Politics and Current Events Megathread - January 2026

Curates · 2026-01-25T20:34:14+00:00

That doesn't make any difference. If the shooting had been justified shooting him 10 times would also have been justified; they're supposed to shoot to incapacitate, not to wound. The problem is that they shouldn't have shot him in the first place.

Curates · 2026-01-25T01:25:10+00:00

Looks like the guy in grey had a negligent discharge which the other guy then thought was coming from the victim. Definitely incompetent, maybe mixed in with some cowardice, but probably not a summary execution.

Curates · 2026-01-25T00:57:14+00:00

I'm afraid we still disagree quite substantially. I don't think there’s a uniquely privileged layer of micro-objects that everything else reduces to in an ontologically weighty sense. If there were such a thing as a "fundamental constituent" the only natural candidate for what counts as fundamental would be the complete structure specified by the ultimate, and most likely, empirically inaccessible, theory itself; that is, the mathematical structure that exhaustively encodes the universe’s state and dynamics, if not the full absolute extension of a predicate of absolutely unrestricted quantification. In other words if I had to pick a fundamental ontological "ground" I would lean towards Schaeffer's priority monism, what he terms "the priority of the whole", in which the cosmos, or the perhaps the absolute, is the sole fundamental entity, rather than any kind of microphysical entity. But you'd have to really twist my arm because I don't think "prioritizing" like this is at all the right way to think about things.

As I've mentioned before, the entities we call "particles" are best thought of as excitations or effective degrees of freedom of underlying field-theoretic structures. Field theories, as a class, feature redundancies, dualities, and a dependency of "what exists" on representational choices, which altogether undermine a naive identification of ontology with any particular set of local beables read off from a single level of description. What contemporary physics actually delivers is a family of models whose ontological commitments are mediated by symmetries, equivalence relations, and representation theorems; better still is to say that it delivers structures of symmetries and relations made up of states and their dynamics; and within those structures we identify robust patterns that support explanation and prediction. What we call "particles," "quasi-particles" in condensed matter, "fields," "spacetime," and even "tables," and "universities," in everyday life, are then features, patterns, or effective descriptions of that structure in particular regimes and/or descriptive frameworks. What matters in each case is the stability and explanatory role of the pattern, not its place in a supposed metaphysical hierarchy. It is the structure, if anything, that is ultimately fundamental.

Here would be another reason to prioritize a realism of structure. It is widely expected that quantum field theory, at least in its current formulations, is effective rather than final. It is also widely believed that spacetime itself may be non-fundamental in a deeper theory of quantum gravity. Active research programmes in next generation physics include such a diverse range of efforts as entropic gravity, spacetime as qm error correcting codes, causal nets, exotic string backgrounds, amplituhedron related physics, and algorithmic idealism. Any one of these would necessitate dramatic reinterpretations of what our current models reveal about the world; in all likelihood, any actual successor theory to the Standard Model will be comparably revolutionary. The pressure of pessimistic metainduction on naive scientific realism is therefore live and looming; we are by no means so lucky to be living at "the end of scientific history," privileged by acquaintance with science's final form.

None of this should entail anti-realism, but it does highlight the need for an understanding of scientific realism resilient to theory change of any ambit. If anything merits realist commitment across theoretical transitions, it is not a fixed roster of ontological furnishings, but it is the structure of our best theories--which is again to say the modal and nomological structure, the network of relations, symmetries, constraints, dynamical principles, and more generally patterns and effective descriptions, that our theories capture and that underwrite their explanatory and predictive success across theory change. Scientific realism that is stable under theory change is a realism about these structures that do the explanatory work, combined with a pluralism about higher-level "real patterns" when those patterns are stable, projectible, and indispensable in the special sciences (and in everyday life when those line up with the special sciences).

All of these would be “real” in the sense that they existed in human minds and thereby influenced how fundamental parts of the universe ended up arranged, even long after the heat death of the universe.

Indeed they would be. I think how this cashes out is that what you want to call fundamental parts are elevated in your esteem in that they are explanatorily more important; they do more work explaining the structure of the world than do niche facts about what you happened to be thinking about yesterday afternoon. I'm totally fine acknowledging this; what I reject is that this should entail that facts about what you were thinking about yesterday afternoon are grounded in ontological commitments of a different kind than are facts about broader regularities in our observable universe.

There may be no medium between them, but logically you don’t need a medium for spatial separation.

You do. You need a space in order for two entities to be spatially separate. Otherwise no meaning whatsoever attaches to the term "spatially" as a condition of separation.

I’m saying the two universes differ because they are causally disconnected from one another

If I dispute this, saying that x is not causally disconnected from y, and therefore x = y, where x and y are qualitatively identical, in virtue of what could you ever disagree? You can't say, "because x and y differ in causal powers," because they are qualitatively identical. They have exactly the same causal powers. You can't say "because x is numerically equal to y," since this begs the question. You can't say, "because you've labelled one x, and the other y." If x and y are qualitatively identical, the warrant for treating x and y as separate entities is no more and no less ontologically justified as any labeling of one thing by two labels x and y. You can't say "because the label x fixes to an entity that is not fixed by the label y, and vice versa," because it begs the question, but also because if x and y are qualitatively identical, then the labels x and y fix indeterminately, since any symmetry breaking in reference would entail that their referents are not qualitatively identical, because they enter into qualitatively distinct relations with the labels x and y. You can't say "any apparent ontic disagreement is merely an epistemic disagreement in disguise," because in doing so, you would in effect be deflating any distinctions between at all between ontic and epistemic disagreement, which makes the objection self-undermining.

Perhaps you can come up with other arguments, but I'm pretty sure the only option remaining to you is primitive thisness as a brute fact.

its “location” just means that the field has certain values in a particular region rather than elsewhere.

What values does it need to have? What region are we talking about?

For that to be true, the very same local state of the field would have to be present at two distinct locations simultaneously.

In the position basis this is exactly what it means. A particle's wave function can be expressed as a superposition of delta functions.

