To be a bit pedantic (and rhetorical), how do you know? You have some model of the world. When you say there are clearly differences, you are saying this from the standpoint of your world model. In general this is not something I’d need to call out, but here it matters, because the very idea of separation is inherent to the very idea of modeling. If you don’t model, then there’s no separation, because there’s nothing to do the sorting into categories. You may hold a contingent belief in your model that, in the counterfactual where you and no one else did any modeling there would still be separation, but this is impossible to consider, because to consider it itself requires modeling the world.
(Tangental, but to be clear I would consider “modeling the world” a fairly basic act that happens any time information is created by a control system. The human version of this is just dramatically more complex than the 1 bit model a thermostat has.)
None of this is to say that modeling the world as if separation exists prior to ontology is not useful. In fact, it will lead to more accurate predictions and you should do it! The trouble is that this doesn’t suddenly let us jump to assuming that separation exists independent of ontology because we have no non-ontological way to observe it. This leaves assertions about the existence (or nonexistence) of separation beyond ontological metaphysical claims about which we cannot know.
Thus why I argue that the idea of a separate agent is confusing. Perhaps I was a bit too strong in saying that we see “no evidence for [...] physical separation”, as I see how without laying out the above argument this could be interpreted as an argument against the value of physical modeling, which was not my intent.
To be a bit pedantic (and rhetorical), how do you know? You have some model of the world. When you say there are clearly differences, you are saying this from the standpoint of your world model. In general this is not something I’d need to call out, but here it matters, because the very idea of separation is inherent to the very idea of modeling. If you don’t model, then there’s no separation, because there’s nothing to do the sorting into categories. You may hold a contingent belief in your model that, in the counterfactual where you and no one else did any modeling there would still be separation, but this is impossible to consider, because to consider it itself requires modeling the world.
(Tangental, but to be clear I would consider “modeling the world” a fairly basic act that happens any time information is created by a control system. The human version of this is just dramatically more complex than the 1 bit model a thermostat has.)
None of this is to say that modeling the world as if separation exists prior to ontology is not useful. In fact, it will lead to more accurate predictions and you should do it! The trouble is that this doesn’t suddenly let us jump to assuming that separation exists independent of ontology because we have no non-ontological way to observe it. This leaves assertions about the existence (or nonexistence) of separation beyond ontological metaphysical claims about which we cannot know.
Thus why I argue that the idea of a separate agent is confusing. Perhaps I was a bit too strong in saying that we see “no evidence for [...] physical separation”, as I see how without laying out the above argument this could be interpreted as an argument against the value of physical modeling, which was not my intent.