changes? What defines being “same”?

As I was discussing this with a friend, I made the following argument:
When it comes to humans, the ‘brain’ is the key, without which everything else is pretty much useless. As long as the brain remains intact, any number of body part replacements will not change the person in any way. But if the brain is replaced (hypothetically), then the person becomes someone else. So I set “brain” as a limit beyond which the person no longer remains the same. I mean, have you ever seen a person change after a kidney transplant?
But then what about those instances where the human body rejects an external organ when tried to be transplanted? It does happen often. Is it because the external organ will make the person – someone else?

In response, my friend brought up a very interesting point of view:
“Brain in a jar” or “Brain in a vat” as it is commonly known. Essentially, every action, reaction and emotion of a human is store in the brain. Experiments have shown that when the brain is given tiny electric shocks, memories stored in those specific areas are triggered and the person experiences the memory as if it were really happening at that very instant. What if we were all just experiencing such a phenomenon where our brains are in reality store in a jar and someone is controlling them with electric shocks? This means that the life that we are leading is nothing but past events that have already happened in our lives and are re-surfacing now.
Difficult to conceptualize? Try this – when you are in a dream, doesn’t it feel like it is completely real? Till the time you wake up, you think that you are actually living the dream. So a brain in a jar is like a never ending dream. Only difference – in an actual dream, the events are fictional whereas over here, the events are past recollections.

I do have an alternate theory to this:
The world we live in is itself virtual. A mere simulation, by superior beings who are playing some sort of a video game in which we are characters. Just like how one would control characters in a game of World of Warcraft or Halo. We humans are the characters of a very large video game controlled by superior species. Moreover, what we think is our ‘free will’ is in fact the free will of the being who is our controller.

Let me take a break here and come back to the movie.
Story 1:
A young girl loses her vision to an infection. Despite the blindness, she becomes an ace photographer. Later on, she gets a cornea replacement and gains her sight back. However, her photography skills are now no longer the same as it used to be earlier.
So what actually happened here? Having someone else’s cornea changes her skill-set. She is no longer the same person she used to be. Remember the ship?
However, one thing was not very clear in the movie. Whether the girl already a good photographer before she turned blind or was it a skill set she developed only after she turned blind? In the first case, the ship theory is applicable. However, in the second case her talent in photography is directly correlated to her blindness and the cornea replacement simply reiterated the fact. The movie did not answer this issue clearly.
Story 2:
A monk is fighting a PIL against pharmaceutical companies on the issue of cruelty to animals. The monk believes in Karma and Destiny and in the equality of living beings. This is in contrast to his ardent disciple who belongs to the Charvak school of thought which essentially rejects the concept of an afterlife and advocates hedonism. Throughout this story, we are exposed to a lot of heavy philosophy on the purpose of existence, identity, and death in the form of healthy debating between the monk and his disciple. In a twist of fate, the monk contracts cirrhosis, the treatment for which will entail a liver transplant and medicines from the very same companies he is fighting against. Caught between ethics and survival, what does the monk finally do?
This story shows how a simple event such as ‘death’ makes a person go through a whole lot of identity crisis. Death – is an equalizer in many ways. When faced by it, nearly every person would possibly react in the same manner. Overwhelmed by fear, unpreparedness and a desperate desire to get out of it. Because this is a phenomenon one gets to experience only once in a lifetime and hence no prior experience in handling it. In the end, the monk decides to give up every single thing he stood for his entire life and embrace the very medicines he was fighting against, simply because he could not face death.
Story 3:
A workaholic stock broker is constantly nagged by his grandmother to go out, enjoy life, and try to contribute something meaningful to society.
Their conversations go thus:
“What is the use of earning all the money when you are not contributing anything back to the society?” “If I am a hardworking, sincere guy who does have enough compassion in him to help a fellow human when in need, but otherwise is focused only on earning money, why is it wrong?”
Hard to dismiss such an argument. The guy is certainly shown to have concern and empathy when his grandmother was sick and bed ridden. What is then wrong to focus one’s life on material pursuits otherwise? What more is required? Does one necessarily have to take extra initiatives on ‘contributing’ to society?
The story continues:
The stockbroker gets a kidney transplant and later comes to know that the hospital is involved in a kidney stealing racket. Suspecting that his kidney may be a stolen one, he investigates. He finds out that the kidney of a certain labourer was stolen and donated to a rich Swedish chap. He makes it a personal agenda to get justice done to the victim and goes to Stockholm to confront the guy. What finally happens is that the Swedish guy buys out the labourer with so much money that the man is no longer interested in fighting back for his kidney and the stockbroker remains helpless
The question now arises – is money the only thing that drives the world? The stock broker could have afforded to go legal, but can the poor man do the same? What made the broker go out of his way to help a poor man? A new kidney? Given that his mission was ultimately unsuccessful, should he have even attempted it? To this, the grandmother says “Bas itna hi hota hai”.
Don’t expect anything more, but you do what you have to do. Just like what the Bhagwad gita says – “Karm karo, phal ki chinta mat karo” or “Perform your duty, don’t worry about its results”.
The story ends when it is revealed that all of the three transplants – cornea, liver, and kidney had come from the same person, an unfortunate accident victim.
All the characters in each of the stories transformed in various ways as certain events changed the way they looked at life. The environment changed, they were out of their comfort zones. At what point does this change exactly happen?

