Philosophy:Open individualism

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Short description: Philosophical view that a single subject embodies all individuals

Open individualism is a view within the philosophy of self, according to which there exists only one numerically identical subject, who is everyone at all times; in the past, present and future.[1] It is a theoretical solution to the question of personal identity, being contrasted with empty individualism, which is the view that one's personal identity corresponds to a fixed pattern that instantaneously disappears with the passage of time, and closed individualism, the common view that personal identities are particular to subjects and yet survive over time.[1]

History

The term was coined by Croatian-American philosopher Daniel Kolak,[2] though a similar view has been described at least since the time of the Upanishads, in the late Bronze Age; the Upanishadic phrase Tat tvam asi ("You are that") is emblematic.[3] Others who have expressed similar views (in various forms) include the philosophers Averroes,[4] Arthur Schopenhauer (influenced by the Upanishads),[5] and Arnold Zuboff (who calls his view universalism),[6] mystic Meher Baba,[7] stand-up comedian Bill Hicks,[8] writer Alan Watts (explicitly elaborating on the Upanishads),[9] as well as physicists Erwin Schrödinger,[10] Freeman Dyson,[11] and Fred Hoyle.[12]

In fiction

Leo Tolstoy's short story "Esarhaddon, King of Assyria" (1903), tells how an old man appears before Esarhaddon and takes the king through a process where he experiences, from a first-person perspective, the lives of humans and non-human animals he has tormented. This reveals to him that he is everyone and that by harming others, he is actually harming himself.[13]

In the science fiction novel October the First Is Too Late (1966), Fred Hoyle puts forward the "pigeon hole theory" which asserts that "each moment of time can be thought of as a pre-existing pigeon hole" and the pigeon hole currently being examined by your consciousness is the present and that the spotlight of consciousness does not have to move in a linear fashion; it could potentially move around in any order.[14] Hoyle considers the possibility that there might be one set of pigeon holes for each person, but only one spotlight, which would mean that the "consciousness could be the same".[12]

One (1988), a novel by Richard Bach, features the author and his wife finding themselves under a spell of quantum physics, existing in different incarnations of themselves in alternate worlds. Eventually, they find out that all incarnations of themselves and others are the same being.[15]

"The Egg" (2009), a short story by Andy Weir, is about a character who finds out that they are every person who has ever existed.[16]

In reality

According to open individualism, physicalism implies experience never dies, because there is no one to die.[1] There is always a substructure embedded in the sum of all experiential computations which assimilates the past from the inside of its causal structure.[1] From this perspective reincarnation in the common sense isn't true, but rather it is that people are already reincarnated as everything because no one is traveling.[1] This computation that knows "I am here" is the same subject as that computation over there in the future that knows "I am here", and there is no computation which knows "I am not here".[1]{{Page needed|date=January 2026}

Krista and Tatiana Hogan have a unique thalamic connection that may provide insight into the philosophical and neurological foundations of consciousness. It has been argued that there's no empirical test that can conclusively establish that for some sensations, the twins share one token experience rather than two exactly matching token experiences. Yet background considerations about the way the brain has specific locations for conscious contents, combined with the evident overlapping pathways in the twins' brains, arguably implies that the twins share some conscious experiences. If this is true, then the twins may offer a proof of concept for how experiences in general could be shared between brains.[17][18][19]

In ethics

Since open individualism fundamentally challenges a common view of the self, the outcome of the philosophy also suggests a radical change in how society views revenge, punishment, and in general any justification of suffering that is founded in our own alienation from the subject experiencing the suffering.[1] From a utilitarian perspective it could be argued that killing wrongdoers is justified if it lowers the amount of suffering that the wrongdoer will have to experience in total. However sadistic punishment just for the sake of revenge doesn't make sense, according to open individualism, since it just causes more suffering for you to experience.[1]{{Page needed|date=January 2026}

