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RichardKennaway comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (2012) - Less Wrong
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How would the Sequences be different, other than in the QM parts, if we lived in a classical universe, or if we had not yet discovered QM?
Wild Mass Guessing: in a classical universe, particles are definable individuals. This breaks a whole mess of things; a perfect clone of you is no longer you, and etc.
The lack of identity of individual particles is knock down argument against our identities being based on the identities of individual particles. However, if there was identity of individual particals, this does not require that the identity of individual particles contribute to our identities, it would just remove a knock down argument against that idea.
(Almost) all the particles in our bodies are replaced anyway, on the scale of a few years. Replacement here means a period of time when you're without the molecule, and then another comes in to take its place; so it's real whether or not particles have identities. This applies to quite large things like molecules. Once we know that, personal identity rooted in specific particles is shaky anyway.
An important point.
Heraclitus probably didn't believe in lack of identity of individual particles, but he did believe we are patterns of information, not particular stuff.
EDIT: On second thought, he'd probably work out lack of identity of individual particles if pressed, following from that.
That minds are physical processes seems discoverable without knowing why matter is made of atoms and what atoms are made of. That elimination of mentalism seems sufficient to justify the ideas of uploading, destructive cryonics, artificial people, and so on.
But I'm actually more interested in what implications there are, if any, for practical rationality here and now. (I will be unmoved by the answer "But FAI is the most practical thing to work on, we'll all die if it's done wrong!!!")
Not necessarily. "What/who is you" is a matter of definition to a large extent. If particles have identities (but are still identical to all possible measurements), that doesn't stop me from defining my personhood as rooted in the pattern, and identifying with other sufficiently similar instances of the pattern.