(March 16, 2013 at 1:38 pm)ChadWooters Wrote: Ahhh, form and substance, my home sweet home. I'm rather curious about how you resolve this paradox, genkaus.
I do not consider identity to be perpetual or unchanging. The fact that we can disregard minor changes taking place and consider it unchanging does not make it so. However, that serves as a functional approximation of identity.
To take the example of the ship, while it would be correct to say that its identity is changing continuously due to the passage of time, such changes are minor. So we regard certain main features of the ship as its identifying features and consider any new changes as being continuously integrated into its identity. Therefore, even if all the parts of the ship are replaced one by one, as long as the identifying features remain intact and in perpetual existence, we regard it as the same ship. The ship created from the discarded parts would be a different ship.
