55. A definitive argument may be given: Open Individualism ends up
being the only possible answer to
what I called “the Individual Existential
Problem”, which only by
adopting Open Individualism can be
reduced to what I called “the General
Existential Problem”, which is a problem common to every theory of ontology,
even if such theory does not imply any theory about personal identity.
Unfortunately, it is not easy to understand the cogency of this argument, so it
may appear irrelevant to those who do not grasp it. But I think that once
understood, it is so strong that all the
other arguments may be regarded as accessory consequences of this main argument.
56. It is
useful to begin by speaking about the
General Existential Problem. This is the name that I use for the old
question: “Why does the world exist?”.
Here the question does not seek to suggest that there is some immanent purpose
to the existence of the world, it just
expresses our wonder at the occurrence of all the events that make possible the
existence of the world and life. It is useful to consider two aspects of
this problem: the Theoretical Aspect and the Practical Aspect.
57. The Theoretical Aspect is related to the
architecture of the world, and more specifically, to the architecture of a
world containing life. We know that in nature there is a set of absolute numbers
(for example, the ratio between the four fundamental forces) that have to be
carefully calibrated to make possible the existence of atoms and molecules as we
know them. If you were God (by “God” I mean a cosmic architect, not a magician),
you would have to find this calibration to create the world, and you would
possibly not even know whether a working calibration could ever exist. So you
would perform a lot of theoretical work, calculating formulas and checking
results, and then finally you might find the right formula. If you did, you
would have solved the theoretical problem. Now you could become the “cosmic
bricklayer” and build an actual world with that exact calibration of the
fundamental forces. If you could also build it materially, then you would also
have solved the practical problem.
58. The
Theoretical Aspect of the General Existential Problem should make us wonder,
because it could not have been guessed
that at least one theoretical solution was possible. It could have been that
the appearance of life would require some impossible conditions, such as
requiring that the solution of a3 + b3 = c3 be
integers for a, b and c. A priori, nothing can guarantee that there would
have existed at least one mathematical model of the universe that left room for
the appearance of the mind. It could be the case that the appearance of the
mind required contradictory conditions. In fact, we know that at least one
solution is possible only because we are here.
59. The Practical Aspect of the General Existential Problem is the same idea that
Stephen Hawking wrote about in his
book A Brief History of Time: “What is it that breathes fire into the
equations and makes a universe for them to describe?”. That is, if you were
God, once you resolve the Theoretical
Aspect of the problem, you still have to practically build an instance of the
theoretical model. To have the complete documentation needed to build a
plane does not mean that you may fly: you still have to build the plane.
60. Actually,
the reasoning regarding the vanishing of
differences between the “type” and the “instance” concept, introduced when
we criticized the identity concept applied to objects, and in particular,
applied to the universe as a whole, led me to think that
the Practical Aspect of the General Existential Problem is not as urgent as the
Theoretical Aspect is. The “type” of our actual universe corresponds to its
mathematical model. The “instance” of an
object is something that derives from the combination of the chosen type and one
identity. We already discussed how identity for objects is always reducible
to a convention, based on the internal structure of the object and its
geometrical relations with other objects (the latter being not applicable to the
model of a complete universe). The only concept of identity that is not reducible to a convention is the
identity of the minds that experience life in that universe. According this
view, the identity of the universe
becomes a projection of the mind of the living beings experiencing it.
Open Individualism allows us to regard
those minds as different forms of the subjectivity phenomenon, so that
eventually, the identity of the mind and
the identity of the universe become useless. According to this view,
the Practical Aspect is reduced to the
direct experiencing of the model by the subjectivity phenomenon, without the
need to create an instance of the model.
61. Now we are
ready to face what I call the Critical
Point of the General Existential Problem. Our bare existence in the universe
demonstrates that the existence of the mind is something that is allowed by a
special set of very complex mathematical and physical rules. We may wish to
overlook the problem of finding a design for a universe that can host life
somehow. We may think that, considering all the possible theoretical models of
the universe, it is normal that some of them, and at least for sure our universe
model, will allow the appearance of life. But I think that overlooking this
problem is wrong. This is the Critical Point of the General Existential Problem, concerning both the
Theoretical Aspect and the Practical Aspect:
even if we find a complete and mathematically coherent world model that
theoretically leaves room for the presence of the mind, strictly reasoning
in mathematical or physical terms,
nothing can ensure that the actualization of such a world model should imply the
actualization of the mind that the model allows. The actualization of the
model, despite the room it leaves for the mind, might result in a zombie-world.