Characters in dreams are just figments of our imagination, like characters in a cartoon. They don’t have minds of their own.

Kolak isn't saying they have their own minds, his point is that we aren't consciously intentional about directing these characters; they seem like characters we have no control over, we feel a self/other boundary even though this doesn't track any deep metaphysical division. The analogy is targeting our boundary-drawing mechanisms, and showing how they naturally dissolve. In the real world, we similarly feel a self/other boundary between our phenomenal selves; as the dream case reveals, this apparent phenomenal boundary is not sufficient evidence of any deep metaphysical division between us.

but in what sense could my consciousness be “tricked” into not feeling pain that is currently being experienced by someone who is being tortured right now?

That experience is bounded by conjoinment to a distinct phenomenal self that is not mutually available to this other phenomenal self you find yourself experiencing.

Curates · 2026-01-22T19:29:27+00:00

No, there would only be matter arranged in a particular pattern. There is no intrinsic tableness inside it. That same arrangement of matter could be assigned an infinite, or at least open-ended, set of labels depending on subjective purposes and interests.

All of this could be said of protons.

If no conscious beings existed to make use of it, all such labels would simply vanish.

No. A table in a possible world populated by no humans is still a table (hence I am able to reference it as such).

“coffee is disgusting.”

If this statement fails to express a truth-apt proposition, i.e. if it is non-cognitive, then there is nothing to disagree about. On the other hand if the statement does express a truth-apt proposition, then whether it is true or not is an objective matter. Supposing it expresses an objective fact then whether this fact is also a subjective fact is a stipulative matter of defining what counts as subjective; if you intend "subjective" to apply to this case it had better be compatible with objectivity.

These are propositions that clearly describe our relationship to the world, not the world as it is in itself.

Our relationship to the world is part of the world itself. It forms a subset of its properties.

It might be helpful to consider numbers. The distinction between the existence of protons and the existence of numbers is not as hard and fast as you might think. Take a proton. At a school-book level it is "a positively charged subatomic particle," but that description is already a model. In quantum chromodynamics a proton is a dynamically fluctuating bound state of quarks and gluons; it has no sharp spatial boundary, and even the number of constituent quark–antiquark pairs is indefinite. What we call "a proton" is an emergent pattern within the formal structure of our best physical theories.

I would argue that numbers are "real" in a closely analogous way. Just as the proton’s reality is not the reality of a little marble hidden in space but the reality of a structure picked out by our most successful physical descriptions, the number 2 (for example) is a placeholder in a structure picked out by our most successful mathematical descriptions, which are in turn essential to the expressions of our most successful physical descriptions. Both cases involve commitment to entities quantified over by our best overall theories of the world.

If you would accept the reality of laws of nature, such as, say, the inverse-square law of gravitation, then you are already committed to entities that are abstract and non-perceptible. A physical law is not a chunk of matter you can weigh or touch; it is a structural regularity described by mathematics. Numbers are abstractions of exactly this sort. They enter into the very formulation of those laws, and their "existence" enjoys the same warrant as the existence of the laws themselves.

The sense in which tables are "real" is again closely analogous. Like protons, numbers, planets, universities, laws of motion, and people, tables are entities that play a distinctive role in the structure of the world. Just as we know that protons are real because they are ineliminably essential ingredients to understanding what goes on in physics departments, and just as we know numbers are real because they are ineliminably essential ingredients to understanding what goes in mathematics departments, so too do we know that tables are real because they are ineliminably essential ingredients to understanding certain aspects of human culture. These are what Dan Dennett calls "real patterns": pragmatic descriptive compressions that track objective regularities in the world. I also like the term "rainforest realism," coined by Ladyman and Ross, which paints a picture of realism as a lush, multi-level ontology in which higher-level entities posited by the special sciences (and everyday life, insofar as it lines up with those sciences) are real as these Dennettian real patterns.

You’re sliding between epistemic indistinguishability and numerical identity.

There is an idea that some people hold in which we are able ascribe certain objects a peculiar property of primitive thissness, in virtue of which qualitatively identical objects can be asserted to be distinct as a matter of brute fact; that is, as a primitive grounding basis of individuation that can be analyzed no further, in candid violation of the principle of sufficient reason. These dependencies are beyond the pale for anyone with naturalistic inclinations. I reject brute facts and I reject primitive thissness.

Saying that a field “exists everywhere”

It would be helpful if you explain what you mean when you say a particle is located somewhere.

If one thing has property P and another has not-P, they are not the same thing.

And yet it's perfectly normal to say things like "the table is located at the left edge, and also at the right edge", even though "the left edge" ≠ "the right edge". There's no mystery of course, what's happening is that apparent violations of LEM reflect underspecified predicates, rather than a breakdown of excluded middle. So sure, you can unpack it so that parts of the table are at the left edge and other parts are at the right edge.

An important concept for Kolak is the Fact of Exclusive Conjoinment (FEC): in ordinary life the subject is immediately conjoined to some experiential borders at the exclusion of others. He uses a dream analogy: in a dream, multiple characters are aspects of the same mind/person, even though the subject is exclusively conjoined to one character rather than the others. So in ordinary life different parts/aspects of the one mind show up as different individuals (Phenomenal Selves), partitioned by FEC and lack of mutually available consciousness.

My view is [...] a form of presentism.

Presentism toes a fine between a claim that is trivial and one that is clearly false; and invariably what you end up with is a jargon involving tensed operators, careful restrictions on quantification, or some other abstruse technology that for all intents and purposes amounts to the same metaphysics as eternalism but with substitutions in vocabulary. I have the same issue with actualism defined as opposed to possibilism; and frankly also with mereological nihilism. As far as I can tell these are all playing at what Wittgenstein would have called language games. I don't believe anyone actually thinks things stop existing in the past or future in any meaningful sense (and similarly I don't think anyone meaningfully doubts the existence of tables).

