I've been reading Wittgenstein in hopes of understanding him and because I want to know what words are and what the nature of reality is. I find myself thinking about the topics every time I sit down to a keyboard, so I might as well see what those with greater faculties and longer lifetimes have had to say about them. Also, I am caught up on all of the television series that I want to watch more than I want to read philosophy. So I'm reading Wittgenstein.
Like all curious people, I have a habit of looking things up.
When I was younger, whenever I asked about a word my mother would make me look it up in the dictionary. We had one of those huge single volume ones, so large and unwieldy that the letters had little semicircular cutouts along the edges of the pages with which you could grasp and move multiple signatures. S, thump. R, thump. I still look up words. Importantly, I often look up words the meanings of which I think I already know. This is an easy practice for me as I have young children who are always asking what words mean and I regularly find myself, even if able to give example usages and a rudimentary definition, unable to find the words to fully communicate the nuances. So I look in the dictionary and find that I truly didn't know the word as well as I could have.
I am a software engineer and, even more regularly than I look up words I think I already know, I look up documentation for APIs I think I already know. I don't know why the average person might, but if you ever find yourself needing to give advice to a junior software engineer you could do much worse than to recommend this habit.
And like many others, I have a habit of looking things up on Wikipedia.
I've been reading Wittgenstein and thinking and forming theories about the nature of reality, and, lacking a formal education in philosophy, becoming an armchair expert through Wikipedia. And so, to end my largely unrelated and overlong prologue, in the course of clicking links I was reminded of the Ship of Theseus and found that there is an interesting addition to the original thought experiment.
The original thought experiment follows the story of the Ship of Theseus and is as follows. Imagine you have a wooden ship. Over time you replace each individual piece of the ship with a new piece, tossing the old one overboard. Eventually not a single piece of the original ship is left. Is it the same ship as when you started?
Yes, of course it's the same ship, as you've just been preserving it and it's been parked at the dock and everyone has seen it every day and called it the Ship of Theseus the whole time. No, of course it's not the same ship, as not one bit of the original ship is left. Like all of philosophy, apparently, there are also very complicated answers about why it is or isn't the same ship.
So what does each answer and its justification imply about the nature of reality?
Wikipedia tells me Noam Chomsky gets it right, of course, as he posits that while it says something about how we think about the world it is unlikely to say anything about reality itself. Except maybe there's more to say on the topic than that.
There's a trick to accurately describing reality, and I will gladly share it with you. Here it is: you can't. In a very meaningful and important way, that is all you need to know and all you can know. But if you're stubborn, you might be able to get at it sideways. As I can't get the topic out of my head, that's what I'll do. I'll keep hammering at the nature of reality sideways, in this piece and in future writing.
So about the Ship of Theseus. It is neither the same ship nor is it a different ship, and going down either road of thought leads one astray. The way I see it, there are no such things as ships.
Thomas Hobbes's addition to the thought experiment introduces a scavenger. As you toss each original piece overboard the scavenger picks it up. Piece by piece, the scavenger builds a new ship with it. Now there are two ships. Is your ship the same Ship of Theseus as when you started? Is the scavenger's ship the Ship of Theseus?
In thinking about the scavenger, there was a middle piece of the story I kept coming back to. Forget what it's called or if it's the same as another one in time and space; at what point in the scavenger's building process is it a ship at all? Take it further by imagining that you're not replacing the pieces you remove, but simply removing them and tossing them overboard. At what point is your original ship no longer a ship? Is there a point when you're disassembling and the scavenger is assembling that there are two ships? What about zero ships? What about when you and I can’t agree if one is a ship or not?
Chomsky was right. This thought experiment does say a lot about the human mind and how we perceive reality, and how we perceive it erroneously. It is like creation. In the beginning, there were no misunderstandings. From this state of grace, a single primary flawed belief arose. That belief begot a second flawed belief, and from the two arose the ten thousand false beliefs that underly dukkha.
The primary false belief about reality is that we think it is made up of things. That is to say, we think it has parts. We think it has components. After all, we can point at them. We can point at the moon, and at the sofa, and at the Ship of Theseus. But when we point at the moon we neglect that we are also pointing at space, when we point at the sofa we neglect the room and the carpet, and when we point at the Ship of Theseus we neglect the air and sea.
