I get it now. You’re saying that the relativism of how one may define one’s personal identity is so great that, in a quantum multiverse, even whether you are splitting into multiple selves or not is a matter of how you define yourself.
Still, that’s not the end of it, because then we can ask exactly what parts of the wavefunction are “potential person-parts”. I may have some freedom to choose whether a particular object, trait, thought, or state of mind that once existed or that could exist is “part of me”, but at some level there has to be an objective correspondence between “person-parts” and “wavefunction-parts”.
You may be a self-defining process, but the point of materialism is that this self-defining process is not something separate from the wavefunction which then freely chooses which parts of the wavefunction are going to count as “part of me”; the self-defining process is a part of the wavefunction, and the choosing about what to identify with, is just part of wavefunction dynamics. Eventually you have to ground the whole thing in physics rather than in cognition. Any thoughts on how that works?
If you ask two people, do these two people necessarily tell you the same correspondence between descriptions of matter and person-parts? You keep using that word “objective,” I do not think it means what you think it means :P
Sorry to be such a downer, but as a human my definition of anything complicated is imprecise and pretty inconsistent—if you ask me two different ways I can give you two different answers. I honestly do not know any particularly good ways to get definitions out of humans.
I guess one way is to stick to simple things—the “looking under the lamppost” approach. For example, the “computational me” who thinks some exact thought that I’m thinking is a better-defined idea than most. But on account of its simplicity it misses a lot of nuance in the human idea of “me,” and so it’s not actually very useful.
Nonetheless it’s important to attend to these “better-defined” parts of you, because that’s where we start to get away from the big distraction created by the freedom to self-define. This flexibility in the notion of self is mostly about what you get to include and exclude. So there’s a large collection of “potential self-parts”, but the potential self-parts themselves don’t exist just by definition; they are the actually existing raw material in terms of which a definition of self gets its meaning—these are a part of me, those are not. There has to be an objective account of what these “parts” are, in terms of the wavefunction ontology, and it ought to say unambiguously whether or not they “split”.
I’m not clear on what you mean by “self-parts” here, but I’m assuming you mean something like basis states that contain people like you, which you can describe people in terms of. In which case I’ve already trodden this ground—no such objective account must necessarily exist, but such things can be useful, though you still wouldn’t be able to get any two different peoples’ idealized algorithms to agree on the edge cases.
I get it now. You’re saying that the relativism of how one may define one’s personal identity is so great that, in a quantum multiverse, even whether you are splitting into multiple selves or not is a matter of how you define yourself.
Still, that’s not the end of it, because then we can ask exactly what parts of the wavefunction are “potential person-parts”. I may have some freedom to choose whether a particular object, trait, thought, or state of mind that once existed or that could exist is “part of me”, but at some level there has to be an objective correspondence between “person-parts” and “wavefunction-parts”.
You may be a self-defining process, but the point of materialism is that this self-defining process is not something separate from the wavefunction which then freely chooses which parts of the wavefunction are going to count as “part of me”; the self-defining process is a part of the wavefunction, and the choosing about what to identify with, is just part of wavefunction dynamics. Eventually you have to ground the whole thing in physics rather than in cognition. Any thoughts on how that works?
If you ask two people, do these two people necessarily tell you the same correspondence between descriptions of matter and person-parts? You keep using that word “objective,” I do not think it means what you think it means :P
Sorry to be such a downer, but as a human my definition of anything complicated is imprecise and pretty inconsistent—if you ask me two different ways I can give you two different answers. I honestly do not know any particularly good ways to get definitions out of humans.
I guess one way is to stick to simple things—the “looking under the lamppost” approach. For example, the “computational me” who thinks some exact thought that I’m thinking is a better-defined idea than most. But on account of its simplicity it misses a lot of nuance in the human idea of “me,” and so it’s not actually very useful.
Nonetheless it’s important to attend to these “better-defined” parts of you, because that’s where we start to get away from the big distraction created by the freedom to self-define. This flexibility in the notion of self is mostly about what you get to include and exclude. So there’s a large collection of “potential self-parts”, but the potential self-parts themselves don’t exist just by definition; they are the actually existing raw material in terms of which a definition of self gets its meaning—these are a part of me, those are not. There has to be an objective account of what these “parts” are, in terms of the wavefunction ontology, and it ought to say unambiguously whether or not they “split”.
I’m not clear on what you mean by “self-parts” here, but I’m assuming you mean something like basis states that contain people like you, which you can describe people in terms of. In which case I’ve already trodden this ground—no such objective account must necessarily exist, but such things can be useful, though you still wouldn’t be able to get any two different peoples’ idealized algorithms to agree on the edge cases.
I don’t mean something that contains you, I mean something that you contain.
Ooh, a non-helpful one-sentence-off!
The wavefunction is not necessarily separable.
Something had better be separable, because all is not one.