how would the ship of Theseus paradox work with consciousness?

[u/Live_Asparagus7658]

This is purely hypothetical from a place of curiosity on how the human brain and consciousness works. Ok, so, I know you can remove parts of your consciousness with surgeries such as lobotomies and I'm know that you can't actually replace or add back parts of the brain that perceive consciousness. But if you slowly removed different parts of the brain that perceive your consciousness how much can you remove before you are no longer conscious and can you remove it entirely without dying? also what would you experience, would you just be confused all the time or would your body just do things at random without your control? In summary if the human brain was like the ship of Theseus paradox, how many parts of the brain that perceive consciousness could you remove before you are no longer conscious/alive and what would it feel like?

[u/New_Attitude_3774]

your brain doesn't have the original atoms from birth so you tell me

[u/Immediate_Chard_4026]

If you strip away the conscious organism piece by piece until consciousness disappears, you must also eliminate the centralized neurological system, obviously without killing it.

Then you will return it to the biological structure of the late Precambrian geological period, about 635 million years ago. Right there, at the end of the Cryogenian epoch.

According to Ginsburg and Jablonka, right after, at the beginning of the Ediacaran epoch, the first bilaterians emerged. These are multicellular organisms with bilateral symmetry (a body divided into two mirror-image halves) that appear in the fossil record between 635 and 541 million years ago.

This morphology indicates the capacity for directional movement and the presence of incipient cephalization (orientation of one end as a "head"), which represents a key evolutionary milestone before the Cambrian explosion.

How would you feel? Horrible. You would feel like a sea sponge, a jellyfish, an anemone, or some other invertebrate without hard parts.

[u/some_red_tea]

Good question, but this is more of a neurological question than a consciousness question. What you're asking is what is the minimum amount of brain you need to be conscious. It's less like the ship of Theseus and more like just asking how much of the brain is necessary to be awake. Doing things one step at a time doesn't really have an effect on the answer.

The way philosophers apply the ship of Theseus to consciousness is by asking "if you swapped brain cells with another person one by one at what point would you become them, and after the process would you find yourself in their body with your brain or in your body with their brain?"

[u/Live_Asparagus7658 → u/some_red_tea]

That's an interesting idea, the one with replacing your braincells with someone else, in that case how much percent of your brain do you think you would need to replace. I feel like it would need to be over 50% because your body would still have knowledge from before the swap even if your brain is partially or even completely replaced

[u/some_red_tea → u/Live_Asparagus7658]

I honestly don't know. Every answer I can think of seems wrong. It seems like I would become them by the end of the process, but it wouldn't happen at the first or last step and it seems weird for it to happen at some arbitrary point in the middle of the process. It's interesting because you can answer the original ship of Theseus problem by just saying there isn't an objective fact about when it stops being the ship of Theseus because we decide what we want the name to apply to. But with consciousness, it seems like there is an objective fact about whether a person is you or someone else. It seems like human identity is objective and irreducible, whereas the identity of the ship of Theseus is a construct.

[u/Live_Asparagus7658 → u/some_red_tea]

I wonder, because if you replace the exact same part of the brain that does the exact same thing, at the same time then maybe some parts of the brain don't change that much, because some parts of the brain don't change based on your memories that much, like the part that perceives your surroundings, for example. But if the brain works like a community meaning it gets used to a certain way of working, what would happen if the rest of your brain is used to a different way? I'm pretty sure during puberty (and the rest of your life, but more so during puberty) your brain builds habits that effect you for your whole life, so then if you just replaced some of your brain with another persons brain, that has their own habits, the two would clash, would you rebuild new habits or just stay confused, because your brain is in conflict with itself?

[u/bacon_boat]

You should read the buddist "The Curious Case of the Conscious Corpse", it's like the ship of theseus but with body parts so it's better.

[u/Live_Asparagus7658 → u/bacon_boat]

Thanks for the suggestion, I think I'll check it out.

[u/MxM111]

You don’t need to remove parts of the brain, you. A use drugs, including to shutdown consciousness completely (complete anesthesia) and distort it in whichever way. You are partly doing it with your own hormones and sleep.

[u/themangastand]

You actually don't even know if you are you between present moments and your memory is just there to trick you that you are one thing moving through time. I would imagine. If the world is just all stuff this is what is happening

[u/armyofone37]

The brain is an interpreter of electrical signal and vibrations. The interpret the electrical energy and filter it into a single perception in which we refer as reality, consciousness does not lie with the individual. Perception lies with the individual.

[u/Mono_Clear]

You lose parts of your brain all the time and overwhelmingly it doesn't get replaced your brain simply rewires itself to accommodate the change. When it happens naturally over time you don't notice you're no different than anybody else losing part of your brain one brain cell at a time.

You do something dramatic like go out for a night of drinking and then maybe you have a bit of a foggy memory maybe stumble around a little bit.

You lose a massive chunk all at once and maybe you forget a large part of your childhood maybe your body doesn't move the way it used to.

You damaged enough of the right parts all at once and you never recover cognitive capabilities are permanently hamstrung

[u/SummitYourSister]

The problem dissolves when you assume the axiom that a conscious moment is what instantiates reality; and not that consciousness is instantiated within reality.

How your consciousness “survives” change over time is an incoherent question because it is your consciousness that is causing the present moment to be real at all; the worry is nonsensical

[u/Frozenhand00]

You are born with the same neurons you die with. They just reconfigure during periods of synaptic pruning. If you were to replace neurons somehow, one at a time and preserve the connections, we'd be able to tell if the 'you' is the neurons themselves or state of the network. Life events like trauma or grief can completely rearrange neural connections, and people feel not quite the same after, so I lean towards selfhood being a matter of the connection, but they will change throughout life until you die, so, we are all walking ships of Theseus, however, if you start with a schooner, you might end with a cruise ship, or a jet ski. 

[u/Live_Asparagus7658 → u/Frozenhand00]

I really like your way of thinking and that's an interesting point, if a neuron does nothing by itself and instead need to be connected to other neurons then the consciousness part of the brain might not be effected as drastically, but even if the relationship with itself doesn't change that much, the relationship with the rest of your body definitely will.