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Comment by hyperion2010 | Hacker News Reader

hyperion2010

Nothing has identity, but it might be possible to write down an identity function that gives a set of things distinct identities. The more interesting question then becomes how those identity functions fail and under what circumstances.

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Honestly, this means nothing to me. Not even trying to be mean, I just don't at all understand what you are saying.

A has no identity. B has no identity. C has no identity.

But perhaps {A, B, C} can have identity?

I guess my confusion is, how can anything have an identity if we just asserted that nothing does.

The same way that a pile of identical bricks can have no identity, but a home you build out of it could?

I guess my confusion is, how can anything have an identity if we just asserted that nothing does.

Provide a quote where I or anyone asserted that absolutely nothing has identity.

Are you serious?

> Nothing has identity, ...

Failed. Lose an intellectual point for leaving out the vital context.

I'm making a distinction about what identity is bound to and how it is bound. The way our brain presents the world to us it seems as if the things themselves 'have' identities, but it is some function that is being computed in our brain that makes those things distinct from each other. It is the structure of the function that gives distinctness. This inverts the question of whether things 'have' distinct identities, into whether it is possible to find a function that can distinguish between any set of things. My point about failure was that all identities as we think of them are something like a hash function with finite length, there is always a chance of collision and it is important to know how they fail. For example, if you pick primary DNA sequence as the definition for identity, then your functional will fail for all identical twins. If you pick some metric on facial structure as measured by a 2d camera, then anything that can evoke the same pattern on the sensor of the camera will be indistinguishable, even a picture of your face. This is not because these things do not 'have' unique identities, it is because the function we choose was bad. Proving that there is no function that can distinguish between two things is exceedingly difficult.

I see, it's not about the set, as I originally thought you were saying, but about the function (act) of identification. I am starting to agree a bit more.

If the elements are all identical with each other, then it seems like the only measurable identity you could attach to sets of elements is cardinality, right?

Ya, that is basically all you have left when you can't find any measurable differences. This is pretty much how the periodic table works.

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