LordBucket. Whats your answers if I ask you the questions you asked?
To the Ship of Theseus question?
I think it depends on the nature of time, which unfortunately I have a very limited view of. I suspect that continuity of consciousness is an illusion resulting from memory, and that human perception of time is limited in such a way that we tend to have very incorrect ideas about our nature.
English grammar doesn't handle non-linear time very well, but to try to explain...that which we might call "you right now" and "you two seconds ago" are both discrete entities. The "experience" of "you two seconds ago" is/was being observed just as you right now are observing your experience right now. Just because the you of right now is unable to directly observe the experience of you of two seconds ago doesn't mean that the you of two seconds ago isn't/wasn't also being observed. Each of those yous
exist. There is no was or will be to it. The consciousness of "you of two seconds ago" doesn't go away just because "you right now" is conscious any more than you right now would not exist just because there "will be" a you-two-seconds-from-now.
As such, every Planck-time-length instance of the ship throughout its existence is actually a different ship. Every Planck-time-length instance of you and I throughout our entire existences are also different people. We just don't perceive ourselves-now and ourselves-two-seconds-ago as different entities because each of these entities only perceives "right now" and the right now that each of these entities perceives includes awareness of "memory of having been" other entities. But each of those entities was only ever itself.
For example, consider a story book. The entire book exists. Every page is a different page. Every "instant" of what's going on in the story all exists and reading page two doesn't make page one vanish. But if you were a character in that story, you wouldn't perceive what you were doing on page one as being a separate and distinct entity from what you're doing on page two. You would perceive them as sequential events that happened to a singular you. You on page two would "remember" what happened on page one. But page two was never page one.
I think that might be what's going on.
I would like to think that "ascension" is possible whereby all the pages of your life come to be collectively aware. But if so, then it would probably not be any of the individual pages changing, and "come to be" is probably a bad way of describing it. Rather the "sum total of your entire life" is a singular, conscious entity. There is no was or "will be" to it. It simply is a collective entity. Nothing more needs to be said to describe it.
At what point do pages in a book become a book? They collectively already are a book. People looking to "ascend" in the sense of the the "you in the right now" going or being or doing something different...I think that's not how it is. The ascended you,
exists. It is the collective of all the instances of you just like the book is all the pages. But even that isn't the whole picture because what each of those instances of you perceives as "you" are also collective entities. The book is composed of lots of pages, but each page is composed of lots of words. "You right now" are actually a network of separate entities experiencing themselves as a collective whole. As mentioned previously, "you" are composed of thoughts, feelings, emotion, a physical body with chemicals, etc. You could cut your brain out and put it in another body and that would probably work fine. Your brain perceives itself as a single entity too, but it's also a collective entity composed of lots of cells, and we could probably remove some of those cells and put them somewhere else and they'd work just fine too.
The "collective you" composed of all the time-instants of your entire life viewed as a single timeless entity is very likely also part of a larger network. Possibly the collective of the entire human race, for example. And that collective is probably also a component to a larger collective. And each of these components at all the various levels are more or less interchangeable just like your brain cells. Nothing particularly stopping a hypothetical bit of mind/soul stuff from another planet incarnating into a human body on Earth, for example. And if it did, what would you call the result? Would it be human? If you put a few human brain cells into a mouse brain, does that make it no longer a mouse? Because we can do that. Do "you" cease to be you when you learn something new? Does the ship cease to be the ship when we replace its pieces?
Thinking of "identity" as an immutable thing is I think kind of misunderstanding what is. Identity is a flexible phenomenon. We can perceive this particular group of cells and thoughts and memories we're experiencing right now and perceive it as "I." The collective that is humanity can perceive itself as "I." We can perceive an ocean wave as a single thing, even though it doesn't make any difference which particular water molecules comprise it, and we might not all look at the same wave and agree exactly where it ends and begins. You and me and Hugo and everyone else in this thread are discrete entities, but collectively together we are having this conversation and this conversation is also discrete entity unto itself.
An ascended being might look at the separate entities "you" and "me" talking to each other and perceive both of us as a single thing just like you probably tend to think of your brain as a single thing even though it's composed of different cells talking to each other.
What is and isn't "the ship" depends on where you look.