What if your consciousness, your self-awareness, isn’t unique at all—but the very same “I” that exists in everyone, everywhere? What if you and I—and everyone—are essentially the same person? In this episode, I talk with Joe Kern, author of “The Odds of Existing: On Open Individualism and the Illusion of Death” about Open Individualism: the radical view that there is only a single subject of consciousness, which is shared by all aware beings. Put another way: instead of seeing your odds of existing—your odds of being self-aware at this moment—as being extremely low, it’s a view of your existence as inevitable, because wherever there is a conscious being, your awareness must be present.
Joe and I explore the logic of this idea, how it challenges our assumptions about identity and existence, common objections to the idea, and what it implies about death. Other topics discussed: religion, the idea of souls, free will, and the multiverse. Joe’s website is at applebutterdreams.wordpress.com.
Episode links:
- YouTube (includes video)
- Apple Podcasts
- Spotify
Resources mentioned in this talk, or related/recommended:
- Joe Kern’s website, featuring his book The Odds of Existing: On Open Individualism and the Illusion of Death
- Wikipedia entry on Open Individualism
- Arnold Zuboff’s paper One Self: The Logic of Experience, and associated reddit thread
- Daniel Kolak’s book I Am You: The Metaphysical Foundations of Global Ethics
- Derek Parfit’s famous book Reasons and Persons, which contains ideas and thought experiments often referenced in work on consciousness and Open Individualism
- Iacopo Vettori’s work on Open Individualism
- The site of Mineta Oliver (née Jurášková), a.k.a. Edralis, where she writes about what she calls “Awareness Monism”
- Related concept: Wikipedia entry for the “vertiginous question,” aka, “Why am I me and not someone else?”
An episode of mine: What it’s like to live without a belief in free will
TRANSCRIPT
(All transcripts will contain errors)
Zach Elwood: What if I told you there are some very smart people who believe that every person who exists, who has ever existed, is essentially the same person? If you aren’t already familiar with this concept, your instinct is probably to dismiss this as a crazy idea. That was my reaction when I first heard about the idea. But the more I delved into this idea, and read the logical and philosophical arguments for it, the more I came to see that this wasn’t some kooky New Age type idea. It’s an idea with a lot of logical points supporting it, and it’s an idea that resolves a lot of the perplexing and confusing aspects of consciousness and existence that many thinkers have puzzled over. It also happens to dovetail with ideas about consciousness found in Buddhist thought.
This idea goes by different names. The most common name for this idea is Open Individualism, coined by Daniel Kolak, who is perhaps the person most well known for this idea. He’s a philosopher and the author of a book titled I Am You: The Metaphysical Foundations for Global Ethics. Another name for this idea is Universalism, coined by Arnold Zuboff, who is also well known for promoting this view. Arnold is known for a 1990 paper on this topic titled “One Self: The Logic of Experience.” He also has a book coming out titled “Finding Myself: BEYOND THE FALSE BOUNDARIES OF PERSONAL IDENTITY.”
I’ll read from the foreword of that book, written by the well known philosopher Thomas Nagel:
Zuboff proposes and defends with creative philosophical arguments a radically original conception of the mind, according to which the distinction between selves – between me and you, for example – is an illusion. There is only one subject of consciousness; it is the subject of all consciousness, and it is equivalent to the first-person immediacy shared by all conscious experience. The separate bundles of experience in the lives of distinct conscious organisms do not have separate subjects, but share a universal quality of subjective immediacy, which it is easy for each of us to mistake for a unique individual “I” in our own case.
End quote
So that’s a pretty succinct summary of what the idea is about, although of course if this idea is new to you, there will be much more to say before you grasp it.
Nagel goes on to say:
Both the conclusion and the argument will certainly seem incredible, even outrageous, to many readers, but the whole is presented with such care and skill that it should be regarded as an important contribution even by those who are not persuaded. The relation of the mind to the world is so mysterious that it is not philosophically reasonable to dismiss any view, however radical, out of hand.
