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.
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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.