![[0088] This Strip Has Been Partially Rewritten…](/comics/2009-08-24-[0088]-this-strip-has-been-partially-rewritten....png "[0088] This Strip Has Been Partially Rewritten…")
… and redrawn, so I guess it’s not exactly the same one it used to be. 😉 For example, in the first draft, Cloud had the following lines:
- Cloud: “You cannot step into the same river twice…
- Cloud: … for other waters are continually flowing in.” Heraclitus said that. If you think about it, that raises a lot of weird questions about the concept of identity.
Our editor Neveko liked that version, but I came to the conclusion that the transition to the following example with the photograph did not work particularly well so I rewrote it.
This strip is dealing with the Ship of Theseus, a paradox that raises the question of whether an object which has had (all its) component parts replaced remains fundamentally the same object. That concept sounded very interesting to me, so I really wanted to do a strip about it. I think the strip turned out okay in the end, considering how much trouble I had writing it.
The next strip, which will be posted on Thursday, will be a very special one!
- Cloud: If you buy a new computer and replace two parts later, is it still the same computer?
- Sandra: That depends, I guess…
- Cloud: But on what? … If you think about it, that question raises a lot of even weirder questions. For example, if you look at an old photo of your grandma, is it even showing the same person? Almost all the cells in her body have been replaced with new ones since then.
- Sandra: I wonder…
- Richard: Good afternoon, Mr. Miller. Pleased to meet you.
- Cloud: BOOM! HEADSHOT! O lol lol, girlz are always teh suxx0rs at gaming!
- Sandra: … if an armless Cloud would still be the same.
- Simon Miller: Hi kids, my name is Simon Miller. I’m a colleague of Richard.
- Simon Miller: Good heavens, children these days…!
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Not sure if the gag works here, to be honest. Comes off as a little high-brow and dry.
I’ve actually had similar situations of bad timing before.
I understand the top two frames, but I don’t understand the punch line. At all. Why would Miller be surprised or abashed at kids acting like kids?
Because it is ironic. Miller now thinks of them as being shallow and focused on trivial things and violence, little did he know the deep philosophical point they had raised between themselves.
When I read the German version first, not knowing much German I figured the well-dressed man coming in was a representative from a really nice school or had some other great opportunity that quickly evaporated with that bad first impression. Personally I prefer my punchline 🙂
I always want to slap people who use the word “lol” out loud.
If no part of an entity survives, can the entiy itself still be…..what would Sheogorath say?8/
Is no your answer to this question?
This sentence is false.
It’s raining outside, but I don’t believe that it is.
I LOVE PARADOXEs
Foreshadowing….
Anyway, to answer Cloud’s questions, Same computer, same grandma and impressive verbal 1337 speak Cloud! Can’t wait for Thursday!
@ Doombiscuit
1. Maybe
2. Okay
3. Doesn’t matter, it is.
😀
This computer has not a single piece that was in the computer we had after Kate and i had been together for two years (nine years ago).
And *that* computer had not a single piece that was in the computer Kate had when we met.
But i still say it’s the same computer.
it is the idea that we continue to be something new that makes me want to live forever….
Oh man, THAT old one.
“You know, this here is my grandfather’s tent. Of course, we’ve had to replace the pegs, and the ropes all frayed years ago before we got new ones, and by now I’m pretty sure that all the old canvas has been patched over– but it’s STILL my grandfather’s tent.”
I say the winners here are the kids. and also, you’d think a grown adult would do better than to pass judgement on a couple of kids he only barely met for 5 seconds. Let alone hearing only 1 conversation.
Ah, the effects of context on interpretation!
I’m going to print & spread this one at college… XD
And, I think the computer talk works better than the river would have. It somehow feels more natural for Cloud to talk about that, and less copy paste.
I heard a similar thought, like if you had a car and slowly replaced all the parts, is it the same car? If so what is the car you have if all the replaced parts were assembled into a car? It boggles the mind. 🙂 Continuing on the computer idea, so if a person has two organs replaced it’s no longer the same person?
“Nope, sorry I don’t have to pay those taxes anymore. I recently had a kidney transplant so I’m not the same person.” 😀
It was very close. I laughed that Cloud distracted her from the game so he could beat her. The college guy sort of ruined it though. Maybe get rid of the guy and change the last panel to cloud having a party dance about how gullible girls are, or knocked out for cheating.
Just a suggestion though.
Er, the guy was a colleague of Richard , not a “college guy”(colleague being a rather formal synonym for coworker). I read him a someone who wanted to meet Richard at home for work-related or social purposes and decided to introduce himself to Sandra and Cloud to be polite.
that guy is pretty huffy about some rambunctious kids not immediately noticing him, huge ego
My old house had a carriage house out in the back, and it was sort of falling apart. We had toyed with the idea of knocking it down and rebuilding it the same but all-new, but ordinances in the area had been passed since the time the house had been built (1893) that prevent you from building what is essentially a two-story garage, or as it was, a garage with a large attic. But our contractor pointed out that the town still considers it to be the same building if it were replaced piece by piece rather than removing all at once and rebuilding. Then it’s considered a “restoration”, or if you alter anything, a “renovation”. But it would then be required to meet all the regular modern building codes, but it would be exempt from building type restrictions as it is a pre-existing structure.
