What Makes Me, Me? What Makes Me, Me? And Other Interesting Questions

-This is Dave.

-Hi!

Dave owns a wooden ship, called the Theseus.

And that's Dave's wife.

-SHE SOBS

-She doesn't like goodbyes.

Dave and his crew...

-ALL: Oooh, arr!

-Yes, thank you.

Dave and his crew are setting off on a long voyage.

It's a tough voyage with many storms and mishaps.

And it gets really quite hard to keep the ship sailing

and to stop bits of it falling into the water!

THUNDER

Every time the ship is damaged,

Dave takes the Theseus to George's shipyard

and George replaces the broken wooden bits

with shiny, new metal ones.

Bye.

But there are many dangers, like Olly the octopus,

who does like a bit of fish and chips.

And so every few months of his journey,

Dave heads back to see George

and has any broken wooden bits replaced with metal.

-Bye-bye.

-Bye.

DAVE HUMS

And each time the ship gets damaged...

-TWANGING

-..more metal parts are added, and so on,

and so on, until eventually,

every part of the Theseus has been replaced.

The ship is now entirely metal, inside and out.

When Dave gets home, his wife,

who's been really missing Dave a great deal, is surprised.

Hmm...

She wants to know why he's got a new ship.

"I haven't got a new ship," says Dave.

Dave's wife insists that it can't be the same ship.

Dave insists that it is.

This goes back and forth for what seems like an eternity.

But Dave's wife won't budge.

"Your ship was wooden, and this ship is metal.

"Nothing of the old ship remains."

What do you think?

MUSIC DROWNS SPEECH

It's the same ship because it's still got the same structure,

it's just made of different materials.

It's not really the same ship

because he's literally just rebuilt the ship.

He's made, like, a different ship.

Well, he'll still have the memories of the ship,

so it would be the same ship to him

even if it didn't have the same things inside.

I think, um, it became a different ship when the last piece was put in.

Because when it had the old pieces, before the metal ones,

he still had one bit of the old ship.

But once it had been replaced with metal,

he would have completely rebuilt the ship.

I agree with Lowri because, first of all, it was the same ship

because there was still bits of wood.

Now, because it is all metal, it is not the same ship any more.

Dave and his wife haven't stopped arguing about whether it's

the same ship when, suddenly,

over the horizon, a familiar shape appears.

It is the Theseus,

only made of wood.

How did this happen?

It turns out, George always wanted his own ship

so, rather cleverly, he kept all the wooden bits

that fell off the original Theseus and decided to rebuild it.

It needed a lot of hard work and an awful lot of nails.

But it looks very good now he has finished.

The minute she sees the ship, Dave's wife thinks it is Dave's ship,

the Theseus.

So, what does this mean?

They are both called the Theseus and they both look the same.

Well, except that one is made of wood and one is made of metal.

It's all getting a bit confusing.

Oh, dear.

If you got a house and you took off all the pieces

and put a new house and then someone else took the old pieces

and built a new house,

it would be a different house so the same way of the ship.

That, the metal one, is the Theseus

and the wooden one is a copy of it.

I'm not really that sure because the wooden one that George has

is made out of the proper things that the old Theseus was made of

but then the one Dave has is still the Theseus

but it is made of metal and so it is like there is two the Theseuses.

In a way.

The person who bought the boat or made the boat

was Dave so he named the boat

so if someone else was going to call their boat the Theseus

then it wouldn't be the same boat just cos it had the same name.

It might look the same but it is not

cos someone else bought it so it is owned by someone else.

Now, this is all very well with ancient ships and whatnot

but what happens if we think about something a little closer to home?

Like...I don't know...you.

You see, like Dave's ship,

our bodies change and grow throughout our lives.

We are born, we grow up into toddlers

then children and we keep growing into teenagers

then adults and we continue changing our whole lives.

Our hair grows and falls out and more grows without us

even noticing. We get a whole new set of teeth. Everything changes.

So, if every part of us gets replaced too, like Dave's ship,

then that raises a big question.

Your body might have changed but you still are the same person.

You have still got all the outside qualities

like your personality and what you would be.

You are of the same person because organs are the same

and personality is the same so, if your cells change,

it's not the whole person which has changed.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd