The Ship of Theseus, Schrödinger’s Cat, and the Question of Who We Really Are

 

📷: Anselm Kiefer's The women alchemists @thaddaeusropac 

One day while I was scrolling through Reels, a post about The Ship of Theseus popped up, and it instantly caught my attention.

The Ship of Theseus is a classic philosophical question: if every single part of a ship were replaced, one by one, would it still be the same ship?

That simple thought led me to something deeper. If our cells and tissues are constantly regenerating every second, are we still the same person we were ten years ago?

And that’s before we even bring in character or cognitive development. It feels almost wrong to assume that the person we met ten years ago would still be exactly the same today. Or that we ourselves haven’t changed, inside and out.

While my mind was still wandering around Theseus’s paradox, another idea suddenly came to me, Schrodinger's equation. An equation born from the famous thought experiment, Schrodinger's cat.

In the experiment, a cat is placed in a sealed box with a vial of poison. Until we open the box and observe it, the cat is considered both alive and dead, in a state of superposition. Only when we observe does that superposition “collapse” into one reality: life or death.

It’s oddly similar to checking a portfolio, before logging in, the balance could be both profit and loss at once. Only when we open the app does the superposition collapse into one outcome. 😆

That simple cat-in-a-box thought experiment became the foundation of Schrodinger's equation, the heart of quantum mechanics. According to Edwin Schrodinger, what we see as an electron wave isn’t really its movement, but the probability of where it might exist. Those probabilities form a wave pattern, and only when observed does that wave collapse into one definite position.

It sounds simple enough now, but back then, questions like these sparked massive debates in both science and philosophy. And maybe, they still do.