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Rukifellth comments on More "Stupid" Questions - Less Wrong
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How do I convince someone that Open Individualism is false?
I bet tabooing/rigorously defining "subject" and "everyone" in the context of the first line of the wikipedia summary would do it. At least to the extent that the position would become either incoherent or tautological.
Subject: a word which is synonymous with person.
Everyone: All persons that exist, have existed or will exist.
Though I have a feeling these definitions aren't rigorous. I'm also stumped on "numerically identical".
I think "numerically identical" is just a stupid way of saying "they're the same".
So now we have
Now taboo "person".
(You're allowed to reword my above definition if you think I've got it wrong.)
Your definition is good, and I'm having a hard time tabooing the word person, so what if I tried making a prediction?
If Open Individualism is true, then there is no moral consequence of fission or fusion, and nothing remarkable about such a process.
That uses the word "moral", which is well known to hide many mysteries. After fissioning someone, how would you judge if your prediction was right or wrong?
Another prediction is that there is no difference between a clone of myself and another person.
It may also help to consider that my interpretation of OI seems to imply that murder is not wrong, which is quite an odd result.
Moral in this case is the adjective that labels the set of all actions that could be Right or Wrong. In turn, Right is the set of all actions that cause warmth, benign camaraderie and relief of negative emotions, and Wrong is the set of all actions that cause alienation and other suffering, as well as the extinguishment of warmth and benign camaraderie.
The reason fusion would have no such Right or Wrong consequence is that since there is only one person in the universe, there is no one who would be destroyed in such a process. Indeed, since no one has disappeared, nothing about the process will be alienating or frightening. The entire theory can serve as a solution to fusion and fission problems, though I suppose making everyone a p-zombie could also do that.
In English, at least, there appears to be no good way to differentiate between "this is the same thing" and "this is an exactly similar thing (except that there are at least two of them)". In programming, you can just test whether two objects have the same memory location, but the simplest way to indicate that in English about arbitrary objects is to point out that there's only one item. Hence the need for phrasing like "numerically identical".
Is there a better way?
I don't know if this is exactly what you're looking for, but the only way I've found to make philosophy of identity meaningful is to interpret it as about values. In this reading questions of personal identity are what you do/should value as "yourself".
Clearly you-in-this-moment is yourself. Do you value you-in-ten-minutes the same as yourself-now? ten years? simulations?, etc. Then Open Individualism (based on my cursory googling) would say we should value everyone (at all times?) identically as ourselves. Then it's clearly descriptively false, and, at least to me, seems highly unlikely to be any sort of "true values", so it's false.
::does a Google Search, finds Wikipedia page::
This appears to be a position that is either incoherent, has no practical implications, or is obviously stupid and wrong. I therefore feel justified in ignoring it.
What convinced you that it's false? Use that. (Note that "what convinced you" might not have been a direct argument, but perhaps a particular way of looking at the problem.)
I'm not convinced that it's false- I'm hoping someone could help me with that.
(*Looks up "Open Individualism"*)
It looks pretty meaningless to me. Like it's a solution proposed to a problem when the problem itself is confused. It fails the standard tests of meaningfulness: What would you expect if you believed it that you wouldn't otherwise? Suppose Open Individualism were true on Monday but false on Tuesday, what would change?
Our minds need to use some definition of personal identity in order to function: open, empty, and closed individualism are the alternatives that you can try to make your brain follow, though we're pretty strongly hardwired to use closed individualism by default and that's very difficult to overcome.
The choice of personal identity doesn't necessarily alter our predictions, but it can (temporarily at least) change our values and thereby behavior: if you believe that you are everyone, then you are much less willing to hurt others. It may also affect things such as your happiness, if it makes you feel more connected with others or if it makes the risk of your own death feel like less of an issue.
This will require careful thinking on my part- I'll get back to you in a few days. For that purpose, what are the other tests of meaningfulness?
The only other one I can think of at the moment is "Can the hypothesis be worded in a way that refers to only physical objects?"
See also this post: Making Beliefs Pay Rent (in Anticipated Experiences).
It could, if we say that consciousness (I'm still not sure how that word is thought of here) is thought to be a physical object. However, (and I am saying this tentatively), I've heard of instances where particles can be made to have no distinction, where action on one particle has effect on a particle at a distance, so there is a prior example of two physical objects being the same entity despite spatial and numerical difference.
If you don't understand consciousness then this isn't allowed.
Do you think that if we had turned out to live in a purely Newtonian universe with no quantum nonsense then no-one would have proposed Open Individualism? If not then the resolution can't lie in quantum physics.