The abstract appeals to a few intuitions, and then vaguely waves toward a kind of slippery slope based on those intuitions, while adding that we ought to not use spatial distribution as bearing on parthood for certain kinds of entities. This has further intuitive appeal for folks who think that consciousness is a kind of emergent property.

It's a little cheeky and seems a little undergrad-ish to me, but I wouldn't call that either absurdist or postmodern.

Also what's wrong with the ship of theseus? If _you're_ tired of hearing that kind of argument, that's fine, but why dismiss it? It's thought-provoking at least, and the kind of thought it provokes has, in my opinion, some practical import