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Rukifellth comments on More "Stupid" Questions - Less Wrong
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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.