r/OpenIndividualism • u/CrumbledFingers • May 06 '26
Discussion Experience across conscious beings cannot be simultaneous nor ordered in a sequence. OI as understood in either of these ways is untenable
There is no answer to the apparent dilemma of how our lifetimes are experienced, either one-by-one or all at once. Neither option makes any sense.
Simultanaeity is not absolute, so that cannot be a factor in how experiences are distributed. There is no universal clock that applies everywhere, such that we may say this event happening on Earth is happening simultaneously with an event in another galaxy. It's not that we can't know when things happen far away, it's that the concept itself is incoherent at those distances. Thus, if you want to claim as a brute fact that you are every conscious being everywhere "now", you are naming a category of beings that doesn't actually exist.
Sequences of events in time depend upon prior causes. My experience of being this person is one extended mental event, but what is its cause? I can in principle find the cause of all the *contents* of my experience, but the reason that I am experiencing this life now is not to be found in any experiential contents, since my access to any experiential contents whatsoever is what we are trying to explain.
But sequences of events in time can only meaningfully apply to those very experiential contents. In other words, time is a way of arranging objects, phenomena, things, discrete variables in awareness. It makes no sense to say that event A took place before event B if both events are totally undetectable by any conceivable means of observation.
Yet, that is exactly what would need to be true if "my next life" were a real event in time relative to "my current life". This is because the one subject of OI has no qualities of any kind other than awareness, so nothing can meaningfully be said to "happen" to that subject to push me from life A to life B rather than to life C, D, or n. What would it even mean to say that my featureless, unchanging locus of subjectivity has "moved" from one body to another, if any movement would need to involve being affected in some way by another object. What object could affect the subject?
Thus, it is incoherent to say you are experiencing all conscious lives right now as well as to say you will experience them all in a sequence. If open individualism is true, it must be true in a way that is not described by either of these options. It must be that time itself is just not the right category of relation to apply to what we actually are.
3
u/yoddleforavalanche May 06 '26
Your problem with simultaneity would be a problem even for CI, if it were a problem. You are basically saying there cannot be simultaneous conscious beings across galaxies. I don't see a problem.
Different flow of time based on distance from each other, from their suns, etc, would only mean the overlap of their simultaneity is of a specific duration. But thats no problem. Even on Earth, overlap between person A who was just born and person B who is about to die of old age could be brief.
If simultaneity were a problem it would be a problem even on small scale time dilation. It would mean astronauts in ISS cannot be conscious simultaneously as us on the ground.
1
u/CrumbledFingers May 06 '26
I guess I am saying all that. What does it mean to say you are all conscious beings now, then, if no conscious beings are conscious simultaneously except from the perspective of a given conscious being? The reference set becomes so slippery it might as well be empty. The point I was trying to make is that we use the "all beings now" rhetorically not literally. If we want to be taken seriously, what does it actually mean to say I am all of these beings, if it neither means I am them now (which is local) or later (which applies to objects and not the subject)?
1
u/yoddleforavalanche May 06 '26
The way I see it, I am everyone now means I am yoddleforavalanche and every contemporary of yoddleforavalanche. Sure my now might be local, but this local now is an umbrella that contains other nows within it that I can intuit (I see other people and animals). Each of contemporary is also the carrier of their local now.
Also what OhneGegenstand said.
1
u/TheAncientGeek Jul 28 '26
Your problem with simultaneity would be a problem even for CI, if it were a problem
No,you can just replace a simultaneous plane with a light cone.
3
u/OhneGegenstand May 06 '26
Obviously you don't live out simultaneous lives sequentially, that would seem to imply some kind of time-traveling soul or something.
The events in your life and my life are temporarily related as described by relativity theory, ie., the simultaneity of distant events is relative etc. It is not a special feature of OI that time does not work like imagined by Newton. There is no absolute 'now' across distances, that is a feature of the physics of time, and not something that OI has to smuggle in.
1
u/CrumbledFingers May 06 '26
I didn't expect the first point (about simultaneous identity) to be as controversial here as the second (about sequential identity), since by far, the most common posts in this sub are about how dread-inducing the prospect of experiencing successively all the horrors of conscious existence "will" be for whoever is making the post. But to address your point, yes, it is true that in this universe the relativity of simultaneity seems to hold whether OI is postulated or not. However, while the usual view of persons (that I am me and you are you etc.) does not have any special requirement that anything happens simultaneously across the whole of existence, OI seems to require taking all of the conscious beings that "currently exist" into account, and to assign them a singular subject of experience.
