this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2024
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TenForward: Where Every Vulcan Knows Your Name
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I've spent too much time on computers.
I don't see people as their age, gender, color, name, whatever. To me, a person is a construct, that construct is immutable. You, as a person, exist, only your variables change. Your name, age, gender, sex, personality, political views, culture, race, skin color, etc, are all properties of the immutable object that represents you.
In this way, your name, gender, age, political views, etc, can all change, and the human object that is you, never changes.
Technology does this already. A good example is with user accounts for something like active directory (the windows domain login thing). Your user object isn't assigned by name, or login ID or whatever. You have, what is referred to as a UUID inside of the system. To that UUID, you have parameters like your name, email, phone number, etc, attached to it. When permissions are given, they're given to your UUID, not to your name.
Because of this, the administrators like me, can update your name, phone number, login, email, etc, without changing what you have access to. Your email account is tied to your UUID as well, so your user object has permission to access that mailbox, and it's listed in the parameters as your primary mailbox (for stuff like auto configure).
It's all very basic object oriented stuff.
wait, you literally objectify people
OOP does an outstanding job of illustrating the nature of the universe, and people are part of that universe.
Fair enough.
Wait wait wait... immutable means unchangeable! In your analogy this would mean if someone changes anything about them, like a name due to marriage or gender due to affirming care, they become a new object. And you can, but shouldn't assign that new object the same UUID.
Welcome to the wonderful, confusing world of objects, semantic models and unintuitive terminology.
The "immutable object" is an abstract kernel of your being, to which all other properties are related. It represents, in a way, the coincidence of all those other properties, but it's not quite so simple.
In semantic modelling, those properties are considered objects too, albeit often dependent ones: "Hair color" in the sense of a person's hair color is an object type; individual instances cannot exist without a person whose hair they're describing. "Blonde", in that sense, is a grouping of instances, but if there were no blonde people, the group would be empty.
Likewise, "Name" is an object type that depends on the thing it's naming. Sure, you can come up with arbitrary terms that don't refer to anything, but they're semantically meaningless. Conversely, a thing can exist without being named, like a newborn. You could identify it as "the newborn baby of ", but that isn't a name so much as list of properties (newborn, parents\¹), that coincide for one particular person.
The combination of a simple object (that a stract kernel) and its dependent objects (properties) forms a complex object. You, as a person, probably have a name by now. You also probably have a body, a past², some knowledge and skills like the ability to understand and form words and sentences, which in turn includes a vocabulary...
If you change your name, that is one property that changes; one dependent object that is swapped out for another. The rest of your properties is unaffected by that. Formally, the relation between you and your name is mutable, but your eye color for instance (probably) isn't dependent on your name.
Now, if you were to somehow swap out all dependent objects at once, changing every property - a different name, different past, different parents, different body - then you would arguably be a different person. Even if you could argue that the core object remains the same, but given that this core object is an abstraction to describe the complex of properties and relations, which no longer has any intersection with the original, that "sameness" is effectively meaningless. The original configuration of properties is no longer tied to anything.
The philosophical difficulty of this concept is the question just what level of change constitutes a different object; which properties are immutably tied to you, so that changing one of them would be a different person? It's the Ship Of Theseus question: How much about a thing can change before it's no longer the same?
Do we argue that, as soon as even one property is changed, it no longer is the same object? Then every moment in time, adding to the past of an object, will make it a new object, nothing is permanent and the immutability is worthless.
For a person, most immutable properties of yours would be part of your past - where you were born, when you were born, essentially the continuous sequence of moments in your existence leading up to this one. The name you were assigned after birth would be a part of that history, even if the name you now use is a different one. Yet we do say that someone has become a different person if things like worldview and patterns of behaviour differ strongly enough. Again we encounter the question: What else, besides your past, defines you?
Practically, most contexts use some subset of your properties to define a person. In the example of a user id, that is the one immutable identification for user management purposes. Change the name, age, login, permissions and everything - from the system's perspective it's still the same user. Semantically, this might be a different person, but the system doesn't care.
Practice has to make concessions to the limitations of human abilities. We accept a level of ambiguity by ignoring some properties, because ultimately every model and pattern is supposed to simplify our decision-making. Overcomplicating things doesn't help us navigate life.
1 Parenthood itself could be modeled a simple, abstract object, dependent on both the parent and the progeny, representing the circumstance that one is the parent of the other. Technically, the Child could then exist independently from having parents; Practically, biology gets in the way of that.
2 Modeling the past of a given object is actually a complex exercise that also runs up against many of the same problems: You could consider it a continuous set of moments, each of which represents a relationship between a point in time and your exact state (coincidence of properties) at that point. But under the assumption of linear time, each moment would describe a different state, at the very least a different set of past moments.
I would just argue that objects of the Person-type are mutable, because basically everything about them can change without modifying who they are. The only thing immutable about a person is any one Moment-type object in their past.
Edit: I found your comment to be an interesting take on the concept, thank you!
I had to read up on the topic of semantic models for my Bachelor's thesis - this just might be the first time I've actually gotten to talk about it since my thesis defense.
Not quite. Picture an immutable map in your programming language of choice (something like const map). You cannot reassign the map object to a new one, but you totally can change its keys and values.
I get what youre saying but this is still only kind of true for languages that only the variable assignment is constant (like javascript) rather than the value itself (like rust). If I create a map in rust, without any modifiers, that map is immutable and can't be changed (not even the contained values). If I create a map in JavaScript using the const keyword, I have created a constant in that block that cannot be reassigned, but any values within the map are changeable like you mentioned. It means the object itself is mutable, but it belongs to a variable that is not.
I think this is fairly well explained by others, but the root object is immutable. That would be the human object that represents a unique person. The properties/parameters applied to that object are entirely mutable.
Even after death, your person object still exists, it's just given the property of being disabled/dead (and/or, the "living" property is removed).
questions about identity are so damn interesting. Like what exactly is being referenced when we say "Sarah" or "Coco-Cola" or "Spain"?
I'm gonna be pissed if I find out my soul is just some 16 trillion digit hex number.
I think if humans had visible UUIDs they would still only account for a part of our understanding of a person's identity. If you could make utterly perfect copies of people like you can with objects and they only differed by their UUID...how different would those two people be really? How many people for example would be happy to replace a dead loved one with such a copy?
Interestingly, most countries have a rudimentary system for giving people identifiers. Like a SSN.
Disregarding everything else you mentioned, I'm also extremely curious what exactly is being referenced when you say "Coco-Cola"?
(I realize it's just a typo, but the idea caught me off guard cause it sounds gross)
This made me think of identical twins. Perfect copies, but the minute they are born (for the convenience of tracking experience) they begin to differ. The majority of their properties and attributes remain identical, but their associations and metadata start to change.
Identical twins provide an interesting thought experiment because a lot of times they end up with the same job roles, married to similar people (or even other sets of twins), dress similarly, have similar attitudes and opinions, etc. But in many ways they are just the same genetic code running in a different environment.
If souls are just uuids, then I guess twins are some type of hash collision?