Maybe that is the answer to the Ship of Theseus question, culture, more than raw materials, is what make it what it is. Same ideas, consciousness, soul, something that runs in our mind, or the mind of enough of others, that at least in some moment made sense, worked, had a lot of people sharing it, and as with aesthetics, we are biased to like, respect or be interested in.

This evokes Lyotard's notion of narrative sense-making, in which narrative is periodic, i.e. rhythmic, in a way standing outside of time, or outside any particular moment in time, and is implicitly self-legitimizing in a way more formal thoughtforms aren't

"[A] narrative's reference may seem to belong to the past, but in reality it is always contemporaneous with the act of recitation... what is emphasized is the metrical beat of the narrative occurrences, not each performance's differences in accent... this mode of temporality can be said to be simultaneously evanescent and immemorial."

- the postmodern condition, ~1979