End quote
I wanted to start out emphasizing that there are some serious and respected thinkers who explore and believe this idea, to help show that it is far less kooky than you may at first be inclined to suppose. Thinking it’s kooky is entirely natural; paradigm-shifting views will all sound pretty kooky at first; they may even strike us as threatening and angering, too, in various ways.
In this episode, I’ll talk to Joe Kern, who writes about Open Individualism on his blog, and in his book The Odds of Existing. Joe is not as well known as the philosophers I’ve mentioned, but he has been thinking about these ideas for a long time, and I think he has some strong and I think highly accessible writings on this topic. If you’re a fan of the TV show Severance, you can find some pieces by Joe that tie in Severance to Open Individualism. You can find Joe’s site at https://applebutterdreams.wordpress.com. Also, you can get a free copy of Joe’s book on his site.
Joe’s work has focused on what I see as a strong angle of attack for demonstrating this idea to people. In the quote ”normal” view of what we are as people, many people see their own existence, their sense of being present in the world, of “being here now,” as something that happened against all odds; as something hugely improbable and unlikely. In this view of things, some unthinkably huge number of factors had to align just right for you — your sense of awareness, your current consciousness — to have existed. Often, this is imagined as maybe the right egg and the right sperm coming together in just the right way at the right time to produce you: the consciousness listening to these words right now.
But what exactly were the factors that led to producing your current self-consciousness? If it was related to the egg and the sperm combining in just the right way, does this mean that if the egg and the sperm had been completely the same, the same material, but there’d been a slightly different few molecules in the egg or the sperm, you’d be an entirely different you hearing this? A different self? Or if the same egg and sperm were combined, just a little bit later, you’d be a different person? How exactly would all these factors work? And would that view of things mean that there are an infinite number of first-person perspectives waiting in the wings, and if something slightly shifts, an entirely different first-person perspective manifests?
And, related to this, does this mean if something had gone slightly differently in your past, like your parents moving to another country, that that version of you would still have the same sense of self; that it’d still be you, the person hearing these words now, present in that other version of you? In what way is that other, parallel-universe version of yourself any different than just another person, a person in another body, leading an entirely different life?
In Joe’s book, he walks through the logic of these things and shows that it doesn’t make sense to think of our inner consciousness as improbable. When you think deeply about it, there are no logical factors to find that could be seen to explain why you would have a sense that “you are here” in this universe but, in a slightly different universe, have an entirely different “I” experience. Instead of seeing our first-person experience as improbable, it makes more sense to see our first-person experience as inevitable: that anywhere there is a conscious entity, that same “I am here” sensation will exist; in other words, you will exist wherever a conscious being exists. And this means that we are all manifestations of the same first-person experience; the same I.
Now you may be thinking of various objections to this; I know I did. But rest assured that the people thinking about these things have talked about your objections and have made strong responses to them. For example, you may be thinking, “Any sentient creature that arises in the universe, no matter how improbable its existence is, must always develop and have its own sense of self; that is not mysterious at all” Joe and I talk about that in our talk, along with other objections.
I’ll say that, as far as I know, this is the first recorded conversation about Open Individualism. At least neither Joe nor I were aware of another one. I think it’s extremely hard to talk about these ideas. Our language, which relies on a “normal” paradigm of what people are, isn’t well suited to the rather unusual and counterintuitive ideas we’re discussing. There are all sorts of ways to get confused, whether when talking about these ideas, or hearing them, and especially if you’re new to them. One area of confusion is the difference between the content of someone’s life — someone’s traits and experiences, what’s in their brains — and the first-person, “I am here” sensation; the I feeling, or pure awareness – what Joe will refer to as the empty self. It’s easy for us to conflate and confuse these two dimensions; we’re used to thinking about both concepts when we talk about ourselves and about what it means to be a person. But for the purposes of this talk, you should try to separate the content of people’s lives from what we’re talking about: which is simply the first-person awareness; the sense that “I exist right now.”
