Advanced Play Design, Week 7 - Objects

By Emmett Redding

Week 7 - Objects - Lego Ship of Theseus

Theme

Objects

Context

Thinking on objects that relate to play I immediately looked towards LEGO. LEGO has always been a big part of my life and I have so much fun building sets. It is also not lost on me that the name LEGO is a portmanteau of the Danish phrase leg godt, meaning "play well”.

I am also greatly interested in thought experiments such as the Ship of Theseus. As Marc Cohen writes in Identity, Persistence, and the Ship of Theseus (2004),

The original puzzle is this: over the years, the Athenians replaced each plank in the original ship of Theseus as it decayed, thereby keeping it in good repair. Eventually, there was not a single plank left of the original ship. So, did the Athenians still have one and the same ship that used to belong to Theseus?

I thought that this thought experiment would be well suited as a LEGO set, since I can utilise the set instructions to replicate the steps involved in it. I am interested in the complex version of events as described by Cohen:

Simple version: Theseus completely rebuilds his ship, replaces all the parts, throws the old ones overboard. Does he arrive on the same ship as the one he left on? Of course it has changed. But is it it?

Let A = the ship Theseus started his voyage on.
Let B = the ship Theseus finished his voyage on.

Our question then is: Does A = B? If not, why not? Suppose he had left one original part in. Is that enough to make A identical to B? If not, suppose he had left two, etc. Where do you draw the line?

Complex version: Like the simple version, but with one addition -- following Theseus in another boat is the Scavenger, who picks up the pieces Theseus throws overboard, and uses them to rebuild his boat. The Scavenger arrives in port in a ship composed of precisely the parts that composed the ship Theseus started out in. He docks his ship right next to one that Theseus docked.

Now we have:

C = the ship the Scavenger finished his voyage on.

Method

I will be designing a LEGO set based on the thought problem of the Ship of Theseus.

Response

I was lucky enough to have a toy market with loose LEGO bricks available for purchase near me over the weekend, where I was able to sift through pieces to physically put together my ship before jumping into any softwares to create it digitally.

I looked at a few different digital LEGO designing applications and settled on stud.io to use as it has stronger rendering tools and is more recently updated than the official LEGO Digital Designer application.

In stud.io I remade my physical ship and went through the tools that existed to create the instruction pages for the first four steps of the final instructions. Then I took these into Keynote and overlaid them to create the additional steps of replacing the parts of the ship.

Reflection

While there were some struggles in actually using the digital designing software I am really pleased with how this all came together. As a huge LEGO fan, it was really fun to think of a set that asks you to replace pieces while you are building, to then use those original pieces to then rebuild what you took apart.

References

Cohen, S. Marc (2004). "Identity, Persistence, and the Ship of Theseus". faculty.washington.edu. Retrieved 2019-08-17.