This is due to the objectivity that
characterizes all the mathematical and physical conditions, and the fact that
the experience of the mind is something that we have only subjectively, by our
direct experience. We of course are convinced that other people also have a
real mind, but we can be absolutely sure only of the existence of our own mind.
We have to acknowledge that the
actualization of a world model that allowed the existence of a mind has been the
necessary context for the existence of this mind, but we could not have taken it
for granted before this would have happened. It simply happened.
This point is critical because it mixes
objective and logical reasoning about the coherence and the rationality of the
world model with the immediate and unquestionable fact of our subjective
experience of the existence of the mind. Keep in mind that the existence of
the mind cannot be deduced by any physical law: we have to accept it, to
acknowledge that it happened; it is not
subject to scientific investigation, because it implies a subjective factor.
62. The Practical Aspect is meaningless without this Critical Point. And actually, I wonder about the
meaning of “existence” when referring to a zombie-world or to any other world
without any observers which could not exchange any information with our
universe. The existence of a world that
is not experienced by any mind poses a serious challenge to the meaning of the
word “existence”. How can we say that a world is “actualized” if it allows
no observer, or if it is populated by zombies without an effective mind? This is
why I think that the solution to the Practical Aspect,
the actualization of a theoretical model in a “real” world, depends on the
actualization of the mind that the model allows to exist.
63. This
position is the same as that of the physicist
John Wheeler, who proposed “the
Participatory Anthropic Principle”, according to which
the existence of the mind is the key condition for the actualization of a
theoretical world model. The theoretical world model is
a coherent mathematical model that allows
the mind to exist, and conversely,
the existence of the mind brings the theoretical world into actual existence.
For this reciprocal dependence, it is not a dualist model, but rather it is
better classified as dual-aspect monism,
or even idealism, because it is the
mind that discriminates what the theoretical structures are that can be
actualized. At any rate, these classifications are limited to my considerations
of the General Existential Problem from an Open Individualist perspective, but
they are not mandatory for any Open Individualist View. You may think that, in
some sense, all the different kinds of universes you may image do really exist
somewhere, but the Critical Point still remains:
the actualization of the mind cannot be predicted to occur just from actualizing
a model of a universe theoretically compatible with it.
64. Now we can
begin to exert some reasoning on the
Individual Existential Problem, keeping in mind the reasoning we have done
on the General Existential Problem. The
Individual Existential Problem is related to our personal presence among the
total number of living beings. Once we accept the fact that life exists, we
may wonder about the fact of finding ourselves being part of this multiform
existence. Accepting Open Individualism, we can immediately avoid this question.
But if you think that every living being,
or at least every conscious being, has their own numerically different personal identity, then you have to face
this problem: “Because all the other living beings are ‘not-me’,
a priori nothing can guarantee that
there would be one living being who is exactly ‘me’. So, I have to think that,
even if my actual birth was a matter of chance,
I am and I always have been the beneficiary of one chance to be born, which
was a sort of exclusive privilege, even if it was only one single chance within
the whole set of all the possible worlds”.
65. The General
Existential Problem reflects longstanding questions about the existence of the
world, or better, questions about a world that allowed the appearance of life. The Individual Existential Problem
reflects the individual wonder at finding myself being a participant in this
world. As we did for the General Existential Problem, we may distinguish
between the Theoretical Aspect, the Practical Aspect and the Critical Point of
the Individual Existential Problem.
66. The Practical Aspect of the Individual Existential Problem is
in some ways manageable even if we do not consider Open Individualism, but we have to be aware that to
manage it we have to accept some
consequences that are not widely acknowledged, because they force us to accept assertions that are
not falsifiable. But the Theoretical
Aspect and the Critical Point of the Individual Existential Problem are more
complex to understand, and they can
be managed only by Open Individualism. For this reason, it is convenient to
begin by discussing the Practical Aspect of the Individual Existential Problem.
67. The
Practical Aspect of the General
Existential Problem is related to the actualization of one of the theoretical
models of the universe that makes life possible, accepting as given that at
least one universe of this kind is possible. In the same way, the Practical Aspect of the Individual
Existential Problem is related to the actualization of my individual person,
i.e. my own birth, accepting as given that
at least one of all the possible living beings has all the necessary conditions
to make my mind emerge. You may already see that from an Open Individualist
perspective this is not an issue, because according to Open Individualism
every possible living being is a
different experience of the very same subjectivity phenomenon that I am
currently experiencing as ‘my mind’. But let us see if other views can somehow
manage the bare facts of my actual existence.