I shall end this post with a quote from the movie that aptly describes this conundrum.
 

“Where does the individual end and his environment begin?”

The Paradox of Choices…

A while ago I was reading an article about the small car market in India and how the Indian consumer is overwhelmed with a myriad of options, to an extent where she is unable to make a rational purchasing decision. I can completely relate to the statement. If I were to purchase a car right now, I would perhaps end up using a random number generator to make my decision.

As consumers, it is not just about small cars, but about every single thing that governs our lives where we make choices. Be it our mobile phones, our day to day FMCG products, white goods, the idiot box with its innumerable channels, our retail products and even the basic food that we eat; there is a plethora of choices everywhere.

Of course, some choices that we make are more important than others, choices that shape one’s destiny; career choices for instance.
While I was growing up, at different points in time I wanted to become a different person. At times I thought I would make a great Bollywood actress, at others I thought it would be super cool to become a CID Detective! There were other times when I imagined myself as a school teacher, and at other instances I was a scientist winning a Nobel Prize. Ultimately, I guess I was destined to be an Equity Research Analyst (Sigh, so much for my dream of fighting crime and solving mysteries).

On the other hand, some choices can be relatively insignificant, and yet can tax the mind to no end. For e.g. the decision I had to make on my derivatives position. The payoffs were like this – a) Exit and make immediate profits of Rs. 600 b) Wait and bear the risk of unlimited losses or another opportunity to make bigger profits.
During my first tryst with derivatives, I opted for (b) and ended up making colossal losses. Fortunately (or no?) this time I went for choice (a) and settled for lower profits, but got rid of the unwanted stress of the huge uncertainty that lay ahead.

Now isn’t it supposed to be a good thing to have so many choices? Or is it like the situation of Buridan’s ass? (A hypothetical situation wherein an ass is placed precisely midway between a stack of hay and a pail of water. The assumption is that the ass will always go to whichever is closer, but ultimately it will die of both hunger and thirst since it cannot make any rational decision to choose one over the other.)

There have been several occasions where I have faced a similar situation (not that I am comparing myself to Buridan’s ass, but the analogy holds nevertheless) wherein I was unable to make a choice and ultimately ended up leaving the decision incomplete. For e.g. my plan to purchase a house – of course for such a big ticket purchase a random number generator will not be apt. Nevertheless, I could not decide upon the budget, the locality, and worse still not even the city; and therefore cancelled the idea of a purchase altogether.

I think we as humans are so spoilt for choices that we fail to appreciate the finer things in life. I also think that too many choices in life lead to excessive hubris, greed, envy, and a lack of focus and confidence.
And there is always this constant stress of ‘what if I had made the other choice, would things have been better?’

But quite often I have wondered “What if?” What if we could actually live an entire life for each of the choices we make in our lives? That would be like living a million lives within a single lifetime. Each of the million lives can be lived in a fast forward motion within the original lifetime. Finally, we can take a combination of the best choices that results in the best kind of life, and ultimately live that life alone in our original allotted timeframe of life.
This will surely make a good movie script, a la Chris Nolan types right? But oh well, that’s another story altogether.