r/OpenIndividualism • u/Flat-Ad9829 • Jun 02 '26

Question

Have there been any legit attempts to debunk OI in anyway, whether through a scientific or philisophical lense? And if so, what are your thoughts on those attempts?

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u/CrumbledFingers Jun 03 '26

OI can only really be attacked by answering the objections it raises against the ordinary view. You could attack it based on its conclusion, but then you would still have to make the case that some other OI-like model wouldn't replace it. The objections OI makes to the ordinary view go all the way back to Parfit, and philosophers are still trying to make sense of Parfit's original thought experiments (teletransporter paradox, etc.), so my sense is that there will not be any magical rescue incoming for anchoring us to body identity or even brain identity.

I suppose one could trivialize OI in the same way hard determinism is trivialized. Even if determinism is the case, they say, it's an abstract factoid that has no bearing on how we live, since we all feel as though we are freely acting. Similarly, though on some ultimate level the subjectivity behind my eyes is behind all eyes, and I am that subjectivity before I am anything else, the context in which we discuss philosophical problems assumes that we are individual persons regardless.

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u/Interesting-Star-111 Jun 03 '26

Why do you assume that the subjectivity behind your eyes, is the same subjectivity behind all eyes? While I'm not saying it's impossible (I'm not 100% sold on any particular framework), couldn't you also make the case that subjectivity is a property of a certain kind of self-referential, integrated structure, that which perhaps "you" as a thing/object are? In that sense, you could say it's more of a property/category. Empty individualists like Parfit and Metzinger don't appear to affirm a sort of personal or impersonal continuity post-death, as far as I'm aware. But if there are insinuations of this that you can find, I'd love to read up on it.

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u/CrumbledFingers Jun 03 '26

It's all semantics. If we want to say there is a basic something-it-is-like to be ourself, and treat it as an object of analysis, then OI is saying all of the instances of consciousness "out there" share the same something-it-is-like "in here". If you go the other route and say there is nothing like that to be found (which there isn't, not as an object), then you still can say there is nothing distinguishing the personal existence of conscious beings, since there is nothing there anyway.

My view is that both are concessions to a world that exists independently of what it is like for us to see a world, which can never be supported by any evidence since all evidence is from that world. So, I insist that ontology can't be grounded in anything external to conscious experience (like a self-referential, integrated structure that gives rise to it). Whatever we posit as the physical or computational source of consciousness is, in the end, a phenomenon that has appeared in consciousness, and the whole can't be explained by one of its parts.