68. In every
other theory besides Open Individualism,
your personal identity is defined by some conditions that univocally
characterize you. These conditions are not clearly defined because the
problems of personal identity in these theories have no clear solutions.
For reductionist theories, these
conditions must be physical conditions; they have to be linked to the matter
that constitutes your brain or to the configuration currently implemented by
neurons in your brain. Non-reductionist
theories introduce something non-physical to differentiate ‘me’ from ‘you’,
so these conditions are undefinable in
physical terms, but non-reductionists think the conditions have to exist in some
form, as they agree that ‘me’ is not ‘you’.
69. The
Practical Aspect of the Individual Existential Problem is about the
probabilities of these conditions coming to be. Often this problem is referred
to with the question, “what were the
chances of me coming into existence?”.
Considering all the facts that preceded
your life that you may regard as being required for you being alive,
such as being born to your parents at
some specific time, you may conclude that
the chances were incredibly small. A
good example of such calculations can be found at
http://blogs.harvard.edu/abinazir/2011/06/15/what-are-chances-you-would-be-born/
. In his essay, Joe Kern formalized this reasoning more
precisely, calling it “the gamete-dependence claim”. This is probably the most
well-known version of this view, but other thinkers attach personal identity to
something more ephemeral than an entire life, so they may propose an alternative
computing of the chances. For example, reductionists such as Parfit think that
during the entire life of your body, many personal identities may follow one
another in succession, as the psychological connectedness between them becomes
weaker and weaker. According to this view, your existing, defined by the
persistence of your single personal identity in this relay race, may be a matter
of years or maybe months or even a shorter interval of time. Nonetheless, even
on this view, there exist a number of conditions that are currently satisfied so
that you exist now, and it seems clear that these odds will all continue to be
incredibly small.
70. To balance
this smallness of odds, if you do not want to accept the Open Individualism
View, the most reasonable solution is to
postulate that many alternative universes are possible, so that you just
find yourself appearing in the one where all the conditions required for your
existence have been realized. This is the
unfalsifiable conjecture that views other than Open Individualism have to accept
in order to give an account of our individual existences when the chances
are so incredibly small. Open Individualism does not require this conjecture to
explain the actualization of my existence, but I am nonetheless inclined to
accept the conjecture, because I think that other universes are just as probable
as this one. If you think that other universes are possible, keep in mind that
Open Individualism, to be effective, has to work the same through all the
possible universes.
71. Max Tegmark, in a famous article (“Parallel Universes”, Scientific American, 2003) about the
classification of all the universes theoretically possible, comes to the
definitive generalization that every mathematical structure is a universe, but
to support life they have to be very big and complex, as the model of our
universe is. In his generalization, he considers
not only all the different types of universes, but also all the possible
evolutions of the same universe. This is compatible with the idea that,
despite the incredibly small chances you had to come into existence, you may
currently find yourself alive here. And the model also suggests that
in some other universes, these conditions
can be actualized again and again, letting you live all the possible variations
of your current life. This is a side
effect of regarding the actualization of our existence as being justified by the
existence of a sufficient number of alternative universes. Many of them may
be identical to our current universe up to now, and begin to be different only
starting from one moment in the future. I want to remark that considering
reasonable that you may live all the possible variations of your current life is
conceptually not very different from considering reasonable that you may live
all the possible variations of all possible lives.
72. This
conclusion is difficult to accept by thinkers who appeal to rationality and
reductionism, because it resembles the
reincarnation concept of some religious views. Some thinkers are more
inclined to accept that every possible universe exists, but that your individual
existence is limited to this one, and any person in any different universe has a
different personal identity from your current one, even if the differences
between that universe and our current universe are relative only to a time in
the future of your life. This implies that
your current personal identity is defined by some future event. This is
possible if we accept that such future events are determined by some hidden
information that already exists at some hidden level of our current reality. It
is also possible to think that personal
identity is strictly limited to a small interval in the lifetime of the body,
so that any future variation will occur anyway to a different person, no matter
what universe they find themselves in. All these conjectures are unfalsifiable,
so different thinkers may charge others with believing in something
unscientific.
