About

There's an ancient thought experiment that philosophers have been arguing over for 2,000 years. Plutarch tells us how the Athenians preserved the ship of Theseus, the vessel the legendary hero sailed back from Crete after slaying the Minotaur: as planks rotted, they were replaced with new timber. One board, then another, until not a single original plank remained.

Was it still the ship of Theseus?

There's no clean answer, which is why the question has remained for millennia. But your body already does this; you're not made of the same cells you had ten years ago. Your gut lining replaces itself every few days. Red blood cells cycle out in about four months. Even your skeleton gets swapped over roughly a decade. But you still feel like you.

The brain is different; most of your neurons are with you for life. This creates an interesting constraint if we want to augment or preserve human cognition.

But can we replace them plank by plank, neuron by neuron?

That's the core thesis of Theseus Labs. Not uploading your mind to a server somewhere; not creating a cold digital copy that waves back at your family once you're gone. We're interested in something more continuous: digitizing neuronal function one neuron at a time, without ever breaking the thread of you. We're not simulating minds. We want to augment them and preserve them, without severing your subjective experience.

This is a mission that will span decades; the technology isn't here yet, but with the rapid acceleration of AI and what it can enable, it might be possible in our lifetimes. Our company is starting in the world of Brain-Computer Interfaces, to develop better ways to read, and then write, to neurons. It will require stunning advances in other fields as well, like Connectomics. The progress will be slow and at times maddening, a bit like the Minotaur's maze, until all at once, we find our way through.

We don't know yet how many planks we can replace, or how fast, or what the minimal substrate for consciousness really is. These are hard problems. Possibly the hardest. But the Ship of Theseus gives us a framework for thinking about identity that doesn't require a clean break between biological and digital. The transition can be gradual; the continuity can be preserved.

That's why we're Theseus Labs. We're building the shipyard.