"Your honor, I could not have possibly shot that person, because yesterday might not have been before today, or at least, there is reasonable doubt that yesterday was before today, according to some physicists on crack. I treat those physicists with high regard personally though, and they have degrees that you don't have, so the court must reasonably conclude their opinions should be entertained."
I guess that's a joke, but it's actually kind of serious that causality, personhood, identity, free will, etc. are all social constructs.
They are useful to us, but every now and then it's helpful and humbling to remember it's a fiction we assign, rather than fundamental.
Criminal justice or the concept of culpability is one of these areas. I know I've seen material by Robert Sapolsky, a neuroscientist who does not believe in free will, talking about how off the mark criminal justice and punishment for crimes can be.
I think it's unclear what kind of determinism you are presuming. Determinism in the universe? Determinism in consciousness? Certainly a deterministic machine can exist in a non-deterministic universe.
However I didn't just assume a lack of free will. I also assumed a lack of identity. Do you realize that who you are is socially defined? When you breathe in, the air in the room around you becomes part of you. When you breathe out, you lose certain gases. When you eat your food, similar story. There's a good case to be made that "you" are in the entire room or the entire food chain. That does make causality and culpability hard to assess objectively. When we do so, we do so subjectively.
Don't be silly. I didn't say anything about shamans. I'm saying human existence is subjective. Culpability, like the courtroom joke above, is subjective. They're useful models for how the world works but it isn't objective reality.
We would do well to remember that every now and then. People who get too into pretending their perspective is objective reality tend to do stupid things.
Isn't identity exactly defined as what one perceives as part of oneself? Food becomes me as soon as I dis-member it to make it to be part of myself. Other food becomes you. This doesn't make food not within my sphere of perception a part of me; before digestion, it stays separate, like a virus doesn't become part of me -- the immune system acts a biological discriminator between what is part of me, and what is not. You are not me, and I am not you; we are physically attached to different matter. I understand people play mind games based on varying definitions of identity, but ultimately you will find that you have control over certain things comprised of physical matter, which then together with your mind makes up "you", and you're not in control of other things, which make them "not you". That's how I would say it is defined, after all. I am not in the entire food chain, because my perception and control simply doesn't reach that far. If I could control objects with my mind, it would be reasonable to say that they are a part of "my body", which makes them a part of me. If you use these language constructs differently, we lose the ability to communicate over them?
Seems like a long-winded way to say you suffer from anxiety.
> like a virus doesn't become part of me -- the immune system acts a biological discriminator between what is part of me, and what is not
But what about symbiotic organisms? What about your microbiome? Or the mitochondria, which began its existence as a separate organism? Or, they say our DNA includes many viruses that our ancestors contracted. A number of these things do stick with us and we sometimes even become totally dependent on them to function.
Exactly? I agree that identity is a fuzzy construct which includes socially constructed elements, and is not a fundamental "thing" that can be observed externally and then named "identity". I disagree that it is therefore "fiction"; as a concept, it is very real? My point was that I don't see how you can claim that identity is nonexistent ("lack of identity"), since the moment I use the term, I "create" and "have" it; it is a flexible enough umbrella to include the distributed system of my body, since I cannot exist separately from it? What "belongs to me" contributes to my identity.
To pick one possible simple and broad definition from WP, "Identity is the set of qualities, beliefs, personality traits, appearance, or expressions that characterize a person or a group." -- you made it sound like that set is empty, which doesn't make sense to me. My identity is part of "I". Every being has an identity; it's not something you can get rid of?
An interesting corner of philosophy for me is when people worry about perfect clones with all your memories. The only reason it bothers us is because we're not used to our doppelgangers turning up and claiming our sofas and relationships. In a polity where clones are commonplace and provision is made to inform the source and the perfect copy that their material possess will be divided or some stuff will be provided, the shock value would fade away.
It's been several years and I'm not fresh enough to summarize it, but some time ago I read Carlo Rovelli's "The Order of Time" which is a pop science book on why that isn't true. Ymmv. I'm sure many reading this know more than I do about the topic.
It’s more a philosophical book than a physics book. I’ve only skimmed it, but it presents philosophical views that don’t reflect a scientific consensus.
Well, it's just a joke. :) It doesn't necessarily have to make a lot of sense.
In any case, I find your comment very interesting. I'm studying quantum computing at the moment, and I've had to read the different interpretations of quantum mechanics, including Everett's many-worlds interpretation. As a non-physicist, I've found the different interpretations fascinating.
The many-worlds one, as far as I understood it, says that all the possible outcomes of a quantum measurement actually "happen" in different worlds. I have the impression that you would be able to give a much better explanation.
In any case, in the joke the gun is shot in the macro world, not in a quantum state. It's possible that it is a quantum gun, but probably not.
The many-worlds theory says that the time-evolution of the (universal) wave function according to the Schrödinger equation is what's real. Different "slices" ("branches") of the wave function correspond to different "worlds". (A "world" is basically defined by what is quantum-entangled together.) The wave function thus decomposes into the different worlds.
Collapse theories, in contrast, state that at specific points in time (the "measurements"), the wave function stops following the Schrödinger equation, and instead collapses to a single slice/branch/world, thus upending the natural proliferation of branches implied by the normal time-evolution of the wave function according to the Schrödinger equation.
Even in many-worlds, however, the wave function doesn't necessarily contain all conceivable worlds. It only contains the worlds, following from some initial quantum state, that follow from the Schrödinger equation. While it's true that all possible outcomes of a quantum measurement become real (because they are all contained in the wave function in superposition), "possible" here means specifically what the equations allow, not any imaginable world.