I mention the difficulty of talking about these topics so that, if at some point in this talk you think Joe or I aren’t being articulate, I hope you aren’t turned off from considering this idea. ** Joe and I were both worried about this; Joe more than I because he has a book on it, and is afraid of representing Open Individualism badly. I think Joe does a good job, and I think I do an okay job, but I just wanted to emphasize the difficulty of talking about this topic, and I hope if you are a bit intrigued you’ll check out the resources and writings on this. On my website behavior-podcast.com, on the page for this episode, I’ll include links to resources by the people who have written about this concept, and include links to some interesting reddit threads about it.
Along the way in this talk, Joe and I discuss religion, the idea of souls, fear of death and annihilation, existentialism, free will, Daniel Dennett, Derek Parfitt, and the multiverse.
Okay here’s the talk with Joe Kern…
Zach: Okay. Hi Joe, thanks for joining me.
Zach: Hi Joe, thanks for joining me.
Joe: Oh, thank you. It’s really great to be here.
Zach: It’s a pleasure to talk to myself about these ideas. You know, talk to… Sorry, that was a really bad attempt at some open individualism humor. Talking to myself. I could have planned that joke out a little bit better. [chuckles]
Joe: Oh yeah yeah. That’s all right. I think everybody that comes to this makes a few of those jokes at the beginning, and then everybody just stops right away. They’re like, “This isn’t going to go any further. That’s good enough.”
Zach: It’s definitely too niche a subject to joke around. Nobody will know what you’re talking about. Maybe we could start with how… I’m curious how you found yourself in such a niche area. How did you find yourself to this area?
Joe: Yeah, it was entirely my own obsession, and not finding the answers in existing philosophy or theories. And so I just kind of found my way to my own answer. The question I was trying to answer was, when I was young, I grew up a Christian. You could call it fundamentalist, evangelical. My family was quite thoughtful and intellectual, so I don’t want to give the impression of the stereotype of those words. But I was a Christian, I believed in heaven and hell, I believed I had a soul or was a soul, and that when I died, that soul was going to go to heaven. And that mostly seemed all well and good to me. Then I went to a Christian college, started out even as a Bible major, intending to go into the ministry like my grandfather did. And then toward the end of my college—uh, took me six years to do undergrad—the last two years, I started to doubt my faith. The first seeds of doubt were really about the social issues like homosexuality and women being allowed to speak and lead in church. I just found myself, after a time, not being able to really accept those teachings anymore. I did it first, but then I was like, “Nah, it doesn’t seem right.”
So, I kind of lost my faith over those issues. Once I realized I could make my own choices about that—I just didn’t believe homosexuality was wrong, and so I made that choice. Whatever the Bible said, I made that choice. Once I made that choice, I realized I was free to choose about everything; what facts I believed and what morality I believed. So, that kind of led to my loss of faith. But along with the loss of faith, I lost the belief in heaven and a soul, and I didn’t like that. I didn’t like the idea of annihilation and death. It just terrified me. I’ve been speaking to people about this for 20 years. A lot of people have different things that they fear in death. So, I understand now that my concern isn’t the only concern that people have, but this was my concern. Just ceasing to exist. Not being anywhere ever, for all eternity. It’s really uncanny. It’s hard to even fathom, in the same way that it’s hard to fathom what it was like not existing before you were born. Right? Both of those things…non-existence is completely hard to fathom and also kind of terrifying.
I was thinking about this and… Let’s see, what happened next? Yeah, I didn’t like that idea. I was kind of holding on to the idea that I might still be a soul even if I didn’t believe in God, or specifically the Christian God or something that might be like a universal soul or something. I was holding on to that idea. And then I was doing more reading and got more into science. Actually, I was a science education major in college, and I was still kind of doubting evolution. Even after I stopped being a Christian, I still doubted evolution a bit. And I met a friend who turned me on to Richard Dawkins, and he started me on…have you read Dawkins?
