My mom does something interesting with recipes, showing her answer to the question regarding Theseus' ship in philosophy. 8 She starts by following the recipe and does a good job, and is praised for it. Then she slowly starts replacing ingredients, either out of complacency or because she doesn't have the right ingredients at hand. After enough time, the recipe devolves into something completely different, and is much worse as a result.
I don't care about thought experiments in general, but if I had to give an answer, it is clear to me that the resulting dish is entirely different, as is Theseus' ship. People don't like that answer because you cannot easily point out when the change happened, similar to how you cannot tell when a group of grains of sand becomes a “pile”, but this feels like an arbitrary word game to me. We split reality into categories because it is useful, not because it is true. Obsess too much about the details and you lose track of what's important.
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2025-02-09