The Ship of Theseus: Exploring Identity and Essence in Metaphysics.

If I take away my name, my profession, my cast, my religion and ask myself “who am I?” what would I say? Without the social identity that is given to me by others, I’m simply non-existent, for if I say I’m matter, so is everything else. If I say I’m a human so is everyone else, so why should I be an individual if my identity without any background is that of collective objects and beings? Why, I, as an intellectual being am incapable of imagining my identity without the society’s idea of me?

Identity is not something that we can just assign to everything and everyone, there has to be a method of identification, there has to be an essence that justifies that identity. The famous thought experience “The Ship Of Theseus” is an attempt at understanding the metaphysics of identity.
Imagine a ship called the ship of Theseus, whose planks were changed one by one due to damage and over time all of the ship’s planks were replaced with new ones. Since the whole of the ship is changed with new external objects, will that still be the ship of Theseus? Because it’s exactly like making a new identical ship what’s to say that it is not a ship of Theseus, but if it is, then how? What exactly makes it the ship of Theseus? Is it the material that was in it? Or is it the originality of the ship that justified it’s identity?
One might argue that since those planks were changed over time, they became a part of the old ship therefore it is the ship of Theseus, but this statement can easily be rectified with the counter-argument that since the planks were changed over time, they’re no longer the part of the ship, and so what made it the ship of Theseus isn’t there anymore, therefore it is not a ship of Theseus.
But since we are talking about the originality of the ship, imagine the old planks taken out of the ship were used to make another ship that looks exactly like the ship of Theseus, which one then is the original ship of Theseus? If we are concerned with the original parts then the second one is the true ship of Theseus but one might say it is impossible for a newer thing to be the original when one exactly like it has existed long before, but time is relative because even though the first ship had existed before, every way of identifying the age of ship will deem it newer, because all of it’s parts are new, and similarly, the newer one would be older because all the parts are old.
We find ourselves in a paradox, the new is old, and the old is new by every measure. Both are Identical but both cannot be the original because it is impossible. To find the answer, we’ll first have to find out what exactly makes it the ship of Theseus. Given the complex nature of the identity, we start to question whether or not metaphysics can even be included in the identity, because all the factors that identify the nature of things are external and metaphysics is the science of that which isn’t, and how do you identify something that isn’t?