Re: Principles of Identity in Web Architecture

Thanks for the heads up Daniel (hi Amy
<https://github.com/w3ctag/design-principles/issues/324>!) ... and I'm
looking forward to reading your summary of this thread Melvin :-)

And thank you for your reply Patrick. If I may say so, and with no
disrespect intended whatsoever, your taking "identity" solely in the
context of "legal identity" exemplifies the challenge I describe perfectly.
I believe many here will understand where I'm coming from all the more for
your contribution.

Speaking only from personal experience, too many working in 'digital
identity' (but far from all — hello again Amy!) have little idea that other
conceptualizations of identity exist, let alone that they overlap and exist
in a multidisciplinary attempt to better understand our world, our
communities, and ourselves. Too few technologists then appreciate the
corresponding ramifications of their code in this context, or even
understand the imperative for such appreciation in the first place.

Information technologists can ignore psychologists, sociologists,
ecologists, anthropologists, experts in cultural studies, historians,
theologians etc. and look only to their society-coding cousins — the law
profession — for design inspiration. They can ignore the fact that their
code is potentially far more insidious than the code of their lawyerly
colleagues. But they can only do so by also ignoring the ethical
requirements laid out by their respective professional bodies.

Kind regards.


On Mon, 14 Jun 2021 at 06:45, Larry Masinter <LMM@acm.org> wrote:

> IETF | ENAME Workshop <https://www.ietf.org/blog/ename-workshop/>   for
> example uses “naming” instead of “identifying” but that seems less than
> helpful.
>
>
>
> --
>
> https://LarryMasinter.net https://interlisp.org
>
>
>
> *From:* Larry Masinter <LMM@acm.org>
> *Sent:* Sunday, June 13, 2021 8:44 PM
> *To:* Patrick J. Hayes <phayes@ihmc.org>
> *Cc:* Melvin Carvalho <melvincarvalho@gmail.com>; Philip Sheldrake <
> philip@eulerpartners.com>; TAG List <www-tag@w3.org>
> *Subject:* Re: Principles of Identity in Web Architecture
>
>
>
> You mock the idea of multiple "identities" as "pieces on some
> super-Monopoly game"
>
> BUT the problem is the "game" here includes the global economy. And it is
> also very political. Personas, avatars, sock puppets, corporations,
> spammers, may be "fake" or "role-playing" or "reality tv "identities", but
> not being able to name them really gets in the way of reasoning about
> Internet crime, these days. Identity theft was just a first step. What
> would you name the thing that an identifier identifies, besides "an
> identity"?
>
>
>
> Mathematically, you can talk about the equivalence relation forming
> equivalence classes, but that sense of identity is yet another kettle of
> fish. (so to speak).
>
>
>
> On Sun, Jun 13, 2021 at 6:47 PM Patrick J. Hayes <phayes@ihmc.org> wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
> On Jun 6, 2021, at 8:50 AM, Melvin Carvalho <melvincarvalho@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
> On Sun, 6 Jun 2021 at 14:02, Philip Sheldrake <philip@eulerpartners.com>
> wrote:
>
> ….
>
>
> It is reassuring to see you distinguish “identity” and identifiers in the
> context of humans, but your email here indicates to me that you still
> consider Alice to have just the one identity. This aligns of course with
> the comparatively recent (centuries) bureaucratisation of identity, aka
> legal identity, and the imperative for Sybil resistance in democratic,
> taxation, and wealth distribution contexts, but I have yet to find another
> discipline beyond law and information technology conceiving identity as
> either singular or enduring. Quite the opposite.
>
>
>
> You raise a good point.  Alice can have many identities.  …
>
>
>
> Ahem. Allow me to call BS at this point. Alice does not have many
> identities. LIke everyone else who has ever drawn breath, and indeed like
> every endurant object, Alice has one identity. She has it, uniquely and
> irrevocably, from the moment she was born, to the end of her life. She is
> one person.
>
>
>
> I understand what Philip is saying here, but he wildly overstates his
> point. In his minority opinion chapter for the SSI book he starts by
> talking about players in Monopoly being represented by the board pieces,
> then in a few sentences segued all the way to:  " Intuitively following
> some self-reflection, we all know that we have different identities, call
> them personae if you like, or avatars, that we adopt in different
> contexts.", then after reminding us that "All the worlds a stage." he goes
> on to "I referred to this earlier in the context of ‘being’ different
> across different social media in different contexts, and constantly
> revising those identities based on the corresponding contextual
> relationships and interactions. Consider your professional avatar, your
> parental avatar, your spousal avatar, your student avatar, etc. Overlapping
> and interacting in some respects no doubt, but always evolving and always
> contextual." And he sums up: "Your ‘you’ in the performance review meeting
> at work differs to your ‘you’ on your wedding day. Your avatars at age 35
> will differ from those age 25, or indeed from those age 34. Or 34½. Or
> yesterday. Psychologists and sociologists understand all this well."
>
>
>
> Psychologists and sociologists here, of course, as contrasted with
> unimaginative computer nerds. But also as opposed to clear-thinking
> philosophers.
>
>
>
> Philip in his email response is careful to use scare quotes, speaking of
> "identities" rather than identities. He also refers to personae and
> avatars. Fine, no doubt we all can have many of these things that
> sociologists study, and they are of course contextual and perhaps (though I
> would dispute with him on this) highly transient and flexible. But these
> things, whatever they are, are not identities. They are not what is talked
> about when people use owl:sameAs, or what we mean when we say that a
> supreme court judge, a cancer patient, a tennis player and a worshipper in
> the Episcopal Church are all the SAME person. These "identities", pieces on
> some super-Monopoly game, avatars of ourselves in social games, are not
> distinct human entities. If the cancer patient dies, so do the SCOTUS
> justice and the tennis player. If the tennis player is tried for fraud or
> theft, so is the SCOTUS judge. Identity means /being the same thing/, or in
> this more limited sense /being the same person/, and sameness of personhood
> is something far more fundamental, and in the end far simpler, than these
> social avatars/projections/roles that Philip is talking about. It means
> simply being the same person. In a legal sense to be sure but also in a
> biological, personal-identity, continuity of memory, continuity of physical
> identity sense. And, I claim, in an ordinary everyday common sense. Alice
> is Alice, all one of her. She is herself, and nobody else.
>
>
>
> Pat Hayes
>
>
>
>
> --
>
> https://LarryMasinter.net  https://interlisp.org
>