73. Despite all
these subtleties, we must not mistake the
Practical Aspect of the Individual Existential Problem for the Theoretical
Aspect. All the things that we discussed up to now about the probability of
your existence are related to the probability that an individual coming to exist
would have all the characteristics that you may want to consider crucial to
having your own personal identity. In this recitation, it does not matter if you
think that such events may correspond to the circumstances that led to your
birth, or to some circumstances that may be true of many different births, or
are related only to an ephemeral state of your brain that tomorrow will already
be gone. The requirements for your existence can even be met only for a single
instant in the entire life of your body. In all those views,
we always take as given that the
existence of your mind was somehow possible, in other words, that the
Theoretical Aspect of the Individual Existential Problem had to have a solution.
But the fact that your existence proves
that somehow your existence was possible does not answer to the fact that you
had to find yourself being the recipient of one of these existences, no
matter how improbable. The deepest question about my personal existence is not
the actualization of my opportunity to exist, but the bare fact that I am a participant in the set of all the possible perceivers
of an opportunity to exist. As we think that each of us owns their specific
personal identity, it will always be possible to wonder:
“It happened that I am one of the many.
Do I have to accept this participation as
given ‘by chance’, without any possible explication?”
74. To
understand the problem, I find useful the
metaphor of the owner of a lottery ticket. Imagine that you find yourself to
be the owner of a lottery ticket. The
ticket has a univocal number that identifies you as the owner. You may
assume that the number is composed of millions of digits, codifying in some way
all the conditions that you may think are necessary to bring you into existence.
The lottery is going on, with numbers being extracted. Imagine that
every time that a number is extracted,
the owner of the ticket with the corresponding number comes into existence.
Despite the extremely huge number of tickets around, if the extractions continue
to be done indefinitely, sooner or later
your number has to be extracted, and you come to life. This is the Practical
Aspect of the Individual Existential Problem, and as you may see,
the solution is to keep on extracting
numbers indefinitely. You may imagine that once extracted, every number is
put back inside the bowl, so you may be born infinite times, or is thrown away,
so that you cannot be born twice. This is the case if you think that all the
possible stories of all the possible worlds will come to exist exactly one time
each. Ultimately, these two cases are not really different in an eternalist
framework.
75. The real disconcert with the metaphor of the owner of a lottery
ticket comes if you consider that, after all, you are the recipient of one
ticket; you are participating in the
lottery. This disconcert comes when you consider
the Theoretical Aspect of the Individual Existential Problem. If you think
that each individual has their own personal identity, and that your personal
identity is different from all the others, then you have to answer to the fact that you are engaged in “the game of all the
possible lives” despite the fact that the game would have existed and would be
going on even if you never existed. Thus, you cannot give any rational
reason to explain why your participation had to be necessary. Do not be misled
by thinking that it never had to be necessary, that it was just your birth by
chance that made your participation become a fact of the game. This is only the
Practical Aspect of the problem. The Theoretical Aspect says that your engagement was necessary at least
as a possible outcome. It is like saying that the lottery can’t start until
you buy a ticket. Then the lottery started and eventually you won. It sounds
like a fraud.
76. At this
point, a common remark is that even the
conditions necessary to my existence had to be accounted for within the sum
of all the possible events, and this means that we cannot be surprised of their
existence. It is like saying that my
ticket number had to exist, despite my opinion about it. Because the ticket
numbers are infinite, every number had to
be on a ticket and can be extracted, sooner or later. No matter what your
number is, even if it would never be extracted, all the numbers have necessarily
to exist, available to be extracted the next time. But this remark does not
really answer to my disconcert about finding myself here, participating in the
game.
77. The Critical Point of the Individual Existential Problem is
that nothing can ever ensure that I had to be assigned any ticket number. Having said all that we have
already said, it is not the number of my
ticket that defines my personal identity, it is my personal identity that allows
me to define the number of the ticket as “my number”. Any number, or any set
of causes that you may consider necessary to bring me into existence does not
have nor define any identity from which I can inherit my personal identity. I
can always easily imagine me owning a different ticket with a different number,
that corresponds to imagining being born elsewhere, from other parents, with
different personal characteristics. And I can even imagine not being born at
all, which would correspond to imagining myself not owning any lottery ticket at all. My ticket could have
been owned by “someone else”, like every other ticket actually is, as long as I
believe that every person has their own distinct personal identity.