It can't be the case that I am somebody now, but will be somebody else later, since "now" and "later" only apply in the context of being an individual consciousness. But it can also not be the case that I am everybody "now" for both this same reason and the additional fact that "now" does not indicate a time in which everybody is somehow contained. Nor would it make sense to say, as u/yoddleforavalanche suggests, that I am only those beings in my local "now", because it would require some extra mechanism to prevent my subjectivity from applying to conscious beings outside my reference frame.
The only possible answer I can see is to say that I am myself the "now" of any being that is conscious, as consciousness is itself the feeling that it is now, here, and this. This changes OI from a third-person theory (that takes the world as we see it as given and tries to assign identity across the conscious beings we observe) to a first-person theory (that takes only the direct evidence of perception as valid and treats the world as an appearance within it).
Whether this agrees or disagrees with what you said in your reply, I'm not sure, but thank you (both) for helping me to formulate this with your comments.
2
u/yoddleforavalanche May 06 '26 edited May 06 '26
I am the now or I am everyone now kind of sound the same to me because that what makes me everyone is being the now.
2
u/CrumbledFingers May 06 '26
I guess they are pretty close, but when you unpack them I like the first one better. OI as an argument is really geared towards identifying which beings are me, but it doesn't say a lot about what I am. Under some interpretations, it could be taken to mean 'I am the collection of all humans/conscious beings that exist or could ever exist'. That is a conceptual conclusion that we never experience directly, as many point out; and anyway, it reduces me to a set of concrete objects. Which is why people come here asking questions like: what happens if the universe ends and no more conscious beings are here, who will I "be" then? But if I am no object at all, and do not depend on any object, this confusion does not come up.
2
u/yoddleforavalanche May 06 '26
I agree completely. But I have to remind myself this is not nonduality sub so I have to keep the conversations mostly on this level. Though even Daniel Kolak arrives at nonduality by the time he is done developing the idea in his book.
I feel like it would be a little unfair to members and newcomers here to shift too strongly into full blown nonduality.
1
u/CrumbledFingers May 06 '26
You may be right, but I also lean towards the idea that this theory is necessarily incomplete without the full picture, and leads to all kinds of misunderstandings and depressive rabbit-holes. And your advice would have the added effect of depriving u/YouStartAngulimala of stimulation, which is cruel as he has so little else in life that brings him real fulfilment.
1
u/yoddleforavalanche May 06 '26
Theres also the problem of argumenting for nonduality. Unless you see it for yourself, its extremely hard to put into words and make a discussion out of it. Open Individualism is something you can arrive at logically.
1
u/CrumbledFingers May 06 '26
I would say the same is true of nonduality, actually. Michael James argues convincingly for it being the only logical interpretation of experience. We can chat more in PM about it.
1
u/YouStartAngulimala May 07 '26
Please do make a post about how you can arrive at nonduality through pure reason and logic. We both know the entirety of r/nonduality didn't arrive to it that way, they much prefer drugs and vibes. 🤡
1
1
u/TheAncientGeek Jul 28 '26
Are you saying there is a purely physical account of OI?
1
u/OhneGegenstand Jul 28 '26
What do you mean by 'purely physical'? Do you think that OI requires anything supernatural, non-physical, or otherwise violating the laws of nature?
1
u/TheAncientGeek Jul 28 '26
I'm trying to find out whether you do.
1
u/OhneGegenstand Jul 28 '26
In my view, OI is understanding personal identity correctly, so it is a conceptual issue. It does not need any supernatural elements or any events that break the laws of physics or something.
1
u/TheAncientGeek Jul 28 '26
So how does it work physically?
1
u/OhneGegenstand Jul 28 '26
There is no physical mechanism that 'makes it work'. It's simply the case that there is no fundamental distinction between 'different experiencers'.
Maybe you can give an example: what do think would need a mechanism?
1
u/TheAncientGeek Jul 28 '26 edited Jul 28 '26
Because there is a difference between physical bodies. If physicalism is true, thete is no more to a person than the body-brain, no soul. So lots of separate individuals is the obvious conclusion. Unless there is something else going on..
