In Identity Isn’t In Specific Atoms, Eliezer argued that even from what you called the “physical science perspective,” the two electrons are ontologically the same entity. What do you make of his argument?
What do I make of his argument? Well I’m not a PHD in Physics though I do have a Bachelors in Physics/Math so my position would be the following:
Quantum physics doesn’t scale up to macro. While swapping the two helium atoms in two billiard balls results in you not being able to tell which helium atom was which, the two billiard balls certainly can be distinguished from each other. Even “teleporting” one from one place to another will not result in an identical copy since the quantum states will all have changed just by dint of having been read by the scanning device. Each time you measure, quantum state changes so the reason why you cannot distinguish two identical copies from each other is not because they are identical it’s just that you cannot even distinguish the original from itself because the states change each time you measure them.
A macro scale object composed of multiple atoms A, B and C could not distinguish the atoms from another macro scale object composed of multiple atoms of type A, B and C in exactly the same configuration.
That said, we’re talking about a single object here. As soon as you go to comparing more than one single object it’s not the same: there is position, momentum et cetera of the macro scale objects to distinguish them even though they are the same type of object.
I strongly believe that the disagreement around this topic comes from looking at things as classes from a comp sci perspective.
From a physics perspective it makes sense to say two objects of the same type are different even though the properties are the same except for minor differences such as position and momentum.
From a compsci perspective, talking about the position and momentum of instances of classes doesn’t make any sense. The two instances of the classes ARE the same because they are logically the same.
Anyways I’ve segwayed here:
Take the two putative electrons in a previous post above: there is no way to distinguish between the two of them except by position but they ARE two separate electrons, they’re not a single electron. If one of them is part of e.g. my brain and then it’s swapped out for the other then there’s no longer any way to tell which is which. It’s impossible. And my guess is this is what’s causing the confusion. From a point of view of usefulness neither of the two objects is different from each other. But they are separate from each other and destroying one doesn’t mean that there are still two of them, there are now only one and one has been destroyed.
Dave seems to take the position that that is fine because the position and number of copies are irrelevant for him because it’s the information content that’s important.
For me, sure if my information content lived on that would be better than nothing but it wouldn’t be me.
In Identity Isn’t In Specific Atoms, Eliezer argued that even from what you called the “physical science perspective,” the two electrons are ontologically the same entity. What do you make of his argument?
What do I make of his argument? Well I’m not a PHD in Physics though I do have a Bachelors in Physics/Math so my position would be the following:
Quantum physics doesn’t scale up to macro. While swapping the two helium atoms in two billiard balls results in you not being able to tell which helium atom was which, the two billiard balls certainly can be distinguished from each other. Even “teleporting” one from one place to another will not result in an identical copy since the quantum states will all have changed just by dint of having been read by the scanning device. Each time you measure, quantum state changes so the reason why you cannot distinguish two identical copies from each other is not because they are identical it’s just that you cannot even distinguish the original from itself because the states change each time you measure them.
A macro scale object composed of multiple atoms A, B and C could not distinguish the atoms from another macro scale object composed of multiple atoms of type A, B and C in exactly the same configuration.
That said, we’re talking about a single object here. As soon as you go to comparing more than one single object it’s not the same: there is position, momentum et cetera of the macro scale objects to distinguish them even though they are the same type of object.
I strongly believe that the disagreement around this topic comes from looking at things as classes from a comp sci perspective.
From a physics perspective it makes sense to say two objects of the same type are different even though the properties are the same except for minor differences such as position and momentum.
From a compsci perspective, talking about the position and momentum of instances of classes doesn’t make any sense. The two instances of the classes ARE the same because they are logically the same.
Anyways I’ve segwayed here: Take the two putative electrons in a previous post above: there is no way to distinguish between the two of them except by position but they ARE two separate electrons, they’re not a single electron. If one of them is part of e.g. my brain and then it’s swapped out for the other then there’s no longer any way to tell which is which. It’s impossible. And my guess is this is what’s causing the confusion. From a point of view of usefulness neither of the two objects is different from each other. But they are separate from each other and destroying one doesn’t mean that there are still two of them, there are now only one and one has been destroyed.
Dave seems to take the position that that is fine because the position and number of copies are irrelevant for him because it’s the information content that’s important.
For me, sure if my information content lived on that would be better than nothing but it wouldn’t be me.