Everyone's a special snowflake, but if you really have enough snowflakes, they won't be unique any more...
A variant of that one's actually quite deeply baked into my worldview, although I hadn't brought it up here, since I've mentioned versions of it before.
I come at a similar point from a very different direction: the cliched thought-experiment of "What if the universe is a giant computer program?" Combining my programming background with the common notion that "it's all math at some level", I actually take that question quite seriously. (Taking it literally is silly, and leads to annoying "elephants all the way down" problems, but bear with me.)
That leads to the following thought experiment. Say that I have a program complex enough to simulate a universe with "life". Run it -- it plays through, beginning to end. (Maybe with quantum branching, maybe not -- not really relevant to the point.) Now, run it again. The same things happen again; in all important respects, this "universe" has occurred again, exactly the same way. Is it meaningful to distinguish between the two runs? Why?
Now, for extra credit -- based on the above, is it necessary to run the program at all? Why? In what meaningful way are 1, 2, 1000 or 0 runs different to the "existence" of the objects in the program, which are just reifications of mathematical expressions?
And taking it one step further: is it relevant to write the program down?
This leads me down some *very* mystical and odd roads, of believing at some level that the universe exists simply because it *can* -- that the mere possibility of being able to describe a self-consistent system mathematically makes it in some sense real. That's extreme enough that I'm not sure if even I truly believe it deep down, but I find it damned intriguing from a philosophical POV.
Anyway, to your point: from any number of viewpoints, I actually *assume* that I am not in any meaningful sense unique. That stopped bothering me a long time ago, on the grounds that it is true but in every sense irrelevant. Insofar as that tweaks my ego, I generally consider that a bug in my ego. I am what I am; worrying about other "me"s is just as much of a waste as worrying about maybes and might-have-beens. I find them philosophically interesting, but that's a very different thing from them *mattering* to me...
no subject
I come at a similar point from a very different direction: the cliched thought-experiment of "What if the universe is a giant computer program?" Combining my programming background with the common notion that "it's all math at some level", I actually take that question quite seriously. (Taking it literally is silly, and leads to annoying "elephants all the way down" problems, but bear with me.)
That leads to the following thought experiment. Say that I have a program complex enough to simulate a universe with "life". Run it -- it plays through, beginning to end. (Maybe with quantum branching, maybe not -- not really relevant to the point.) Now, run it again. The same things happen again; in all important respects, this "universe" has occurred again, exactly the same way. Is it meaningful to distinguish between the two runs? Why?
Now, for extra credit -- based on the above, is it necessary to run the program at all? Why? In what meaningful way are 1, 2, 1000 or 0 runs different to the "existence" of the objects in the program, which are just reifications of mathematical expressions?
And taking it one step further: is it relevant to write the program down?
This leads me down some *very* mystical and odd roads, of believing at some level that the universe exists simply because it *can* -- that the mere possibility of being able to describe a self-consistent system mathematically makes it in some sense real. That's extreme enough that I'm not sure if even I truly believe it deep down, but I find it damned intriguing from a philosophical POV.
Anyway, to your point: from any number of viewpoints, I actually *assume* that I am not in any meaningful sense unique. That stopped bothering me a long time ago, on the grounds that it is true but in every sense irrelevant. Insofar as that tweaks my ego, I generally consider that a bug in my ego. I am what I am; worrying about other "me"s is just as much of a waste as worrying about maybes and might-have-beens. I find them philosophically interesting, but that's a very different thing from them *mattering* to me...