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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32882 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

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Let's say you have content-addressed Content-addressable file system. It supports mirroring of any piece file onto multiple devices. When user saved a new file, it is saved, identifiable only through its content hash, onto two or more devices.

If you unplug any of them and plug it to a different computer, both computers will have the file.

Which is the original file and which is a copy? Neither is original, it makes no sense to talk about 'original' in digital realm (usually).

And yes, files, digital data - abstract stuff. Maybe for 'real' objects it is different? Identity Isn't In Specific Atoms

Suppose I take two atoms of helium-4 in a balloon, and swap their locations via teleportation. I don't move them through the intervening space; I just click my fingers and cause them to swap places. Afterward, the balloon looks just the same, but two of the helium atoms have exchanged positions.

Now, did that scenario seem to make sense? Can you imagine it happening?

If you looked at that and said, "The operation of swapping two helium-4 atoms produces an identical configuration—not a similar configuration, an identical configuration, the same mathematical object—and particles have no individual identities per se—so what you just said is physical nonsense," then you're starting to get quantum mechanics.

If you furthermore had any thoughts about a particular "helium atom" being a factor in a subspace of an amplitude distribution that happens to factorize that way, so that it makes no sense to talk about swapping two identical multiplicative factors, when only the combined amplitude distribution is real, then you're seriously starting to get quantum mechanics.

If you thought about two similar billiard balls changing places inside a balloon, but nobody on the outside being able to notice a difference, then...

The concept of reality as a sum of independent individual billiard balls, seems to be built into the human parietal cortex—the parietal cortex being the part of our brain that does spatial modeling: navigating rooms, grasping objects, throwing rocks.

Even very young children, infants, look longer at a scene that violates expectations—for example, a scene where a ball rolls behind a screen, and then two balls roll out.

People try to think of a person, an identity, an awareness, as though it's an awareness-ball located inside someone's skull. Even nonsophisticated materialists tend to think that, since the consciousness ball is made up of lots of little billiard balls called "atoms", if you swap the atoms, why, you must have swapped the consciousness.

The original must have the quality "created first."

But to what do you attach this metadata, if you are presented with two bit-by-bit (or atom-by-atom) identical objects? If it's a 'real world' painting on a canvas, and you make that copy, the only way to discriminate between them is some metadata - like position in space of its center of gravity or sth. That seems rather arbitrary.

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