Some other characters may even be recast (paging Ralph Bohner!). Some characters, like Vision, will return from the dead. The longer that the Marvel Cinematic Universe persists, the more likely we are to see older characters return. Vision’s Ship of Theseus should prove to be important as Marvel continues on into Phase 4 and beyond. It’s The Ship of Theseus from a human perspective…communicated by a synthezoid. The rot on the planks is not merely something to be replaced but rather evidence that the ship, in fact, lived. It doesn’t matter when the ship ceased to be the Ship of Theseus because we know when it was. He argues that the thought experiment is too hung up on the ship as an inert, passive object. Vision’s interpretation of the Ship of Theseus is fascinating and not one that I’ve personally heard before (though that’s on me, someone else has certainly had that interpretation and shared it before at some point in human history).

White Vision regains a sense of self immediately.Īnd so he is! He flies out of Westview, presumably to rejoin the Marvel Cinematic Universe in earnest, leaving this shade of a Vision to crumble once the hex does.

He then restores White Vision’s memories that SWORD has hidden deep within his code. The wood touched by Theseus himself,” he says. But he does need something…and Vision figures it out quickly. This White Vision doesn’t need the Mind Stone to be The Vision. Now it’s clear that The Vision believes they were right. Bruce Banner and Shuri were both adamant that there was more to Vision than just the Mind Stone. When it became clear that the Mind Stone must be destroyed before Thanos could get his beefy fingers on it, Vision and the rest of the Avengers naturally wondered if Vision’s identity would survive the destruction. In many ways, these two Visions are just continuing a conversation that began in Avengers: Infinity War. Do we have an entirely new helicarrier at this point? If so, at which point did the first helicarrier cease to be itself and become a new helicarrier? Finally, a HYDRA virus wrecks the internal computer system on the ship and that must be replaced as well. Then The Chitauri invasion destroys the long runway atop the helicarrier so SHIELD replaces that. Let’s say The Hulk destroys the powerful turbines that keep the helicarrier afloat, so SHIELD replaces them.

What Plutarch is essentially asking here is “how often can you replace a part of something before it constitutes a new whole?” Since this is the MCU, let’s apply that logic to SHIELD’s surprisingly destroyable Helicarrier. “The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned from Crete had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their places, insomuch that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.” The best known version of the puzzle (and the reason it’s often referred to as The Ship of Theseus) comes from Greek philosopher Plutarch who recounts the concept from Greek legend. The Ship of Theseus is a thought experiment so old that it’s not even clear who thought of it in the first place. By understanding it and unpacking it fully, we may get an idea of just how deep the rabbit hole goes for the nature of identity in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The Ship of Theseus is quite simply one of the most pervasive and important philosophical concepts of all time. White Vision’s Ship of Theseus explanation is a good one but it’s still worth expanding upon the concept further. When no original plank remains is it still the Ship of Theseus?” Over time, its planks of wood rot and are replaced with new planks. “The Ship of Theseus is an artifact in a museum. He then offers up a brief primer on the Ship of Theseus, for both Vision’s sake and the audience:

Wandavision episode 9 white vision