UGH i think so much about the ship of theseus thought experiment it's so crunchy to me (heads up for a long ass response BAHAH)
if you're not familiar with the ship of theseus thought experiment, it basically questions the concept of identity over time and the idea of the self--e.g. if you have, say, a ship, and over the course of hundreds of years of using and repairing it, you've replaced every single piece of the ship (so it's now made of completely new materials and is no longer physically constructed of the same pieces that it was when it was originally made), can you really say it's the same ship as it was at the start? if someone constructs a second ship of exactly the same model using all of the discarded materials that made up the ship when it was first made, which one is the original? the ship that's existed the whole time or the ship made of all of the original parts?
wrt my thesis and the idea of cultural identity as it pertains to the ship of theseus this is definitely a very personal example BAHAH but i was specifically thinking about like. my identity as a half-filipino person/second gen immigrant and my connection to my own status as a filipino person--i would definitely say i culturally connect more to being filipino than to being white and american, but at the same time my experiences as a filipino person and even my own experiences of filipino-ness are intrinsically altered by being half-white and growing up in the united states instead of in the philippines proper, like my mom did. in that sense, it's technically the same culture because i am filipino lol, but if the adobo i'm eating is a different dish than the adobo my mom ate growing up and i speak english but not tagalog and i reject catholicism but it's the religion she grew up with and practices, can you really say it's the Same Culture? even (and particularly) as it coexists alongside my mom's experience of it? how many diffractions can you put an identity through before it becomes something else?
culture and self-identity are obviously ever-evolving things lol so i think there are definitely answers you can apply to those concepts that don't apply 1:1 to like. boats lol BUT that sense of individual exploration of and experience with culture is more or less what i think i want to explore with said game
hopefully this explanation made at least a slight bit of sense BAHAHAH
