First, the assignment, and then, the weirdness.
This week in Intro to Fab, we were asked to make 5 of something using more than 1 technique for the repeated item. The goal was to think about repeatable processes— things like clamp setups and jigs, among others.
I made 5 rings for a “Tower of Hanoi” game.
They’re different sizes, but all used the hole saw attachment on the drill press. I mistakenly did not attach the center hole drill bit, so I also had to set up a system for drilling holes in the center of each ring. Afterwards, I sanded each of the pieces, first a bit on the belt sander, then manually. Finally, I coated each of the rings in black paint then drew a character across them (pictured later.)
I didn’t quite succeed in the core purpose of this assignment. I don’t think the processes I used were as thoughtful and repeatable as they could have been. In the crush of the week, I think I ended up locking in to a concept rather than really focusing on the intent of the assignment. I could have more thoughtfully rigged up a system for precisely sanding the rings, drilling holes and even cutting/sanding the corners on the game board.
With that said, I did end up using all of the equipment in the shop and even made it out to Reuse to pick up wood. And in the process of making my assignment, I rediscovered a line of philosophy that I really enjoyed way back in the day in undergrad, a good 12-13 years ago!
The Game
As a little kid, we had a couple of wooden tabletop games that I vividly remember. One of them was a game that I now know is modeled after the Tower of Hanoi mathematical puzzle. The goal is to move all of the rings in the tower from their starting dowel to another one, one ring at a time, with the bigger rings never on top of smaller ones.
The goal is to do it in as few moves as possible— which, spoiler alert, winds up being 2^n -1 where n is the number of rings on the board.
I added an additional component — reconstruct the character on the rings as well.
The inspiration
What’s the deal with the character and board decorations?
It starts with a line of philosophy focused around the “continuity of consciousness” — in other words, how do we define what a mind and/or a body is *over time.* I remember discussing this during Philosophy 101 back in undergrad as part of a broader unit on the theory of mind, free will and simulations.
First, a couple of thought experiments (for a more expansive set of thought experiments, this blog post is solid.) For each of these, think: in which case is your mind and/or body continuous throughout the whole scenario:
1) You enter a teleportation device and immediately are sent to another location
2) You enter a teleportation device, then a month later, you appear in another location.
3) You enter enter a teleportation device which sends you to another location one atom at a time.
I’ll let you ruminate on the answers. Maybe I’ll share some thoughts on my answers in a later post or addition to this one. But for now, let’s just leave it as a thought experiment that inspired the drawings on the game. The character in the game is in scenario 3, being sent one piece at a time to another part of the board — the past, present or future.