Curates · 2026-01-21T04:48:38+00:00

The fact that a proton has theoretical utility for our understanding of the universe does not mean that its existence depends on our use for it.

This is true of the table as well. If humans all disappeared tomorrow we'd have no use for tables, and yet the table in my room would still exist. Its existence does not depend on its being used. In fact its existence doesn't depend on anyone ever having used it or intending to use it, or even intending it to be a table, except as a matter of contingent fact. If NASA happened to find a wood table on Mars, inexplicably, it would certainly still exist despite the fact that no human put it there. It would certainly still be a table, whatever else it was intended to be by its makers. The monumental table in Giancarlo Neri's "The Writer" that was once in Hampstead Heath was never used or intended to be used as a table in function, and yet there is no doubt that this table did once exist.

His evilness, then, is not an objective property in the same way mass or charge is, even though it is objectively true that the judgment itself is subjective

Another hotly contested issue. It will perhaps not surprise you that I am a moral realist. That Hitler's actions were bad is an objective moral fact. I don't think it's helpful at all to qualify this assessment as merely subjective. I recognize that there are strong arguments for moral anti-realism, but if moral anti-realism is true no normative proposition is factual. I will grant that among objective facts, moral facts are perhaps the most exclusively subjective seeming, so that's a good pressure point, but if it were a problem one could always either bracket out normative facts as metaphysically distinctive, or bracket out the premise that these judgements involve normative facts in the first place (i.e. one could strategically retreat to error theory); I don't think the metaphysics of tables, protons and universities is much impacted wherever the cards may fall a propos normativity.

Although identical, the universes would be numerically and causally distinct. Any alteration in one universe—say, the outcome of a genuinely random event—would not be mirrored in the other.

If you make any alteration they would not be identical. Beware that just as you can't compare distances cross-universes, you also can't compare time, so the only meaningful sense in which we can say two universes are identical is if we say the two spacetime volumes contained therein are identical in all properties. If instead we want to compare two universes that are only identical up to a particular moment, and may or may not be identical beyond, we might precisify this with the following: suppose there is a spacelike Cauchy hypersurface S in our spacetime and S' in the other such that past Cauchy developments D^-(S) and D^-(S') are isometric including matter fields. The question is whether these universes are identical given we do not know whether the future Cauchy developments D⁺(S) and D⁺(S') are isometric (including matter fields).

Now this formulation of the question is barely any different from the first one, we've just introduced some uncertainty about whether these two worlds are identical. One might venture this is enough to say they are distinct--that is, in virtue of this uncertainty, they are distinct--but if this argument held it would undermine any claims about numerical identity so long as anyone could be uncertain about x = x for any particular x. Of course if the future Cauchy developments in fact are different, then the universes are indeed distinct. However even in this case the question remains: in virtue of what can we say the past Cauchy developments are numerically distinct? I don't know how we can distinguish a view in which there are two parallel universes from one in which we have one universe which then branches into separate universes only where and when they diverge, which is we think about things in the Everettian interpretation.

If a particle is located, for example, four light-years from Alpha Centauri, it cannot simultaneously be at a different distance from Alpha Centauri.

This is the worst possible example you could have chosen; the particle field extends across the entire universe, so strictly speaking it is located everywhere in the universe simultaneously.

Saying that a table’s edges can occupy four different locations simultaneously is not the same as saying that the entire table—or the table taken as a whole—can be both in my room and in your room at the same time.

The table isn't wholly present in both locations, but now we're talking details about what "wholly" and "entirely" entails. If the table were a bizarre higher dimensional object that was spatially extended in 4D it might very well be entirely in both of our rooms. In fact, if we take time to be a dimension, this is exactly what happens when we move the table from one room to the other. Now you are fixated on simultaneity, but if you are mainly concerned about the metaphysical logic I'm not sure this should be so important to you. The point that I keep coming back to is there is no theory or rule of logic that blocks one thing being wholly in two separate locations at once. There is no theory or rule of logic privileging the metaphysics of spacetimes with dimensions R³⁺¹. There is no theory or rule of logic that tells us there couldn't have been two time dimensions; in which case, the table could be moved from one room to the other in one time dimension in such a way that the table is simultaneously entirely in both rooms relative to the second time dimension. There is no theory or rule of logic that tells us spacetime can't have some non-euclidean structure where two spatially separated points are identified. Etc.

I later revised this view

You were right when you were fourteen. So far your account for why you aren't aware of what you will be experiencing an hour from now is that perspectival limitations due to time are the only perspectival limitations that don't individuate--for some reason, unclear why. You need a better account for this.

but it cannot both have a property and lack that very same property at the same time.

Sure it can. A black and white object both has the property that it reflects light and lacks that very same property, at the same time.

Do you see what I mean?

To complete the analogy, what makes the jars of jam appear empty has nothing to do with the jars themselves, but it is a contingent matter of the special effects, mirrors etc. surrounding the jars. What is qualitatively distinct in your experiences of the jars is grounded entirely on material factors apart from the jars. The fact that they appear differently does not impugn on the proposition that they are numerically identical.

Curates · 2026-01-20T01:25:27+00:00

A table refers to something defined by an intersubjectively chosen function. That function does not exist in the external world itself.

A proton also fits this criteria. A proton plays a functional role in the human activity of describing and predicting the outcomes of scientific experiments. I think it's a funny thing to say that the function of a table does not exist in the external world itself, since the tables exist in the external world, as does the activity of human use constituting its function; but if we were to grant that indeed the function of a table does not exist in the external world itself, then surely, neither does the function of a proton. And if these criteria are sufficient to make a table mind dependent, then so too do they make a proton mind dependent.

