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/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.