See also

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 Kolak, Daniel (2004) (in en). I Am You: The Metaphysical Foundations for Global Ethics. Synthese Library. 325. Dordrecht: Springer. doi:10.1007/978-1-4020-3014-7. ISBN 978-1-4020-2999-8. OCLC 60329674. 
  2. ↑ Thomson, Garrett (2008-06-01). "Counting subjects" (in en). Synthese 162 (3): 373–384. doi:10.1007/s11229-007-9249-7. ISSN 1573-0964. 
  3. ↑ Frazier, Jessica (June 2019). "'Become this whole world': the phenomenology of metaphysical religion in Chāndogya Upaniṣad 6–8". Religions 10 (6): 368. doi:10.3390/rel10060368. "Through 16 sub-sections it recounts a conversation in which Uddālaka changes his student son's self-perception, leading him to identify as part of a larger reality that transcends his finite body and mind; the recurring motif 'tat tvam asi'—that or thus thou art—is one of the most globally celebrated lines in the whole 3000 year span of Hindu thought.". 
  4. ↑ Ivry, Alfred (2012), Zalta, Edward N., ed., Arabic and Islamic Psychology and Philosophy of Mind (Summer 2012 ed.), Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2012/entries/arabic-islamic-mind/, retrieved 2019-09-07 
  5. ↑ Barua, Arati, ed (2017) (in en). Schopenhauer on Self, World and Morality: Vedantic and Non-Vedantic Perspectives. Singapore: Springer. doi:10.1007/978-981-10-5954-4. ISBN 978-9811059537. 
  6. ↑ Zuboff, Arnold (1990). "One Self: The Logic of Experience". Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 33 (1): 39–68. doi:10.1080/00201749008602210. https://philpapers.org/archive/ZUBOST.pdf. "In all conscious life there is only one person—I—whose existence depends merely on the presence of a quality that is inherent in all experience—its quality of being mine, the simple immediacy of it for whatever is having experience.". 
  7. ↑ Baba, Meher (1989). The Everything and the Nothing (2nd ed.). Myrtle Beach, South Carolina: Sheriar Foundation. ISBN 978-1880619131. OCLC 38045971. https://avatarmeherbabatrust.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Everything_r.pdf. 
  8. ↑ "Mushroom scene from, American - The Bill Hicks Story". YouTube. May 18, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k91R-fe530Y. "Today, a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration. That we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There is no such thing as death, life is only a dream and we're the imagination of ourselves... Here's Tom with the weather." 
  9. ↑ Watts, Alan (1966). The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1st ed.). New York: Pantheon Books. ISBN 978-0394417257. "For every individual is a unique manifestation of the Whole, as every branch is a particular outreaching of the tree. To manifest individuality, every branch must have a sensitive connection with the tree, just as our independently moving and differentiated fingers must have a sensitive connection with the whole body. The point, which can hardly be repeated too often, is that differentiation is not separation." 
  10. ↑ Schrödinger, Erwin (1992) (in en). What is Life?: With Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 89. ISBN 978-1-107-60466-7. "The only possible alternative is simply to keep to the immediate experience that consciousness is a singular of which the plural is unknown" 
  11. ↑ Dyson, Freeman J. (1979) (in en). Disturbing the Universe (1st ed.). New York: Harper & Row. ISBN 978-0-06-011108-3. https://archive.org/details/disturbinguniver00dyso. "I called it Cosmic Unity. Cosmic Unity said: There is only one of us. We are all the same person. I am you and I am Winston Churchill and Hitler and Gandhi and everybody." 
  12. ↑ 12.0 12.1 Hoyle, Fred (1966). October the First Is Too Late (1st ed.). New York: Harper & Row. ISBN 978-0-06-002845-9. https://archive.org/details/octoberfirstisto00hoyl. 
  13. ↑ Tolstoy, Leo (1906). Twenty-three Tales. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 256–263. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Twenty-three_Tales. 
  14. ↑ Webb, Stephen (2017). All the Wonder that Would Be: Exploring Past Notions of the Future. Cham: Springer. pp. 162. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-51759-9. ISBN 978-3-319-51758-2. OCLC 985702597. 
  15. ↑ "One by Richard Bach". Magill Book Reviews. 1990. https://openurl.ebsco.com/openurl?sid=ebsco:plink&id=ebsco:a9h:9008019743&crl=f&prompt=none. "Ultimately Bach and his wife learn that there is more unity in the world than diversity: We are all one, our differences deriving only from the different choices we make." 
  16. ↑ Prisco, Giulio (2015-07-18). "A short story about Open Individualist resurrection by Andy Weir, author of The Martian" (in en-US). http://turingchurch.com/2015/07/18/a-short-story-about-open-individualist-resurrection-by-andy-weir-author-of-the-martian/. 
  17. ↑ Cochrane, Tom (2021). "A case of shared consciousness" (in en). Synthese 199 (1–2): 1019–1037. doi:10.1007/s11229-020-02753-6. ISSN 0039-7857. https://philpapers.org/archive/COCACO-6.pdf. 
  18. ↑ Kang, Shao-Pu (2022). "Shared consciousness and asymmetry". Synthese 200 (413). doi:10.1007/s11229-022-03890-w. https://philarchive.org/rec/KANSCA-5. 
  19. ↑ Roelofs, Luke; Sebo, Jeff (2024). "Overlapping minds and the hedonic calculus". Philosophical Studies 181 (6–7): 1487–1506. doi:10.1007/s11098-024-02167-x. 

Further reading



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