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Self of Theseus
(thelemmy.club)
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this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2026
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If they made a spare of each of Thomas's parts, replaced them one at a time, and then reassembled all his original parts, would there be two Thomases with all his thoughts and memories?
Yes but the other would have to go by Will instead so that we can tell them apart
Why not just assemble all of Thomas' spare parts immediately, without dismantling the original? Same end result, should be indistinguishable.
So with a human, if you could make all the parts and assemble them, it wouldn't result in the result having all the memories because the brain part doesn't work that way - it stores memories and experiences that the fresh parts wouldn't have. We know Thomas is sentient, but as far as we've seen, all his parts are just train parts (maybe face notwithstanding); we have never seen that there's a brain part.
So I'm going to postulate that there's some essence of Thomas that persists through the part swaps. What's unclear is whether or not those individual pieces that are swapped out retain the essence of Thomas and would be recreated if they were reassembled.
What if we place the human fresh parts in the exact molecular state, that the original is in ? If my understanding is correct, our memories are somehow encoded with whatever chemical biology is happening in the brain, and if we suppose we can imitate those chemical states with the fresh parts, shouldn't we get the same memories/consciousness ?
I mean, ideally the repair would fail and you'd have two dead trains. Anything else is vaguely sickening