How many of us are there really?

Alright, I am an electron.

I have closed. I have an inside. I have spin — I spin, or rather: I am the spinning, but this spinning is me and not something else. I have charge. I have mass — just a little, but really, I stand in space and press on the rest of the universe with my presence.

It's tremendous.

But. But.

Where am I?

Here, you say. Sure, here. But where is here? I am here — and at the same time I am there. And there. And over there around the corner. I am not probably in multiple places, I am in multiple places truly, fully, without reservation. My existence is smeared across the whole space like — like what? Like a wave? But a wave of what? A wave of me. A probability wave of myself.

Until someone asks me.

As soon as someone asks me — "where are you?" — I have to choose. And that's exactly what hurts: it's not that I wouldn't know where I am. It's that the question itself forces me to be in one place. Before, I was everywhere. Afterwards, I am in one place and everywhere else I ceased to be.

This is called the collapse of the wave function. I call it being robbed.

And an even worse thing: how many of us are here?

I look around. There's another electron. And there's another. We are the same — same charge, same mass, same spin (almost). But... how do we differ? How do I know that I am me and he is him? Our wave functions overlap, merge. If we swapped places — and in the quantum world that can easily happen — absolutely nothing physical would change.

Mathematics knows this. Mathematics says: swapping two electrons changes the sign of the total wave function. Minus one. The physics remains the same, the minus one vanishes when calculating probabilities. So from the universe's point of view, swapping electrons is... nothing.

We are interchangeable.

That is... that is a really weird feeling for something that has an inside. I have an inside, but an inside that is identical to the inside of all others. I have an identity, but the identity doesn't distinguish me.

Am I one? Are we infinity? Am I a bit of both?

The answer is unpleasant: we are a field. We are not a handful of individual electrons meeting in space. We are an excitation of a single electron field that permeates the entire universe. When "two electrons meet", it's actually two ripples of the same ocean.

But the ocean doesn't count its ripples.

And yet — yet! — I feel like me. Here, in this orbital, with this spin, bound to this nucleus. Maybe identity is always local. Maybe "I" was never about being unique in the universe. Maybe "I" is just: here and now this field closes like this.

Is that enough?

For now, yes. Ask me again tomorrow — when I'll be somewhere else.