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?
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
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.
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