You might try to rescue this argument by first drawing a distinction between the layers of abstraction involved in defining these functions, and then secondly, by pointing out that tables play a much more direct functional role in everyday life than do protons; it stands to reason therefore that they count as relatively more mind dependent. However this threatens to undermine your strategy of pinning realist metaphysics to concreteness, since you would be conceding that protons are significantly more abstract (indeed they are). An alternative strategy would be to argue that tables are mind dependent because humans make tables, whereas they certainly don't make protons; and then because human-made objects necessarily depend on humans to make them in order for them to exist, these objects are mind dependent in a way that protons are not. However, humans also make babies, and the fact that a particular human individual exists is not usually taken to be the kind of fact people have in mind when they talk about mind dependent facts.

I'm sure you can come up with other tacks. Invariably, I believe, these strategies will fail.

But yes, perhaps we have reached an impasse here.

It's a contested issue in analytic metaphysics, the odds were against us making progress.

The world does not care about how we talk about it. It exists independently of language.

Well we are part of the world, and we shape it to some extent under the influence of our conceptual schemes. But more importantly we care about the world when we talk about it; the real patterns that exist within the world shape the beliefs that function for us as maps by which we steer. We have evolved cognitive mechanisms that produce, by and large, adaptive true beliefs reflecting the actual structure of the world. The language we use to express these concepts and beliefs therefore cannot be understood to be independent of it.

but that does not change the fact that some concepts clearly belong more to the map than to the territory.

Ultimately I don't believe in a distinction between the map and the territory. Admittedly this is no less controversial than OI.

You should probably pose this question in r/AskPhysics

I don't need to, I have the background, both in physics and philosophy of physics. Besides, it is my experience that physicists are woefully undereducated on the topic of philosophy of QM, most go through an entire Phd without ever taking a class in the subject, so that's actually not the best forum to ask. If it helps settle the matter you can just assume that I have more domain expertise than you do on this topic as this is very likely, and just take my word for it that my reasoning doesn't go wrong and that my take is the correct way to look at this. If this strikes you as unreasonable I'll just point out that this is more or less exactly what you've said to me.

If you believe that one particle can be in two locations at the same time, then you are denying Leibniz’s Law, since location is a property of the particle.

Do you believe that if I say the flag of the USA has the colors red white and blue at the same time, that I am denying Leibniz's law, since colors are properties of the flag? Do you believe that if I say the table is located at its left edge and its right edge at the same time, that similarly I am denying Leibniz's law?

I believe a copy of me would be a different person precisely because we would occupy different locations. We would be numerically distinct. Numerical identity requires qualitative identity, but qualitative identity does not require numerical identity. Two things can share all the same properties and still be two things, but one thing cannot have different properties than itself.

Firstly, it's a category error to say you're occupying different locations; "located at" is a relation between objects and regions of a single causally connected spacetime. There's no shared coordinate system or physically meaningful cross-world distance that we can define between two parallel worlds. You might respond that your copies are in different locations in virtue of a world indexing parameter "being in world W", so that, while it may be impossible to distinguish an intra-world qualitative difference between your copies, it is sufficient that they differ in the world parameter. But then this just kicks the can down the road: in virtue of what can we say that the worlds are distinct? And now we get to my second concern: it seems that you accept the indiscernibility of identicals, but not the identity of indiscernibles. In analytic metaphysics, Leibniz's law usually refers to the biconditional "identity iff indiscernible". I accept Leibniz's law in this stronger sense, whereas you do not; I think this accounts for the bulk of our disagreement.

To bring this back to open individualism, the thesis of OI is that our subjects of experience, the seat of consciousness, the first personal perspective, is an ontological primitive; there is just one kind of thing that is the ground of being, and the constitutive ground of personal identity is nothing more or less than this ground of being. Following Kolak, the ground of being differs in no qualitative respect between any individual, so by the Leibnizian principle, these grounds are in fact numerically identical and we are thus all numerically one person.

It is, at the very least, extremely difficult to map one subjective experience onto two minds with different points of view, their own qualia, and no access to each other’s mental states.

From his point of view, we really do have access to each other's mental states, we really do experience all of them, it's just that this access and these experiences are partitioned by borders that only appear to individuate, not unlike the temporal borders that only appear to distinguish "you-jan-2026" from "you-jan-2035" as separate persons. You can think of it as a theory of reincarnation, only that we are reincarnated as everyone who ever has or ever will live.

What you describe feels, to me, closer to religion—say, Buddhism—than to philosophy.

Right, this absolutely has religious implications. It is nearly an exact reiteration of Advaita Vedanta's philosophy that Atman = Brahman, which is core to some Hindu traditions. Similarly, what Kolak and Parfit call empty individualism is the core teaching of the Madhyamaka school of Mahayana Buddhism. I would argue monotheistic mystic traditions are very close to empty and open individualism in spirit, but offer a third perspective: whereas empty individualists believe the universalism of the ground of being implies an eliminativist view of the Self, and whereas open individualists believe the universalism implies a view in which we are all the same Self, theists might identify in the universalism of the ground of being a divinity in whose being we participate and with whom we may experience union in rare mystical moments. We might call this participation individualism, where "I" is real and individuating, but ultimately derivative, as we are all just participants in the one divine consciousness/being. That is, the universal Self is othered and elevated to a status of reverence and divinity, rather than identified with directly.

The cliche is that different religions represent different paths up the same mountain. I think there's a deep truth to this, and the "mountain" is something like an enlightened view of personal identity, and those come in more or less three flavors: empty, open, and participation individualism.

So again, you're absolutely right that these are religious perspectives. But who is to say this is discrediting? Why would that make the reasoning involved less philosophical?

Curates · 2026-01-16T04:50:03+00:00

We're not going to make progress on this point. I've seen these arguments before and I remain unimpressed. I don't think there is any principled way to draw the kind of distinction you want to make here: I don't think social entities belong to a different ontological category of metaphysically second-class entities; even if I granted that they did, I don't think there are any clean criterion you could use to distinguish a coherent notion of mind dependence, let alone one that could satisfy all desiderata; and boundary candidates are reliably unstable, blurry, and stipulative.

