Outer Limits of Reason by Noson S. Yanofsky Page B

as philosophers and learning how to deal with different questions of personal identity. With all these skills, children are imposing order and structure on the complicated world they have entered. Before these skills are mastered, they are showered with an incomprehensible stream of stimuli and sensations. With these classification abilities the children can comprehend and start to control their environment. If they fail to learn the classification skills, they will be overburdened with external stimuli and unable to deal with their surroundings.
    With enough sophistication, children also learn to classify abstract entities. For example, they might learn what it means to be a family. Their mother is a family member. Their father and siblings are also part of the family. What about first cousins? Second cousins? These are a little vague. Sometimes they are part of the family, and sometimes not. Children must learn what is a family and what is not. As they grow, they learn to classify even more abstract entities like numbers and political parties.
    Not only do children learn to classify objects and people, they also learn to name them. They realize that they live in a society of other classifiers, and in order to communicate with these compulsive classifiers, they follow their example of giving names to objects. They first give the external stimuli their own names. As their communication skills progress, they learn to forgo their names and start to use other people’s nomenclature for objects. They call brown gooey stuff “applesauce.” They learn to call the woman who takes care of them “mom,” regardless of her wearing makeup or not. By using the same names as others, children are showing society that they are conforming to the prevailing classification system and that their mental processes are similar to those of others. Society then rewards them by showering them with love and providing the protection they need.
    The point is that classifying and naming are learned skills. Children do not learn exact definitions of things because they are never exposed to exact definitions. They learn to classify and name physical stimuli. Some notions are exact and unchanging. The concept of the number 4 is exact and has a clear definition. In contrast, many other notions lack sharp definitions. The first part of this section shows that even physical objects do not have sharp definitions.
    With this in mind, we can discuss the many questions posed at the beginning of the section. Is the ship of Theseus the same after changing one plank? The proper response is that the definition we have for the ship is not clear enough to provide an answer to that question. There is no exact definition of the ship of Theseus. We only have what we learned—that is, the stimuli we were taught to associate with the ship.
    The ship of Theseus does not really exist as the ship of Theseus . There is no exact definition of what is meant by the ship of Theseus. It exists as a collection of sensations but not as an object. Yes, if you kick it you will feel pain in your toes. When you look at it, you will see brown wood. If you lick it, you will taste stale wood and salt water. But these are all just sensations that one learns to associate with something we call the “ship of Theseus.” Human beings combine these sensations and form the ship of Theseus. Of course, the ship exists as atoms. But it is made of atoms as atoms . 3 The atoms are not tagged as the ship’s atoms. Rather, it is we who make those atoms into a whole entity called a ship. It is we who further demarcate this ship as somehow belonging to the mythical general Theseus. The first part of this section cited many examples demonstrating how the ship can lose and change atoms and still be the same ship. It’s all in our mind. We are fortunate to live among other people who learned to give the same names to commonly occurring external stimuli. Each of us calls