As a comment on identity in science: certainly it’s not about ‘personal/agentic’ identity, but I have been thinking a lot about how we draw boundaries between objects—like “when” a group of 3 quarks “is” a proton. Generally this involves specifying a “scale” parameter expressing ~ how much information we’re willing to lose in abstracting away from details—then we take, symbolically, the limit where this parameter goes to infinity. Then you can use perturbation theory to bridge lower-level effects to cash out at the higher-level (eg how quark structure effects proton collision statistics)
For systems of agents, the analogue is, from the perspective of the group-level, ‘coherence’, or ‘incentive-compatibility’ from the sub-agents’ perspective. Unfortunately we don’t really have the tools to do the analogue of perturbation theory in these more complicated cases. It seems like the salient difference is that we can’t really scalarize ‘incoherence’, as there are too many saliently distinct ways for a group to be ‘incoherent’ and no natural commensurability between them.
As a comment on identity in science: certainly it’s not about ‘personal/agentic’ identity, but I have been thinking a lot about how we draw boundaries between objects—like “when” a group of 3 quarks “is” a proton. Generally this involves specifying a “scale” parameter expressing ~ how much information we’re willing to lose in abstracting away from details—then we take, symbolically, the limit where this parameter goes to infinity. Then you can use perturbation theory to bridge lower-level effects to cash out at the higher-level (eg how quark structure effects proton collision statistics)
For systems of agents, the analogue is, from the perspective of the group-level, ‘coherence’, or ‘incentive-compatibility’ from the sub-agents’ perspective. Unfortunately we don’t really have the tools to do the analogue of perturbation theory in these more complicated cases. It seems like the salient difference is that we can’t really scalarize ‘incoherence’, as there are too many saliently distinct ways for a group to be ‘incoherent’ and no natural commensurability between them.