Also, if you restore a wooden boat that has already fallen apart, you are basically replacing everything as it is because the old wood is no longer any good. You might as well build a whole new one.
Doesn’t “restoration” assume that you retain as much of the original structure as possible?
The only part of this coming I find “off” is the idea that a computer would only have two parts…
The philosophical debate only works if ALL pieces of the object are replaced.
The best example is George Washington’s axe. It was sitting in a museum and eventually the wooden handle decayed. They replaced it with a new one.
A few years later, the head broke while it was being moved to another exhibit. They replaced the head as well.
Now the axe has none of it’s original components. Is it still George Washington’s axe?
Computers on the other hand are much more complicated… replacing only two of it’s many many many parts would not do much to introduce this sort of logical dilemma.
@Long Tom-Your argument is invalid,go away.
Anyway,I get the point and the punchline of the comic,so it wasn’t that bad.I don’t he got turned by not being noticed over something trivial,but rather how trivial and one-minded many kids (and many adults) can be nowadays.
@Unsilenced: Yes, the story usually goes: I change this little thing. Now I replace a bit more, but these are always minor changes, yet at one point everything gets replaced.
Part of what I find cool about this strip is that the kids have quick wits and immediately jump to a different illustration of the paradox. And then Cloud jumps to the meta-game of distracting Sandra. Who then seamlessly edits what she was about to say she wondered about.
I’ve read about a very old Shinto shrine, all of whose parts are replaced every twenty years and sent to other shrines all over Japan.
Seriously, that’s what’s always bothered me about fossils. Apparently one tiny bit of mineral at a time flows through it, knocks out an equivalent sized particle of bone.. and so on until it’s a rock in the SHAPE of a bone.. so then how can it be dated?
And do fossils keep going, getting constantly replaced by new minerals all the time? Granite one eon, gneiss the next? Boggles the mind.
Another example, from Only Fools and Horses:
Trigger the municipal road sweeper has received a medal from the council for saving them money by never needing a new broom.
Trigger: I’ve maintained it for twenty years. This old broom has had seventeen new heads and fourteen new handles in its time.
Cafe owner: How the hell can it be the same bloody broom, then?
Trigger: [shows picture of himself and broom being presented with the medal] Well here’s a picture of it, what more proof do you need!?
@ Moroni:
Sure, this wasn’t what you were expecting. But, with organ transplants, you not only lose a bit of yourself, but gain a bit from the original organ owner. It all dives into what one might call the soul. That energy matrix that make up whom each and every one of us actually are, but goes well beyond the physical properties that make up the whole. So, when you say that you are no longer “yourself”, then you are correct. Like a recipe, your ingredients have changed. Is the change of any significance? Is the bits that have been gained dominant enough to make a difference? One would have to know the old you to compare. In many cases, traits from the former owner never come through.
As for the computer question, one should just go out and directly ask the machine in question how it feels about it’s new parts. Get an answer? No? Then, the device in question doesn’t care what it originally had over what it now possesses. What’s left is how you perceive the machine to be. If you state that it’s still the same machine, despite knowing the changes, then what does it even matter? It’s the same machine by your exclamation and it could care less. No challenge? No fault. Case closed.
Yeh, that’s what I mean, the adult comes off as so shallow and childish that the joke’s lost.
Does the next strip involve Miller suggesting something, and disliking how Sandra and Cloud understood him?
Whoa, heya Argent! *wave*
The seat of identity is the critical question — where does it lie? Is it in any physical part of us, that is subject to replacement, or is it in some portion that is ineffable, unchanging, no matter what happens to the gross material portion? If the former, how does the mechanism of identity survive the healing of damage, and the process of age? If the latter, does this postulate the existence of the soul, or simply suggest that the self lies in quantum states that cannot be linked to simple tinkertoys of cells and flesh and bone?
An Existentialist would say that you are not the same person at twenty that you were at ten, that each experience changes you, and that when you are in the twilight of your days, you are a very different person entirely, just as every cell of your body has been utterly replaced. Every board in the ship has been exchanged for new wood, but it has never been rechristened.
A Platonic might say that the Ideal you is elsewhere, and that Platonic ideal is what maintains your identity regardless of what happens to your physical form — which, of itself, is only a shadow of the ideal form represented elsewhere. We aspire towards our ideal selves, but do we ever achieve them?
In this strip, though, we see only that the adult has walked in too late to see the children discussing deep philosophical concepts. All he has seen and heard, too late, is what he perceives to be “mindless violence” from videogames. And once again, a crusader is born.
ColdFusion-The minerals are not, as far as I know, constantly replaced. As for dating, that is usually done by measuring the decay of radioactive isotopes. If you have an isotope with a known half-life, you can measure the ratio of that isotope to what it decays into to caculate how much has decayed and therfore how long the rock with the fossil has been deposited. T his will give a rough but useful estimate of the age(at the very least, it should be the right order of magnitude).
