This sh*t is bananas

I had a dream last night that my friend Travis was a bear-wrestler and that the owner of the restaurant I work at came over to my house and he liked my decorating and he was nice (if you knew him that would be funny), and then I was trying to talk about Ted's bananas to some other friends (one was Jonathan Aboites but I can't remember who else- and I'll fill you in on the banana thing in just a moment) but they didn't get it and there was something else weird I dreamt last night, what was it.... I can't remember, maybe it'll come to me later..

Anyway, bananas. If I'm holding a bunch of bananas, 5 to be exact, and I ask 2 people how many things I'm holding and one says ONE bunch of bananas and the other says FIVE bananas, then who is right? they can't both be right.. right? because 5 is not the same as 1, and I can't be holding 5 things and 1 thing.

Neighbor Ted was trying out some material on my sister and I last night for the Philosophy class he teaches at Vanderbilt. I gave him the thumbs up cause he sure got me thinking.

This initial banana situation didn't really get me going. I thought, you could do that with anything, I really don't see what the point is. Am I six body parts or one person? Is the child holding 25 crayons or 1 box of crayons. Both, depending on how you look at it. You can break down anything and talk about this. So I tried to turn it into a math equation.
1 bunch/5 bananas= 1 thing/X
If you are turning the noun "bunch" to the noun "thing" then you can't turn the noun "banana" to the noun "thing" because bunch does not equal banana. SO when Ted went straight to the statement "One thing is not the same as five things" perhaps he skipped a step. It's like if you are writing a story and using pronouns.

Ted went to the store. He bought some apples. Jim never goes to the store. He hates apples. Why did "he" buy apples if "he" hates them. Is that not a contradiction? No, because we know that the pronoun first refers to Ted because of the placement of it and then it refers to Jim because it follows the sentence talking about Jim.

So maybe using the word "thing" is similar. You could even make it more obvious. I own one car. I own 25 pairs of shoes. I own one thing. I own 25 things. But 25 is not equal to one. See?

However, I'm not a philosophy scholar so let's go with the implications of what Ted was talking about. If the possibility for this kind of seeming contradiction exists then doesn't that open the door for relative truth? That 2 people can believe two things that compete and both are correct?

Let's move on from that to the real mind-f*ck of last night. Ted tells us the story of Theseus's Boat. Here's my summary of Ted's version. Theseus sails out on a ship made of oak. Throughout his voyage he has to replace some of the wood planks and he uses teak wood. By the end of his journey, when he sails back in, he has, one by one, replaced all the old wood with new teak planks and tossed out all of the oak so that not one piece of the old wood remains. Is it the same boat?

Now, let's add to that. Along his journey a scavenger has been collecting all the oak planks and builts a boat with them that is identical to Theseus's. The scavenger sails in and docks his boat next to Theseus's. Did Theseus dock the same boat that he left with? Did the scavenger dock the boat that Theseus left in? Think of it like this- the boat that Theseus sails out in, made of oak, is A, the boat he sails IN in, made of teak, is B and the boat that the scavenger builts, made of the pieces of oak tossed out, is C. It is obvious that B does not equal C. But does A=B or does A=C? Of course many smart people have dicussed and pondered this and come up with theories and answers to this question and others about identity and persistence such as "whether one can step into the same river twice precisely because it continually undergoes changes". Read this: http://faculty.washington.edu/smcohen/320/theseus.html