(no subject)

The Ship Of Theseus Dilemma, asking what is the nature of a constructed item once all the individual parts of it have been replaced, is interesting enough. Thomas Hobbes made it worse by asking what would happen if some enterprising person collected all the old bits as they were replaced and then made a new ship out of them. I was thinking about this today in the context of us: all our atoms are replaced, several times, over a lifetime. (What would happen if someone collected all the atoms we discarded and built an identical copy? Which gets rapidly into the nature of living memory hardware.)
Japanese rebuild temples on a regular basis, because they regard the identity of the temple as being tied up with the location and its place in society, rather than the physical items. Aristotle spent a lot of time talking about different types of causes, that together made an item's existence relevant.

Today I spent much of the day programming and running tests on the same board I had yesterday, with mostly all new components. Is it the same board? It runs the same. Right now I'm fighting with a noise problem that might end up with me building a power supply on a 9V battery to get something quiet enough to isolate a variable that's making me crazy. The day gave me a pounding headache.