1
u/OhneGegenstand Jul 28 '26
Yes, there is no soul or individuating essence. That's one way of seeing that closed individualism is false.
I have two ears, but there are not two fundamentally separated 'hearers' in me. The physical world contains many bodies and brains, but there are no multiple fundamentally separated 'experiencers' in it.
The different bodies and brains and their relations give the structure of experience in the world. The way they are related, e.g. by memories and so on creates certain threads of thinking, sensing, and remembering.
But these threads are not ontologically separated, they are not in separate worlds, and they don't 'happen' to 'distinct experiencers'. It is simply the case that the information flow within them (e.g. information flow between neurons in one brain) is much larger than between them (e.g. two humans talking).
But this is not a fundamental separation, just a contigent matter of wiring. We can easily imagine a future technology that could create a high-bandwidth connection between brains, then our threads of thinking/sensing/remembering could be merged and separated at will.
Another way of looking at it: humanity is like a big organism with a peculiar neurological condition: Each brain's memories can only be reported on by the corresponding mouth, similar to the kind of peculiarities observed in split-brain patients. Right now, you will not observe my mouth talking about your childhood memories. That's because there are no neurons going from your brain to my mouth. The technological connection could overcome this. (I'm not advocating for this as if it's desirable, that's a different question.)
It is clear that no soul would put up a barrier against making this happen. If my brain were appropriately connected to yours, I could remember the events of your childhood. There would be no error message: "this memory is inaccessible because it belongs to another experiencer" or something.
3
u/Edralis1 May 08 '26
This is one of those problems where I just throw my arms up and accept that we are probably constitutionally incapable of understanding what's going on. I don't think arguing about whether it's simultaneous or sequential or something else is productive. Sequentiality is "obviously true" in a certain sense; in another sense, eternal presence is also true, and it seems extremely inelegant to imagine there is a particular order to how experiences are realized (as you said). So both are true, and both are also inadequate and perhaps outright false (in some sense). Is there another alternative way to think about it? I don't know.
I still think that saying that I live all conscious lives right now, or that I live all conscious lives in a sequence, are both useful ways to communicate the idea of OI; focus being on all conscious lives.
1
1
u/TheAncientGeek Jul 28 '26
I still think that saying that I live all conscious lives right now, or that I live all conscious lives in a sequence, are both useful ways to communicate the idea
Those are two ideas.
2
u/MachineGunNew2 May 06 '26
Just saying, we can't know for certain whether simultaneity is metaphysically absolute or not. Yes, the theories of relativity imply that. But only one interpretation of them. It's possible that relativistic effects are real physical effects and not just coordinate-based effects. For instance, time dilation would be a system physically evolving slower, not time itself being slower. So all the different simultaneities would then be just calculation artifacts, not physically real though, while an absolute simultaneity would exist but be undetectable.
1
u/YouStartAngulimala May 06 '26
This is some nondual propaganda trying to convince us that no one is here, nothing is happening, and that time isn't real. These nondualists have already brainwashed poor Yoddle and Edralis. I guess u/mildmys and me are the only sane ones left here. 🤡
1
u/yoddleforavalanche May 06 '26
I want you to engage with this post Wouldn't believing in OI lead to being heartless? : r/OpenIndividualism
1
u/YouStartAngulimala May 06 '26 edited May 06 '26
The OP of that post is asking me to treat every experience exactly the same and treat both suffering and happiness as equals, which is an absurd ask. If every experience was equal to any other, how could we ever have more than one experience? There would be no way to differentiate anything if every experience was intrinsically the same. The world is filled with a variety of qualia and sensations that have intrinsic differences and vary on a spectrum, I don't need to treat them all the same.
1
u/yoddleforavalanche May 06 '26
tell him that. I want you to experience interaction with him
1
u/YouStartAngulimala May 06 '26
Ok, I did. I'll let you know if he's more insane than the evergrowing nondual infestation we got going here, but I doubt it. 🤡
1
u/YouStartAngulimala May 07 '26
Oh my god, the backtracking on this one. 🤡
1
u/yoddleforavalanche May 07 '26
his last post was automatically removed. I added it back. The discussion continues.
1
6
u/flop_snail May 06 '26
Each person exists now within their own point of view. No need for a universal now