this post was submitted on 01 Jan 2024
138 points (92.1% liked)
Asklemmy
43939 readers
573 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
If you want to draw the line in that way, then break it all the way down and apply the principle evenly. Every single time you change your mind in any way, shape or form, that is an ever-so-slightly different you. The difference is so minor that it's basically no difference at all, but it does exist.
So, when you decide to put stawberry jam instead of grape on your toast, that old you that used grape is dead. And then the next day, when you go back to picking grape, the stawberry you is now dead and the grape you is resurrected.
Obviously I'm exaggerating with such an innocuous example, but the basic principle applies. It's all arbitrary, from a truly objective perspective.
There's a number of deductions one could draw from this, but a big one is that we try to apply identity as if "things" are real, but it's mostly just our choices, which can vary as much as we want them to. This goes against a natural human desire for stability, we kinda wish that once we learn something, it can "stay learned". But that's just like Mr Incredible complaining that his city won't "stay saved" in the beginning of the movie.
Pluto's recategorization away from planetary status triggered this in a lot of people. It's arbitrary though, we made those decisions in the first place. And in the modern world, we really need to be ready to handle new stuff all the time, so flexibility is important.