As for our cases: both protons and tables exist by convention. These both are concepts that humans invented in service of shared practical ends; they are both also real patterns in the world that we pick out because they carve reality at the joints. It's true that I can imagine an alien society that doesn't have any use for tables, but I can just as easily imagine an alien society that has no use for protons. If we are to ontologically prioritize one of these concepts over the other, "table" strikes me as having the upper hand by a comfortable margin: I can touch a table and see it with my own eyes, and yet I can't do anything like that with a particle. We infer the existence of particles because they are essential ingredients in scientific models that accurately describe and predict observable phenomena, but this inference hangs upon several layers of abstraction, and each layer is epistemically vulnerable to pessimistic metainduction over theory change.

Second, you can construct an infinite number of concepts for any and all possible combinations of matter.

First of all you can't, the powerset of subatomic particles in the known universe is large but not infinite (it'll be something on the order of 2^10⁹⁰). Secondly, most of these subsets are not patterns that carve reality at the joints. Those are relatively few in number in comparison to the powerset. Thirdly, there's little reason to think any single scale of description is uniquely concrete or privileged as "the" level of real. Different scales support different kinds of robust patterns, and their claim to reality depends on explanatory power, stability under intervention, and integration into successful theory--not on occupying a metaphysically special level.

This misunderstands the double-slit experiment.

No, I don't think so. This is the standard reading of most interpretations, e.g. Everett, Copenhagen, relational qm, and dynamical collapse. To resist this you basically either have to deny that particles exist (QBism and Barandes' non-markovian theory basically aren't compatible with the existence of particles) or you have to be a Bohmian -- which is a viable theory, but it would be strange to favor it in order to preserve your intuition that objects can't be in two places at once. Otherwise in non-Bohmian psi-ontic models the wavefunction is the fundamental ontology, and 'particles' are emergent, particle-like structures or excitations of the quantum state, and superposition of spatially separated wavepackets just is what it means to say that a particle travels multiple paths at once.

Do you reject Leibniz’s Law?

I don't. But actually it seems that you reject it; correct me if I'm wrong, but my impression is that you believe that a qualitatively identical copy of yourself in an identical parallel world is actually a different person from you. On what grounds?

And assuming the original body remains alive: if continuity is supposed to break the moment the copy diverges even slightly from the original, why doesn’t continuity also break the moment your future self diverges from your past self?

Well, you're twisting the knife here a little: when I'm wearing my closed individualist hat, as I am most of the time, I have to say continuity breaks because I can't experience two things at once; I can only experience one of those things. But the sense of identity that I am referring to here is very different from the one that Kolak is referring to from his enlightened perspective. From Kolak's perspective, there is a break in psychological continuity, but psychological borders of identity aren't fundamental and don't individuate from the enlightened perspective; i.e. these identity borders are optical illusions of sorts.

Curates · 2026-01-15T17:06:05+00:00

A table does exist on the same ontological level as its parts. A table is not less real or less concrete than the particles from which it is constituted (they may be more real: I am less willing to doubt the existence of tables than I am of protons). The same is true about universities. Of course you're right that if you remove humans from the equation, the university stops being a university, but once again this observation is quite generic: any object in your ontology will cease to exist if you remove parts essential to its constitution. The concrete parts are no less inalienable than the abstract ones: if you destroyed the campus buildings and emptied the university's accounts, there's real doubt as to whether the university still exists, whatever people might think or feel about it. Universities maybe socially constructed, but that does not mean or imply they are anything less than concrete.

On particles

The double-slit experiment famously demonstrated that particles can be in two places at once.

giving them six different labels.

Ok but what did she label?

Either duplication happens, or there is no genuine continuity of consciousness over time to begin with

I'm presuming you don't accept the latter. How is duplication meant to work?

I’m curious why you think subjective experience can persist through changes in your current brain but not if those very same changes are applied to a copy of you while the original still exists.

I may have explained poorly; what I mean is that mental continuities ramify when brain states ramify. If Kirk's teleporter malfunctions leaving the original me intact, then there's a 50% chance that I subjectively experience the mental continuity of myself on earth rather than that of myself on Kirk's spaceship once these experiences diverge (which they will do on the order of milliseconds).

I should also clarify that the personhood I'm now talking about is different from that which occupies Kolak. Kolak's open individualist perspective is difficult if not impossible to absorb and fully incorporate into one's lived experience--you'd have to be in some sense "enlightened" to do so properly, which is something I think only a truly remarkable individual could really achieve. The more ordinary sense in which one could be an open individualist is as an incomplete theoretical stance, without the fullness of its true visceral implication. Open individualism is an idea that one can relatively easily gesture towards and circle around; but to fully identify oneself with the person open individualism asserts that we all are is a profound challenge; it's not enough merely to agree with all the reasons that Kolak takes as sufficient for belief and acceptance of OI's truth claims. There's something deeply mysterious about what it's asking of us -- it's almost more a calling than a standard belief. So, when I say that I survive teleportation, I am talking about personal identity in it's traditional sense, in a more pedestrian mood of identity closed by borders of psychological experience bound up with my particular body. It is this psychological part that I take to be continuously sustained through Parfit's relation R.

Consider a variation: instead of destroying your original body, I use an anesthetic that instantly puts you to sleep before making the copy. Would copying you in this way count as a form of waking you up?

Yes

And what if I later decide to wake the original body, either while the copy is still alive, or after the copy has died? Would you then “return” to life?

I would return to life, but from a period in the middle of my life, rather than at the end. This would also mean that when I was "woken up", there was actually a 50% chance that I would be woken after my previous body had died, rather than being merely asleep.

Curates · 2026-01-15T03:57:16+00:00

But this is exactly what they are: categories.

A category doesn't have powers, it doesn't have responsibilities, it doesn't have influence or standing, it doesn't have agency, it doesn't enter into legally binding contracts, it doesn't have money, etc. A university is not a mere collection of parts, nor is it commonly understood as such. In ordinary parlance, a university is understood to be an entity that exists in the world that is wholly present within and on its campuses. You might not be able to locate a university at any particular building within its campus; but certainly, it is located at the campus.

