#idealismseries

If you take apart an old ship and replace each piece with something new until every part is different, it’s not the Ship of Theseus anymore.

It’s the same model of ship, but not the same vessel because it hasn’t shared the same experiences as the original.

So when does the Ship of Theseus stop being itself? It’s hard to measure. But I think it happens when the pieces that hold its memories are gone, the planks that heard the same waves, the deck that carried the same crew.

Once those are replaced, the meaning changes. And meaning, more than material, is what makes something what it is.

If perpetual motion was real, I think it would look a little like this:

It would need an infinite or near-infinite power source, something like solar energy with a constant electrical relay, so it never fails even during outages. To truly be perpetual, it couldn’t lose energy to resistance. That means it would have to move in a perfectly contained system: like a carousel that never stops because friction simply doesn’t exist there.

But then, for it to have purpose, it couldn’t just spin in isolation. It would need to do something, maybe convert that motion into tiny bursts of usable energy.

The paradox, though, is that use creates resistance. So maybe the only true perpetual motion is something that exists but doesn’t try to matter. Maybe motion that serves no purpose… is the only kind that can last forever.