Comment by pontifier | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pontifier | Hacker News Reader

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The philosophy of identity is quite interesting to me. I've been thinking about it for a long time.

I like the idea of proof of personhood, and proof of location. These are both concepts that I have explored extensively. I looked at retina scans, and found it they're both not unique enough, and not secure enough to act as a basis for a currency.

My proof of location was based on the 500 mile email story. Many millions of round trips between two devices could allow someone to prove on a blockchain that two secret keys were stored arbitrarily close to one another for some amount of time.

The paper mentions key signing parties which I believe must be part of any web of trust that proves personhood. Proving uniqueness is more difficult. There's nothing that would stop me from having several different identities verified at different key signing parties, then using those to generate even more.

Using genealogy seems to be the only way to truly verify a unique identity if the system becomes widespread enough that parents often verify their children at birth. Then the age of the identity matches the age of the individual.

Farther into the future, the possibility of creating multiple copies of myself makes it much more difficult to tie an identity to a particular group of cells. There's nothing truly unique about a copy, especially if we have the ability to change our DNA.

Philosophically, I started to wonder if there's anything particularly special about any arrangement of cells. Maybe we should all just do our best, share resources, and create a society where abundance makes keeping track of all this stuff unnecessary.

> Philosophically, I started to wonder if there's anything particularly special about any arrangement of cells. Maybe we should all just do our best, share resources, and create a society where abundance makes keeping track of all this stuff unnecessary.

We are an arrangement of cells betrayed by the human character. If all we wanted was to live leisurely this could have been easily achieved after the industrial revolution. But it's our nature to be ambitious, to achieve things, to want more, to compete, to be greedy and 1up each other. Most people are never satisfied regardless of how big their house is or what they do for a living. So I don't think an idle society of abundance can exist as long as people are competing for the largest piece of the pie.

I've started to suspect this kind of Darwinian individualism - which probably evolves in a lot of places - is guaranteed to lead to extinction, and is likely a critical part of the Great Filter.

When a species evolves to the point it has planet-shaping capabilities it needs to be able to think about consequences on a planetary scale - not just in terms of short term individual benefits.

Competitive individualism completely fails at scale.

It's possible there are other Darwinian solutions - maybe life that evolves as a single cooperative colony organism - which avoid this trap.

The corollary is that if we ever meet aliens, they're not going to have much in common with us.

Or perhaps its a small minority of people who have access to vast wealth and control through a combination of luck, ruthlessness, and glitches in our social, economic, and political systems, who then maintain their power by refusing to makes those systems more equitable. There are plenty of studies of Indigenous peoples whose societies are much more equitable than ours, which shows that the problems we face now are neither inevitable, nor solely a result of 'human nature', if such a universal concept even exists.

Or perhaps it's the market-based economy, supply and demand - a feedback loop that, by its very nature, optimizes away any average surplus a society accumulates, in the same way a DC filter will remove energy from a signal until it averages to zero.

I'm increasingly convinced this is a direct consequence, a flip side of our economic system - i.e. the very fact that people can freely compete means prices will go down to near production costs, as competition minimizes everyone's margins - but at a larger scale, it means the market will grow and change to consume any surplus, which, since nothing here is mathematically perfectly uniform, necessitates the existence of poverty and affluence - income inequality that can have arbitrary amplitude, but averages to zero.

> There are plenty of studies of Indigenous peoples whose societies are much more equitable than ours

Please name three. As far as I've read, all the various indigenous tribes past and present tend to have the same problems as every other group of people, including modern civilization; they're just earlier on the problem complexity/sophistication ladder. That, and they tend to have pretty horrible alternatives to what we've learned to solve via taxation and the rule of law.

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