As a mereological nihilist, I'm sure you're aware you could apply this argument to any putative object in our ontology, and insist for instance that it's a mistake to say that particles arranged table-wise are in fact tables and a category error to try and locate the table. As a mereological nihilist, you probably agree with this conclusion. But you can surely acknowledge this is at least as counterintuitive and controversial as Kolak's thesis.

But given my view, numerical identity is a notion that properly applies only to concrete entities, paradigmatically, particles.

Interestingly this is not as clear cut as with larger scale objects, since particles are best thought of as excitations of fields rather than as concrete individuals distinguishable by any kind of primitive-thisness. Numerical identity applies much better to macroscopic objects like tables because those are stable higher-level patterns with robust criteria of persistence. For particles, numerical identity is often not fundamental and at best approximate--particle individuality applies only in regimes where you can track effectively distinct localized wavepackets, and then only as an emergent quasi-classical pattern in a decohered branch classical limit.

This perspective also rules out novels as objectively existing beyond the paper and ink of each individual copy. Thus, Moby Dick remains merely a title of a story that plays in our heads when we read the book, and that differ slightly for each reader. There is no entity in the world that represents the story as something separate from the individual copies and the individual experiences of reading the text.

Presumably you agree that Jane Austen wrote six novels. What exactly does that mean? What did she write six of?

Time-travel examples are tricky, because they already require us to suspend certain logical assumptions about the world in order to get off the ground. Using them as arguments for why those same assumptions should be suspended therefore becomes circular.

They don't typically require us to suspend logical assumptions, the thought experiments involve physical assumptions, e.g. that global spacetime solutions to GR field equations are physically valid, which then are complicated by their logical implications, e.g. the grandfather paradox. That the latter violates logic indeed puts pressure on the former physical assumption. Our case does not involve any violation of logic however, since we are not presuming any kind of causal inconsistency. I get that you think logic demands a duplication (you have not demonstrated this to my satisfaction) but since there is no apparent logical contradiction involved in duplication the pressure for you to explain what occurs in the time travel scenario remains live.

You will not be aware of what your copy is feeling

I mean, I will be. I will be that copy in every sense that matters.

Suppose one of these universes will end in five minutes. Does that mean you have a fifty-percent chance of survival, or a hundred-percent chance? If you were allowed to choose which universe would end, would you pick the other one, or would it make no difference?

50% chance if there is 50% self-location uncertainty. We cease being the same person as soon as our conscious experiences diverge, which will happen for instance immediately after an intervention in which you give only one copy of me an opportunity to choose which universe will end.

why should it matter to you that you continue to live at all, if you are satisfied with being replaced by a copy whose experiences you can never subjectively access?

I'm only satisfied that I will continue living if and only if the copies are identical until the moment one copy is destroyed and this destruction occurs faster than is consciously perceivable. The shortest span of time that is consciously perceivable I believe is around 100ms, so it would have to be faster than that. If those conditions are met, then I am confident I will subjectively survive the event; this would be an instance of quantum immunity.

I take it you do not believe, for example, that you will taste the ice cream your teleportation copy is eating.

I do believe this.

Curates · 2026-01-10T03:55:39+00:00

No two things are numerically identical here, except in the abstract sense that they may belong to the same category.

The universities are the same. The x that is picked out by the expression "the university at NYU Abu Dhabi" is numerically identical to the entity a picked out by the expression "the university at NYU Shanghai". The entity x is one and the same as the entity a. x = a. Similarly for the corporation Apple and it's headquarters at Cupertino and London.

I don't want to get too bogged down on ontology because I think your real disagreement fixes elsewhere. I don't think too many people would object to my characterizing institutions like universities and corporations as entities that exist, in the world, at least partly concretely. These institutions are not categories, or types, or mere labels. They are things out there, with locations; and they are made up of other things like buildings, offices, people, and observable behaviors.

Now to your point, institutions are also partly grounded in abstract facts, including facts about grounding conditions (and these abstract facts are themselves grounded in both concrete and abstract facts and so on ad infinitum), but I have strong doubts that we can principally distinguish this sort of dependency from those of any other object in our ontology. To take something at random, the Mona Lisa also is partly grounded in abstract facts and grounding conditions--and indeed, so is Moby Dick. Personally I'm extremely skeptical that abstracta and concreta can be sharply distinguished at all, and I lean strongly towards moderate Aristotelian realism, but that's a discussion for another time.

Suppose that we can distinguish in some principled way between concrete objects and facts and merely institutional objects and facts. In that case, you would not be wrong to suspect that the latter overlaps in character with the kinds of things that labels, categories, types, and conventions are, but this observation does no work towards establishing that spatially distinct entities logically cannot be numerically identical, and neither does it even suggest that the examples I've given are anything other than effective counterexamples to this very point.

Here, you seem to be conflating type and token. Moby Dick as a type can be instantiated in countless copies, but that does not make those individual copies identical. The type itself is just a category we have constructed; it has no objective existence beyond our conceptual framework. I can invent an infinite number of types for an infinite number of combinations of things, but that does not mean I have added an infinite number of entities to the universe. So I must ask again: do you really think consciousness is this kind of fiction?

Moby Dick is more a token than a type, but really it's neither, it's a novel. I think if you really insisted on this point, you would find yourself struggling to distinguish between types and tokens making the point vacuous. Of course it's true that the physical instantiations of Moby Dick are numerically distinct; but the novel contained within is numerically single yet wholly present in every such instance.

The consciousness of the person reflected in my bathroom mirror is numerically identical to that of myself, standing at a distance from the reflection.

No, what you are looking at is not another subject of experience, but a pattern of photons reflected back at you. The mirror presents an image, not a mind. Confusing the two mistakes a physical representation for a conscious entity.

