Identity is reflected by who owns the capability.

Capabilities are often transient. Or in a capability based OS, capabilities are given to a process when it launches and the capabilities naturally go away when the program closes. "Who owns the capability" is the wrong way to think about it. But I'll lose this argument.

Because I suspect if you really want to, you really can think about all "permission systems" as identity systems, and shoehorn in users or something. This cognitive distortion is totally possible. My claim is that its a bad mental model. Its like if you mentally translate all programming ideas into assembler, or java or something, it would make it hard to properly understand and appreciate a lot of higher level programming ideas. Haskell's beauty doesn't make any sense if you mentally translate everything into java. There are programs you just can't write with this mindset, and you would be a terrible haskell programmer.

Its the same with capabilities. They're not user accounts. They're not identities. They can be transient or persisted. Fine grained or coarse grained. A capability can be a function argument - arguably the C FILE struct is a capability object. Or they can be a permission box. Its just, a bigger idea than identity.

You're so obviously correct in this. TBH I think the only reason the term "users" come up when it comes to isolating programmes from one another is because that was the only hammer Unix had, so it was coopted. The original point stands, the actual multi-user aspect is completely secondary and unnecessary to 90% of people. I'm the only person who uses my computer, but still I want to be able to isolate application 1 from application 2.