Divine identity and roving atoms

D'Andrew "Dave" Thompson blogs:

The means to verify a person's online identity has become a divine discovery. As with a deity, whom we cannot taste touch, feel, etc, we are left to consider such an entity through imperfect means, lesser reason, or perhaps we can call it quasi proofs. There is no one proof that so evidences the undeniable existence, rather a group of quasi proofs, which leads to a stengthened trust in the surety of a claim, person, or identity can lend to a necessary trust.

Yes, but I'd go further—we can't prove anything by empirical means, just establish useful shared assumptions based on relatively strong hypothesese. Anyone want to argue for a flat earth? Probably not, but if you were to, I couldn't prove you wrong, just establish a near-100% degree of doubt.

How do I know that you "are" your physical body? Meeting you in person, it sure seems that way to my brain, as my innate and learnt perceptual mechanisms tell me that your body is an entity that is discrete from the rest of the physical world; if we didn't make this collective assumption throughout our daily life, we would cease to function. However, a molecular biologist would understand otherwise—there is a constant flow of atoms from "your body" to "not your body".

Mere philosophical distractions from serious tech discussion? Well, no. I firmly believe that if we can design tech architectures that are maximally agnostic to our subjective beliefs, we will be doing our job of facilitating the technological mediation, rather than imposition of human experience of identity.

Let's eradicate the concept of "objectivity" from our definitions of identity—it's just a hall of mirrors, in the end. : )

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