Ship of Theseus

Suppose you run an empire. There is no competitors east but there is a larger and more powerful force in the west so you move your territory east and east every time, adding new territory to the east and removing those in the west. You are adding eastern soil to your collection, removing western ones so they are not yours anymore. This happened, well kinda. The Huns used to live in where Russia is now, but now their descendants live in Hungary with no territorial overlap.

If one component of the ship is removed, it is no longer yours, whereas the replacement of it is yours. That set becomes you, removing one element and adding another, recognizably. If another ship is built after complete replacement that it looks identical, it comprises of elements all of them being rejected away from you. Since none of them is now a part of you, that ship is not you. Instead, you should be the other ship, with replacements for all elements, because that set was from the beginning you and only removed and added elements revised onto it. A folder does not automatically change its name even if you delete all files and add new ones.

According to researchers, the body replaces itself with a largely new set of cells every seven years to ten years, and some of our most important parts are revamped even more rapidly [sources: Stanford University, Northrup].

As time progresses, old cells go from "yours" to "not yours" and the newly generated cells become yours. You just add and remove elements from an existing set of "you" that does not disappear.

So why do we deteriorate and die if we are constantly replacing ourselves?

Or are you saying that we replace worn out cells with even more worn out cells?

I expect that descendants of the Huns live all over the place.

There are probably quite a few in the U.S.

For 5, yes, that is what telomeres do or as the textbook say. We replace old cells but eventually the replacement function gets slower than the speed the cells die out, the max supply is less than the demand, and you begin to die. That is when you have to put on life support and eventually the life support cannot catch up, so you die and your family members wave goodbye with a tear in their eyes.

They became the Hungarians after breeding with other Asians and Europeans(which are just geographical terms, not racial) for centuries. And yes, some Hungarians live in the USA, they do. As for the main concentration of the Huns, back in like 2nd century AD in Han dynasty, they fought with the Huns. The Huns lived in…well, Mongolia and Russia as known as today. Then again, you don’t just call Russia “Hungary”.

Encoded exponential deterioration as it were.....I guessed something like that.

And for sure. Russia is a nominal reference to a conglomeration of various old Euro-Asian tribes.

As is much of Europe.

I doubt that many if any modern Nation States can claim to have a purity of ancestry.

Certainly not Magyarorszag.

Telomerase is the enzyme responsible for maintenance of the length of telomeres by addition of guanine-rich repetitive sequences. Telomerase activity is exhibited in gametes and stem and tumor cells.

Is this analogy adequate and valid?

 

A ship is an assemble of its parts.

In theseus' ship allegory, the parts of the assemble is replaced with other parts, not someone that is located on the ship gradually assembling new parts to stand on and then cutting the ties with the initial ship but in your analogy, someone is situated in an assembly (assembly of drops of soils), he adds extra parts to the assembly, moves to them and cuts its ties with the original one. That is not what Theseus' ship allegory is.

It is basically the same thing. You replace parts with different parts, old ones with new ones. If the empire moves net westward but has a constant area, this is the same thing. It replaces obviously different parts without changing the function of anything.

No, not same at all. Not even remotely close.

 you are integrating new parts, instead of removing the original ones and putting something new to the removed parts. You integrate new parts to the ship, those new parts now can host you, you moved there and disconnected the old one. The ship stays there as it is, parts are not even replaced, which was something supposed to happen.