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?
If you cover your eyes and the guitar disappears and then you uncover them and it reappears, is it the same guitar?
I always have an issue with the use of the words “the same” because it kinda ruins it for me, because like it objectively isn’t “the same” it’s the guitar with some things changed about it.
Is it the guitar you picked up at a pawn shop though? Yeah it is. It is still the guitar
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
Yeah, I think so. You’re the one who makes it that guitar, so as long as it is that guitar to you, then it is. Repairs and replacements are part of the life you live with it, the travels you have together. I would say it wasn’t “that guitar” if you swapped it out wholesale. How do you feel about it?
The answer gets more tricky if we say you’re a famous musician and when you die, society decides to keep your guitar, because then who is it that makes the guitar the guitar, and what if they disagree?
Or that we say it breaks in two and you repair the two halves into two seperate guitars (personally I’d say the guitar wasn’t no more and you’d used it to fix up two other guitars).
I wrote out a bunch of the hypotheticals not too long ago, I’ll see if I can find them, if you want