Way I see it, if you replace a small part of something, the rest of the object “infects” the small part over time so that the part becomes part of the whole. They key points are the size of the changes and the frequency with which they happen. If the frequency is too high, then it still counts as being something different even though it was done piece by piece. Or maybe just diluted, since the initial pieces had time to be semi-infected, then they spread their semi-infection to the new pieces.
To put it in terms of computers, if I replace my harddrive, then the new harddrive is assimilated and is considered part of my computer. Then a couple months later the ram dies, so I replace that. By the time the CD drive fails, I consider that new ram to be part of the computer. So each time something fails, I’m only replacing a part, and the new part is adopted.
If on the other hand my power supply goes nuts and everything gets fried, leaving only the case intact, I would gut it and put in a new mobo and new parts, keeping the same case. In this situation, it is a new computer that is simply reusing my old case. Essentially, I took a separate computer with its own identity, and swapped in my old case. The case becomes a part of this new computer, rather than the new computer being adopted by the old case.
Bodies are mostly the same way, although you have to make a special allotment for the brain (assuming that the mind is attached to the brain). Swapping out cells or kidneys causes them to be adopted by the body, not the other way around. With the brain, it depends. AFAIK nobody has ever done a successful brain transplant. My gut says that if they did, the personality and memories that were originally attached to the brain will stay with it in the new body. Because those are far more significant than the physical body itself, that would cause the brain/mind to adopt the new body, rather than the body adopting the brain/mind.
Of course, all this adoption/assimilation stuff is imaginary. They dictate which label we apply to an object, but they don’t have any other real significance.
As for the comic, I found it funny. And IMHO, he’s not disturbed by being ignored. He’s being disturbed by a kid taking great joy in blowing the virtual head off his friend’s virtual shoulders. The screen probably displayed some gore too. And the exclaiming was done with that weird new language people use. And to make matters worse, he was dissing girls. Hearing a young girl threaten to tear a person’s arm off probably didn’t help.
Not that I have anything against any of that. But he probably does. Bit of a culture shock. You have to remember that many adults nowadays didn’t grow up with the technology we have, so in some ways kids nowadays really are different to them. Of course, before we had shooting video games, we had “cowboys and indians”, so it isn’t really as different as it seems at first glance… And when you get older, things that used to make sense as a kid don’t, and things that didn’t make sense do. So it’s easy to think kids “nowadays” are different from when you yourself were a kid.
According to MS Word’s DRM, replacing two computer parts does mean it’s a different computer, and therefore my registration is no longer valid so I can only use it X amount of times before I have to call Microsoft and explain to them why my copy of Word is on quote two different computers unquote. This is why I switched back to OpenOffice for good.
but DG, if 50 million year old rock replaces the mineral in 1 million year old bone, doesn’t that throw your results completely off? I’m sure the ground is always older than the animal..
For that matter, when is rock ‘born’? when it exits the ground? When does the atomic ‘clock’ start? Hmm. Oh well.
Er, the fossil is not deposited in rock. What happens is that it is deposited in sediment that is turned into rock under pressure. Therfore, the material that leaches into the bone is contemporary with the bone’s deposition. The fifty-million year old rock in your example is quite a ways below the surface, since sediment is more-or-less constantly deposited under older sediment. This may be observed in the stratification of archeological sites(or, for an example accelerated by human building activity, Rome, where the original street level is a good twenty feet under the modern street level) The atomic clock question is interesting, and I will further research it now.
Okay, according to a website run by Berkley, the fossil is in fact dated by looking at igneous rocks right above and below the layers of sedimentary rocks, which gives at least the age ranges of the fossils. The “atomic clock” apparently starts once the isotopes are locked into the crystalline structure of the igneous rock, which happens once the rocks cool below a certain temperature.
@D.G.: Actually, a “colleague” is someone in the same line of work, usually with a different employer, since otherwise the word “co-worker” would be used.
@Unsilenced: If the two pieces were the hard drive (including contents) and the motherboard (with a bunch of the device functionality on-board instead of on cards), that’s a rather overwhelming portion of the machine…
@ColdFusion: I think it’s more of a seepage thing. The mineral elements get more added to than replaced, and the organic remnants within the bone structure itself do not. The “atomic clock” starts when the critter dies and stops actively taking in and integrating new non-mineral (e.g. Carbon) radioactive isotopes. Besides, AFAIK the dating is usually done based on the surrounding soil, not the fossils themselves, particularly if it’s past Carbon-14 range.
@D.G.: Use of igneous layers assuming there was volcanic activity before and after to produce igneous. It should be noted that some types of sediment-generated stone might be viable for carbon-14 dating based on the organic content of the sediment, e.g. bacteria and other microbes.
DanialArin-The problem with Carbon-14 is that it’s apparently usless after around 50,000 or 60,000 years, which is fine for some things but not for fossils. In general, most carbon-decay dating techniqes are no good for stuff old enough to be fossils because of the short half-life.
“If A candle burns another candle ¿is the same fire?” Budist saying
Religion, making things easy to understand since 7000 years
Fanatis and integrist, starting fires since 6999 years and 364 days
Took me a minute to get it, mostly because I didn’t realize the one with dark hair wasn’t a girl. I like it, though. I think children are often oversimplified by adults.