Did you ever read about the Ship of Theseus? I’m sure you have – the RPS community is, after all, a bastion of scholarly insight, where people can write about things like digital museums and heraldic devices and attract comments like “actually, Liu Bei’s supposed Han ancestry has minimal DNA basis and I’ll thank you to use the Harvard referencing system”.
But on the off chance it’s slipped your mind because you’ve been binge-reading Ibsen or whoever, the Ship of Theseus is a classic thought experiment. In brief, if you replace every part of Theseus’s ship as the wood decays, is it still his ship? Are things no more than what they’re made of, or does something about an object transcend its components? And what the hell does any of this have to do with Age of Wonders: Planetfall, a turn-based 4X strategy game featuring jetpacks and acid grenades? The answer to the last one is that there are Elves of Theseus, too. Also Dwarves of Theseus and Borgs of Theseus. Crikey!
Source : rockpapershotgun.com