78. Some people have criticized this example as dualist, because to express this problem I am forced to ask you to
reason as though we were spirits waiting for a chance to live, owning numbered
tickets. Please keep in mind that this is
only a metaphor to explain the Theoretical Aspect of the Individual
Existential Problem, and that the
metaphor is valid only if we do not accept the Open Individualism View. If
we do accept it, we no longer have any need to imagine tickets and lotteries.
The metaphor shows that in denying Open
Individualism, we have to give an account of our engagement in life’s game,
no matter what the contingent causalities of our existence are.
79. The bare
fact that there exist other people different from me leads me to imagine that
even the individual with my body and my
brain could well be another person (or “other people”) instead of being “me”,
in the same way that a perfect copy of me would not really be me, especially if I am still alive
at the same time. You may advocate any number of reasons to justify why I should
not wonder about it, but they are condemned to be ineffective. And this is not
imputable to the fact that I am not intelligent enough or willing to follow your
reasoning: it is because from the
first-person point-of-view standpoint, it is always legitimate for me (or for
anybody else) to consider all the reasons you may advocate to explain my own
existence as not being fully explanatory, as these reasons should encompass and
give an account for all the elements that concurred to define precisely my own
personal identity. This is impossible for the same reasons that make
personal identity so hard to define: that
actually nothing has an absolute identity, but rather all identities eventually
appear to be founded on arbitrary conventions or some hidden and
indemonstrable dualist concept, and eventually it is my (illusory) personal
identity that makes it possible to define the identity of my body, not the other
way around. I know that I am the individual that I am just because I find myself
already being it, but this does not demonstrate that I will come into existence
each time a body exactly as mine is somehow created.
80. The
Critical Point of the Individual
Existential Problem has the same criticality as the Critical Point of the
General Existential Problem: they try
to give some objective reasons (physical matter, structures and events)
to explain the subjective fact of the
existence of the mind, and, for the Individual Existential Problem,
of a very specific mind. It is
useless to try to define physically the identity of an objectively ascertainable
object (based on material or physical elements) in which to anchor the identity
of a specific mind. As long as I believe that I have a personal identity
different from all of the other people who exist or might have existed, whatever
reasoning you may advocate, you can never find any objective reason to prove
objectively that a particular instance of the subjectivity phenomenon
necessarily had to exist (due to the existence of a particular physical object,
for example). We cannot use objectivity
to demonstrate something that is purely subjective. I know that the
subjectivity phenomenon exists only because I undergo it personally. As long as
I believe I have my own personal identity, my own instance of subjectivity
phenomenon, different from that of every other living being,
I can always imagine myself staring at
the ticket in my hands and wondering how I found myself there, with that
ticket, having to accept it as an inescapable fate.
81. The
Critical Point of the Individual Existential Problem is definitively unsolvable
even for dualist theories. Even in
this case, and I would say especially in
this case, my personal existence is deferred to something inexplicable that we
have to accept as given, without any further question. And in this case too,
as long as I believe that I have my own personal identity,
I can always imagine myself staring at the ticket in my hands and wondering how
I found myself there, with that ticket, having to accept it as an
inescapable fate.
82. Now,
consider again the Open Individualism View: at the price of a new conception of
time that is nonetheless coherent with our experience, it offers the only
possible solution to the Critical Point of the Individual Existential Problem,
it reduces the Theoretical Aspect of the Individual Existential Problem to the
Theoretical Aspect of the General Existential Problem (which is independent of
any view of personal identity), and
offers a straight explication of the Practical Aspect of the Individual
Existential Problem, leaving open the complete range of choices for your
favorite theory of the universe. I can understand how it happens that I am the
owner of my lottery ticket: actually, I am the owner of all the tickets. Once
the distinction between an external time that does not flow and multiple flowing
subjective times is accepted as viable,
Open Individualism offers the clearest solutions to all the problems concerning
personal identity. Any alternative theory has to be more convincing on at
least some of these issues to compete with Open Individualism. And the fact that
Open Individualism contradicts our common sense conception of time is not a
strong argument against it. Contemporary physics has already demonstrated that
our common sense and our conception of time are not good tools or guidelines for
understanding what happens in the physical world in extreme conditions.
Moreover, Open Individualism offers solutions for a wide variety of problems
about consciousness and identity.