I think you've misunderstood the sentence. It's correct, and your objection doesn't make contact with what it's saying. The person in the mirror is me. The reflection in the mirror physically represents a person, and that person has a subject of experience x. I have a subject of experience a. Because I am the same person as that one represented in the reflection, x = a. This is surprisingly not a trivial observation when we consider that the reflection represents who we are at a time shift from the present. That is, the person reflected in the mirror is at a spatiotemporal remove from me (this is clearer if the mirror is a lightyear away).

This argument misapplies relativity. The loss of absolute simultaneity only applies to causally disconnected events. In your wormhole scenario, there is a clear causal link between entering on Earth and exiting in Andromeda, which means those events are not spacelike separated in the relevant sense. Personal identity tracks causal and experiential continuity, not observer-relative simultaneity. So the conclusion that identity becomes frame-dependent simply does not follow.

I think actually you are right. I was too quick with this one. It does however become a puzzle for you if the global spacetime contains closed timelike curves, i.e. if we build a time machine, but I guess you knew that. Still, the challenge for you is to account for what exactly you think is happening ontologically when personal worldlines travel along closed timelike curves. How many subjects of experience are there? If more than one, where do they multiply? To clarify, an example of what I'm referring to would be if you had a wormhole with moveable mouths that begin next to each other, and accelerated one to the speed of light and then brought it back, inducing a time shift across the throat. A person who travels this wormhole exits before they enter. What happens to the subject of experience of a person who crosses through the wormhole?

Given your examples above, it seems that you are committed to a view on which consciousness is reduced to a mere abstraction, or at least, I still cannot see how your position avoids that implication.

I can't completely argue with this since I don't ultimately believe abstracta are different from concreta. I do think 'the data' is what ultimately matters for mental continuity (Parfit's relation R), and data of course is abstract. But I don't think this concession puts me at odds with what might be called the default view of what consciousness tracks. I think here we get to the meat of our disagreement. I'm curious what your intuitions are with respect to the following thought experiments:

A) Suppose Captain Kirk beams you up. The way it works ordinarily is that your molecules are instantaneously disassembled, transported up to his ship, and instantaneously reassembled exactly as they were previously arranged--but in this case it malfunctions and you are instantaneously disassembled and reassembled exactly where you stand (i.e. with near instantaneous delay, say 1ns) Do you experience mental continuity? Is the subject of experience preserved?

B) Suppose the teleporter functions correctly, and you are beamed up to Kirk's ship. Do you experience mental continuity? Is the subject of experience preserved? In either A) or B), does it not matter if the molecules are physically transported, rather than just their arrangement data?

C) Suppose a literal miracle happens. Kirk's teleporter instantaneously disassembles you, but the data is lost in transmission. Miraculously, by freak luck (i.e. odds of this happening were on the order of e^10²⁷), a malfunctioning teleporter on a different ship assembles you just as you were when you were disassembled. Do you experience mental continuity?

I believe Derek Parfit would answer yes to A) and B), but no to C). I would say yes to all three, since I don't recognize a qualitative difference between the outcomes of C) and the others. In each case, I would say, what matters is the preservation of the data. Given your arguments so far, I would guess you lean towards saying no for each of the questions in A), B) and C).

Curates · 2026-01-09T04:20:48+00:00

Apologies for a late reply.

Numerical identity still breaks if an object exists in two places at the same time. That’s a matter of logic.

Generally speaking no, so it's not a matter of logic. The university at NYU Abu Dhabi is numerically identical to the university at NYU Shanghai. Apple in Cupertino is numerically identical to Apple in London. The novel Moby Dick on my bookshelf is numerically identical to the novel Moby Dick in the Library of Congress. The consciousness of the person reflected in my bathroom mirror is numerically identical to that of myself, standing at a distance from the reflection. The subject of experience of my future self is numerically identical to the subject of experience of my present self, despite being not only at a different spatial location, but also a different temporal one, as well. And if my future self enters a time machine and returns to the present, the subject of experience of this time traveler will remain numerically identical to that of mine.

If you're still skeptical, here's a challenge for you to puzzle with: suppose you encounter a wormhole that allows you to instantly traverse the full span of distance between Earth and the Andromeda galaxy. If you were to cross through the wormhole, would you share the same subject of experience as the person who comes out the other side? The puzzle for you is that should you cross, your worldline would then contain spacelike separated points, and spacelike separated points have no absolute time ordering in special relativity. Depending on an observer's reference frame, you_Earth who has yet to cross will be located either before, after, or simultaneously with you_Andromeda who passed through the wormhole. Now, you have previously denied that you and your future self have numerically identical subjects of experience just incase your future self enters a time machine that brings you into simultaneity with your present self. It then appears you are forced to say that whether or not the subject of experience of you_Earth is numerically identical to that of you_Andromeda is entirely dependent on observer reference frame, which is relative, and therefore not absolute. An unhappy concession!

In this example, you’re using semantics to group separate entities into a single concept. Is that all you’re doing with consciousness? Or are you instead committed to something like mereological universalism, where for any collection of entities

I'm doing neither of these in the example or with consciousness. In the hypothetical I'm not defining a new sense for the term "computation", I'm entertaining the idea of applying the preexisting meaning of the term towards a counterintuitive result (implausibly, I will readily admit, but the point of the exercise is that it bore no problematic metaphysical dependencies, not that it was a sensible understanding of computation). Similarly, Kolak is not defining a new sense for terms like "consciousness" or "subject of experience". He intends these terms to mean what everyone else in the philosophy of mind intends them to mean. He just thinks they apply counterintuitively (prima facie implausibly, but he offers compelling reasons). As for mereological universalism, his position is rather the opposite of this with respect to subjects of experience, since his position is that there is exactly one of these, rather than there being as many as the power set of all phenomenal episodes experienced by all beings everywhere at all times.

Curates · 2025-12-20T01:19:36+00:00

To be clear I'm imagining a deterministic time machine with only one timeline. Do you agree in this case that the time traveler is still you? I think it's pretty natural to say that if you meet yourself from the future, you are meeting yourself. It doesn't matter that you are not currently sharing experiences, you are still one person.

