In 2019, I bought a cheap guitar at a pawn shop. Over the course of the following year, I swapped out the neck, the tuners, the pickups, the controls, the jack, and the bridge. Is it still the same guitar?
If my guitar went through the Star Trek transporter beam and had all its molecules disassembled into energy and was reassembled via the inverse process from different energy strings, is it still that guitar or is it a duplicate?
Is it still that guitar if I swap out the body for a new one? What if that also requires a pickguard swap? What if the tremolo cavity plate no longer fits and I need to swap that out, too?
It's conceptually the same guitar if you think it is
It's the same idea of "what is a chair"? You are the one who perceives an arrangement of wood in a particular way as being a chair. Heck, you're the one who conceptualizes a certain arrangement of organic molecules to be "wood" in the first place
I would say it wasn't "that guitar" if you swapped it out wholesale.
This is the joke. The body and a couple of plastic bits are all that remain from the original pawn shop find because I kept finding shit that was either broken, unusable, or in need of so much rework that it made more sense to just get new parts, resulting in an almost entirely different instrument from what I initially bought. I almost have enough bits to rebuild the original guitar and dump it off on some other sap with poor impulse control, but it probably has more use value as (carcinogenic) firewood.
In 2019, I bought a cheap guitar at a pawn shop. Over the course of the following year, I swapped out the neck, the tuners, the pickups, the controls, the jack, and the bridge. Is it still the same guitar?
You can't play the same guitar twice
If my guitar went through the Star Trek transporter beam and had all its molecules disassembled into energy and was reassembled via the inverse process from different energy strings, is it still that guitar or is it a duplicate?
If you cover your eyes and the guitar disappears and then you uncover them and it reappears, is it the same guitar?
Depends on if I have slotting files or a Dremel nearby. It's kind of an Idle Hands situation over here.
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It's a joke about lacking object permanence the way babies do
good joke
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Is it still that guitar if I swap out the body for a new one? What if that also requires a pickguard swap? What if the tremolo cavity plate no longer fits and I need to swap that out, too?
It's conceptually the same guitar if you think it is
It's the same idea of "what is a chair"? You are the one who perceives an arrangement of wood in a particular way as being a chair. Heck, you're the one who conceptualizes a certain arrangement of organic molecules to be "wood" in the first place
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This is the joke. The body and a couple of plastic bits are all that remain from the original pawn shop find because I kept finding shit that was either broken, unusable, or in need of so much rework that it made more sense to just get new parts, resulting in an almost entirely different instrument from what I initially bought. I almost have enough bits to rebuild the original guitar and dump it off on some other sap with poor impulse control, but it probably has more use value as (carcinogenic) firewood.
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Last question: do you think this line of questioning will work on my spouse?
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brb
Edit: Holy shit, it worked! Thanks, comrades!