A wild philosophical question

[GideonWilhelm]

Is it really still the Ship of Theseus after you've retrofitted it with a radar and 460mm cannons, ditch the sails for a nuclear-powered engine, swap all the wood for streamlined steel, restructure the boat for maximum speed and munitions capacity, and expand the overall structure to function as a makeshift aircraft carrier in the event of necessary emergency landings?

I came up with this sarcastically as a joke, but it also relates to a D&D argument I still think about sometimes.  A friend argued that if his healer character were a tank, they'd still be the same character.  I argue that the skills required would be acquired from differing life choices, which could come from differing life experiences.  You could still have the same values, but you would perceive the world differently.

I suppose the original question here is really just about "How much change does it take for you to say that something is no longer the same, but a separate object altogether?"

_.x-Xo^~ I don't know how to end forum posts ~^oX-x._

[IndigoGolem]

My answer is generally that any change makes a difference, and small changes are totally unavoidable. I'm a slightly different person than i was two hours ago before lunch, but i'm still basically the same person so it barely matters. It's normally only over long periods of time that these differences build up and make you feel like a different person. I'm basically the same person as i was this morning, but not quite the same as i was a decade ago.

Your friend's D&D character could be similar as a tank, but they wouldn't be the same because they'd be a tank instead of a healer. Who someone is as a person (or as a character) is the sum of their experiences, skills, and everything else about them.

All that is what i would have said a month ago. For reasons i don't want to talk about, my view on this has been shaken up recently, and now i don't know how to feel.

[ThunderPerfectWitchcraft]

You encountered an antimony that focuses onto the problem of essence and accident.

To illustrate this: Is the healer character (or the player) the same, after he visited the barber? Usually you'd say no, but it is absolutely possible to see the haircut as the essence of a person - especially when the haircut is your only basis for reference. To grasp the essence (if there is one, and not only a relative essence that is only essential only for those who experience the object), you'd need to recognize the thing-in-itself, as what you perceive is only an appearance - but this is, within the material world, impossible, as not even the existence or the nonexistence of the thing-in-itself can be proven, let alone recognized.

So, we have to arrange ourself with the relativism within our possibilities of perception - and here it helps to check what we do and for what we try to recognize the things. Within a strategy game, the outer form is important - turning a Pawn into a Queen changes the essence of the piece, as the essence for the player is defined by its function. Within a PRPG, things are different: You play a figure with a biography and a history, and this is what should usually define its essence - and then, the role is accidental - just as we don't lose our essence when we change our job.