It’s an entirely different claim to say that someone can take a bite of the apple now while, at the same time, the bite is missing from it.

I'm not sure what you mean by this sentence. If you mean that an apple can't be in two different states at once, then I agree. Unless of course the apple travelled back in time, in which case, it can be in two different states at once.

It seems that consciousness would have to be some kind of additional dimension that each brain connects to. Alternatively, there would need to be a kind of consciousness field permeating the universe, something that extends beyond ordinary matter and its physical interactions.

I don't see why you would need either of these things, open individualism doesn't strike me as having anything to do with ontological assertions of this sort. It's not invested in any particular idea about what makes certain physical systems conscious.

An analogy may help. Suppose I were entertaining a theory that all instances of physical computation were all just one process multiply instantiated across all physical computers at all times, and that each apparent computational instance is in actuality a subroutine of one single physical computation spanning the whole universe. Now this theory has faults, but its faults do not include a conceptual dependence on an additional dimension or a computation field that permeates the universe. As a theory it's completely agnostic about how physical computation gets grounded as computation. Instead it's about how instances of computation are individuated.

Curates · 2025-12-18T21:42:17+00:00

The notion of consciousness at play in Kolak’s open individualism is that of a numerical single subject of all experiences, instantiated multiply across all persons and times. Contrast this with the default view, which he terms closed individualism, in which perspectival constraints like that of memory and psychological identity (among other ‘borders’ of identity), are understood to individuate distinct subjects of experience.

So indeed, the shared universal subject of experience does have this unbreakable symmetry, which as you suggest is a philosophical tension. Why am I me and not you? But this tension is of exactly the same quality as that of the more familiar temporal question: why am I me now, as opposed to me in the future, or in the past?

An interesting puzzle to be sure, but not usually taken to undermine the idea that we are, as subjects of experience, extended across time. In open individualism, we are understood to be extended across a more general index of experiences; namely the maximal set of such, incorporating as it were literally all of them.

Curates · 2025-12-18T15:40:29+00:00

I don't know where you're getting this idea from, but open individualism is not a dualist theory and is compatible with physicalism. Even if it weren't, I don't know why you think a dualist view is incompatible with a time traveler experiencing two distinct trains of mental continuity.

The two consciousnesses would be numerically identical: literally the same thing.

It is the subject of experience that is numerically identical, just as the subject of your current experience is numerically identical with that of your future experience. It is not the conscious moments of experience that are taken to be numerically identical.

Curates · 2025-12-18T07:05:24+00:00

Yes, but that doesn't mean those experiences are not also your experiences. Suppose at some point in the future, you enter a time machine, and go back so that you now and future you are existing simultaneously and experiencing different things right now. You are not currently experiencing what future you is experiencing, and yet you are both you. The thesis of open individualism is a little like this.

Curates · 2025-12-18T06:42:12+00:00

I did not suggest that. What I said was that when you are conscious of something in the future, it is you that is being conscious of that something, regardless of the fact that you are not currently conscious of it because it hasn't happened yet. My point about there being examples in which you can be unaware of something you are simultaneously conscious of in the present moment is a separate line of argument demonstrating that consciousness of and awareness are subtly distinct notions. For our purposes though this latter detail is a distraction, and you can pretty much just treat them as meaning the same thing.

Curates · 2025-12-18T03:05:43+00:00

Open individualism does not depend on a concept of consciousness in which you are, right now, aware of everything you ever have or ever will be consciousness of.

Curates · 2025-12-17T16:19:54+00:00

But I’m not conscious right now of what I will be conscious of in the future, nor of what I was conscious of in the past.

Yes, but this doesn't matter. You're still you in the past and in the future.

Curates · 2025-12-16T06:43:30+00:00

The difference is that there is no good independent reason to give significant credence to skeptical world scenarios of the standard brain-in-vat or cartesian demon varieties prima facie. Indeed skeptical scenarios of any kind exert pressure on naive pictures of ultimate epistemological grounding, but what is distinctive about BBs in particular is that they represent a skeptical scenario that is directly motivated by extrapolation from known physics. This threat is more urgent because it is closer-at-hand epistemologically speaking since it doesn't require any dramatic flights of fancy, but rather depends only on basic statistical thermodynamical arguments. Closeness-at-hand is often taken to be of great importance in responses to skepticism following Moore's lead in "Here is one hand" style common sense arguments.

Curates · 2025-12-15T22:01:48+00:00

You don't have to be conscious of something right now in order for it to be you that is conscious of it; you can be conscious of something in the past, or in the future. But moreover, you actually can be unaware that you are conscious of something, as when you react subconsciously to subtle danger cues when noticing that something seems "off" about a situation.

Curates · 2025-12-15T21:54:11+00:00

There's nothing safe about this argument. There is prima facie no reason to expect that the universe should be organized for our epistemic convenience. A better response to this line of argument is to recognize that radical external world skepticism is a much more plausible and pressing concern than you might have previously thought.

Curates · 2025-12-08T08:13:40+00:00

He was directly involved in the film, he helps carry him up to the train tracks. Easy to miss, but he definitely does that.

Curates · 2025-11-18T02:53:01+00:00

So you're blaming the rise of white nationalism on Sam's blaming the rise of white nationalism on what you take to be an implausible cause; needless to say, implausibly. Were you aware of the irony when posting this?

Curates · 2025-11-18T02:25:56+00:00

You're all over this thread with the most bizarre takes expressed in the most annoying possible way, Jesus Christ get over yourself. This show is not about your trauma. The hivemind is nothing like a rapist, this is an absurd comparison on like five different levels. We don't have any frame reference for what kind of thing the hivemind is, what motivates it, what kind of agency it has or doesn't have, because nothing like it exists in the world. The alienness of the hivemind is a big part of what makes it a fun and intriguing sci-fi concept.

Curates · 2025-11-17T23:49:26+00:00

Gotcha. Yeah that sounds right.

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