Not only do we neglect the negative surrounding the object, we neglect the media of information propagation like the light connecting the moon to our eyes. We neglect erosion like the fuzz of the sofa wearing off. We neglect accretion like the algae and barnacles growing on the sea-touching planks of the ship.
Each of these look like things to us. In our language and in our thoughts they sound like things to us. But it is better to think of them as a system. This is better, but still inaccurate, as the system has no start and no end. But they are definitely not separate things, as they cannot be separated.
Try to remove a single atom from existence and you will fail. You may change how it looks. You may make it explode and think it has gone away, but it will only have been transmuted. Our physics tells us this, but we ignore the implications.
The true atomic unit is reality itself.
Reality cannot be carved up into parts. The lines we draw with words do not exist. Look closely at the border between so called things and you will find their atoms sitting side by side. Some atoms bind with others more or less closely; some seem to ignore each other while some share pieces of themselves. This principle holds even in space, a place bereft of most matter but still infused with energy.
Reality is one thing. It is so much one thing that we cannot call it a thing because that word implies an existence outside of the thing; it implies other things. We cannot speak sensibly about it. But we can look at a ship and know that it only looks like a ship. It only looks like a part of reality, but it can’t be because reality has no parts.
(And yet, there is a ship and I can point at it.)
The second false belief about reality, arising from the first, is that it can be static. We know that’s not true in some ways. The Ship of Theseus needs regular maintenance after all, or why else were we replacing all those parts? But even despite that, we think of the ship as still. The wind moves, our heart beats, the trees grow, but we perceive most things around us as static.
They aren’t. Look at the erosion of a rock, look at the accretion a lake bed. Look at the chemical reaction that turns air and food into you and then you into dirt. Look closely at a glass of water and see the atoms wiggle and rearrange. Look closer still and see their electrons zoom around. Or zoom out, way out, and see your sofa spinning on the edge of the Earth, whirling in our solar system, twirling in our galaxy. Absolutely nothing is static. Our physics tells us this, but we ignore the implications.
There are no things, there are no parts, there is no within and no without, there is only reality. Thinking of it as a system with no start and no end is one step closer to truth. Another step closer to truth is thinking of it as a process. The process turns energy into matter, matter into energy, and changes the shapes of both. Nothing is still, nothing is static. And not only is it moving, it is transforming.
So about the Ship of Theseus.
It is important and impossible to remember that there are no things. But if there were, there would be no nouns. Nouns are verbs moving very, very slowly. Or: all nouns are gerunds.
It is neither the same ship nor a different ship. There are no such things as ships. What we point to is a locus of reality — so to speak — that for the time being is shipping. It isn’t that before it was a ship it was planks, and before that trees. It’s that before that locus of reality was shipping, then each locus of reality we point to as a plank was planking and before that each one was treeing.
Last night I was sleeping, this morning I was eating, today I was working, and now I am writing. One day I will be decomposing. This process stretches backward and forward to the edges of time for every atom and joule within me.
The final piece of the puzzle is asking what shipping is. When you take the ship apart and the scavenger puts it back together, when does your ship stop being a ship and when does the scavenger’s becomes one?
The answer is too straightforward to stick with us: shipping is whatever satisfies your criteria for a ship. If you dock the Ship of Theseus beside Jeff Bezos’ yacht he might look over at you and say you call that a ship? That’s a joke, but it’s pointing directly at reality.
An empty food tin is a piece of recycling. But to a toddler it’s a noise maker. To a young child it is a precious treasure box. To a certain type of sculptor it is raw material. In a sinking canoe, if it is larger than your cupped hands then it is a water bailer. These are not definitions or ways to look at a thing changing based on usage or experience. (There are no things to look at.) We have other clues that get us closer to truth: we call these things thinking outside the box or, better, games of imagination.
That locus of reality — so to speak — is for the moment empty-food-tinning if it meets your needs to be considered an empty food tin, and treasure-boxing if it meets your needs to be considered a treasure box.
None of this is accurate. But then, I already told you the trick.
