The Theseus Thesis
If a piece is only completed when you stop working on it, what happens if you never stop working on it?
A Past is Prologue
In 2009, my graduating high school class of River Hill had a mandatory senior reflection assignment where everyone had to write a one page essay reflecting on their growth over the last four years before printing and collating it into a single book. This was honestly better than a yearbook, if only due to the fact that I never got a high school year book, so this not-exactly-spiral-bound essay collection is what I collected various signatures on.
I distinctively remember that my essay played with the concept of “The Ship of Theseus.” So of course, I will now proceed to write a similar meditation with my current skill set and will then transcribe the original essay so we can see how far we’ve come.
The Constant Reinvention of Self
I do not think a person is a ship. This feels important to acknowledge up front. I could probably make an argument that a person is a flesh mech, but I think that may belie the important part of the conceit in that, a person is not just a physical thing that exists. It is a physical thing with a very robust memory.
The Ship of Theseus is an entry level paradox. A thought experiment really. The basic idea is if you replace a board on a ship with a different board, is it still same ship? What if over time, you have replaced every single board? Same ship? Different ship? If a different ship, at what point in the process of replacement do it qualify as a different ship? It’s an interesting exercise.
I still do not think a person a ship. I also don’t think a person is an island while we are mixing metaphors, but one maligned metaphor at time.
The Ship of Theseus is a question: is the sum of parts greater than the whole? Do we mistake the vessel for its contents? That latter question I riff’ed off the lore tab of my favorite Destiny 2 exotic weapon of all time, Delicate Tomb, so that’s how you know I’m writing this piece in the 2020s. The inquiry is an incitation: what is intrinsic to identity?
In high school (appropriately), one of short hand science truisms I was informed of was “every year seven years, you get a new body.” Now, in actuality, the cells of the body get replaced at variable rates. The outer layer of skin cells for example renew every two weeks or so. Red blood cells at a rate of four months. There are a couple systems that we are stuck with forever, I think the nervous system being the most prominent, which is appropriate. If you look at the immortal jellyfish, it is essentially a floating nervous system that can live an eternity and then some.
So the practical reality of a human’s corporeal form makes it a poor analog for a ship while also having a whole… consciousness thing, so of course it’s easy to stake that a person is not a ship (nor is a person an island, a statement I won’t go into as much detail other than pointing out we live in societal and communal frameworks).
When I think if I am the same flesh mech I was years ago, I think to a conversation circa 2014 where I hear my friend say “You’ve become more yourself.” I think back to a conversation circa a couple Sundays ago where I exclaimed “I sure as hell didn’t like myself as much back then” when I was still going by pronouns that ill-fit and lacked the same vantage that you really can only get from time.
I am not a fundamentally different person than when I was six. My vocabulary’s a bit better. I am capable of nuance. I am more confident when I twirl skirts and dresses. I keep an open mind about most things except the onset of generative artificial intelligence which is not the villain arc I ever expected to have as someone who has always readily identified with robots, but in fairness, I never though tech companies would so aggressively unethical in the creation of models and ignore the environmental cost, but that’s the reality we live in.
I write the same things that I did the year before and the decade before and the life time before. I write it better sometimes. My life’s not quite a roguelike, but I have somehow managed to take all the lessons from the genre. You do slightly different things over and over again and get slightly different results. It is by definition not insanity. That isn’t to say it’s sanity. I have a myopic approach, but I am getting better.
It is 2025. I am in an era of the reinvention of self. I’m not trying to become something I’m not. I’m trying to extend what can I be. More more myself I guess. And knowing me, I’ll probably end up writing about a different arrangement of idea regarding Ship of Theseus after some indeterminate units of time. We’ll see how it all works out.
A Past is Epilogue
I will attempt to be nice to my past self. I will attempt to be nice to my past self. I will… goddamnit, there’s already a typo in the second sentence.
Idiosyncrasies
Here is the greatest paradox of all time. A ship goes out to sea and a single board gets damage. The ship comes to shore and the board gets replaced with a new one. Over the years, each piece gets replaced, each crew member picks a successor, and by the time it's all over, the only thing that has remained constant is its name. Is it still the same ship? Can you see past the thinly veiled metaphor? Is it not blatantly obvious that every day of our lives, we lose a piece of ourselves only to find another aspect of it? I've had the chance to really set out against the sea and I will tell you, I found the answer. Yet, what type of narrator would I be, if I didn't throw some exposition in the mixture?
Oh sweet summer child, you really thought you were *pontificating* about this huh.
The neophyte year of high school threw the awkward child that was me, armed with nothing more than conviction and curiosity, into a brilliant fray. A stranger to a land already full of alliances and rivalry, I saw the first few months through the eyes of an outcast, merely observing the new world. Yet, I became a part of the massive actuality. Adjusting to the heavy work load and long nights, I came to appreciate the nuances of mathematics and language, even though my social skills were a tad lacking. I came to revere the place and I felt confidant I would to unlock my potential here.'
Definitely showing off all those SAT words huh.
Sophomore year went by without incident, but not without note. While as a whole the water's were calm, I learned of the torrent to come from past travelers and heard of the darker depths. I prepared the best I could and began forming friendships that would last up until this very day. Trade routes of knowledge were crafted and I took tutelage from the ancestor's of the land. Though, the year came as quickly as it went.
What are you even talking about.
The tertiary year was perhaps the most defining. It marked a full venture into the world that is River Hill. Between my academic pursuits leading me to discover the wonders of biomedical engineering, my writing being accompanied by acting, public speaking, and singing, my circle of friends quickly expanding because of the miracle of social networking, I became someone new, epitomized as such with a simple hat. While I was still set on my search for an unattainable omniscience, I was graced to have the support of friend and family to explore new territory, once uncharted by me.
In the defense of past me, fedoras hadn’t quite been co-opted by incels yet. Also, the fedora has been wrongly mischaracterized with the trilby, a fact I will remain mad about.
My final year was marked by two goals: finish the exodus and find my new destination. I finally gathered the courage to trust myself and because of it, I found solace in St. Louis, the gateway to the West, and the rest of my life plan fell into place. My final trek uncovered my passion for story telling, and while my penchants led me to the pursuit of science, I resolved an inane pact to study both. Only fitting that a contradiction like myself take up such a holistic study in unrelated topics.
Even high school me had the inklings of my current diction.
So, what is the answer to the question I posed in the beginning? It's deceptively simple. It is whatever you want it to be. If I have learned anything is that reality is a subject experience, unique to the individual and that the only thing that matters is what you take out it. If you believe you haven't changed, then you haven't. But if you acknowledge the fact that you're a different person, you are. These four years have shaped me into something both familiar and foreign. Because of this school, I have become an engineer of realities and broker of thought, with idiosyncrasies unlike any before and after will come. Along with a trader's tool, an author's pen, and a black cap Fedora, the memory of this school will help me shape my world.
Engineer of realities and broker of thought. Okay young Mikkel. You were on to something there. Future-writer you can see their roots here, feeble as they are. And they manage to get us here, so that’s something I suppose.