Zach: Yeah, and you also quote some Dawkins in your book. Right?
Joe: Yeah, that’s right. Have you read The Selfish Gene?
Zach: I have not. No.
Joe: You have not. Okay. I started out with Climbing Mount Improbable, which is a great underrated book of his. It convinced me evolution was true. And then my friend had me read The Selfish Gene, which I read a few years later. It absolutely devastated me. The Selfish Gene really devastated my worldview. I was still holding on to wanting to believe in a soul, and I read The Selfish Gene and it’s this whole theory about how the replicator molecules are the entire reason that any life exists, you know? It started out as just bare replicator molecules. You read chapter two of The Selfish Gene, which I recommend to everybody; it’s a short mind-blowing chapter. So, just these bare replicator molecules. It’s like an algorithmic thing. Just the fact that the molecule that replicates itself more than the others is more successful. It’s like a tautology. It’s like saying that the person that runs fastest in the race wins the race—gets there first. The molecule that replicates itself more has more copies of itself around. And that process, according to Dawkins, which I agree with—I believe—is the entire reason that life exists, including human beings. He ends that chapter two, you know, he uses this contentious language, “We are the robots. Inside of us are the replicator molecules and we are the robots doing their bidding.”
Zach: We’re the carrier for these things that are…
Joe: Exactly. And so I ended that book just like, “Oh, that’s what my existence is! Evolution, this is my existence. This is why I exist. It’s just because of this.” I was depressed for a couple of days, and I was thinking about it, and then I sort of launched back to a thought. I remember I had this thought when I was five years old. I remember I looked over at my brother sitting in the kitchen as he was talking to my mother, and it just struck me all of a sudden, like, “Why is he him and I am me? Why not the other way around? Why am I not him and him me? Or why was I born as this person and not somebody else?” And I started to think maybe there’s a key in that thought to why this… Even though I totally agree with Dawkins’ theory of evolution—selfish gene theory—that thought grabbed me as something like-
Zach: The mystery.
Joe: Yeah, the mystery. The way I formulated it to myself was, evolution reaches down through the eons and creates this genetic person that becomes you. That explains why the human being Joe Kern exists, but it doesn’t explain why I exist. It doesn’t explain why I-
Zach: The ‘I’. The ‘I’ feeling.
Joe: Yeah. You could have a million or infinite number of copies of this human being with the same DNA that’s not me, and this one’s me. And so the thought I gave myself at the time—because, again, I was worried about annihilation and death, and I wanted to believe I was a soul—was, “how do I know I will cease to exist when I die, when I don’t know what caused me to exist in the first place?” So, I held on to that. Then I started doing research. I started reading about consciousness, I read… First was Chalmers’ The Conscious Mind, and then Dennett, his biggest critic, Consciousness Explained. And then after that came Parfit. I found Parfit through Dennett. He quoted him at the end. I’ve read a bunch of other things since then, but those are still the big three in my mind.
So I spent about five years thinking I was writing a theory about the soul, you know, trying to prove that the soul must exist because of this uncanny, strange thought, like, “Why am I me and not somebody else? Evolution doesn’t explain why I exist.” After reading a lot about consciousness and personal identity, which is what Parfit wrote about, I decided I really can’t believe in the soul anymore, either. That was really depressing, another depressing moment, and yet I still had these same thoughts about…
Zach: There’s still something mysterious and wild going on here.
Joe: Yeah. Why do I exist? Souls, I think, are actually conceptually incoherent. And not everybody who believes in open individualism thinks this. This is my thought. I have specific reasons for thinking that, but I feel like souls are conceptually incoherent, and Dennett and Parfit both were big parts of me just being inundated by the evidence against souls, spirits, and that kind of thing. So I decided I just can’t believe that anymore. And then again, I had a few—I don’t know, it could have been longer than a few days—moments of depression and time of depression, like, “Oh man, not only am I not a soul anymore, but what I’ve been working on for these five years or whatever and so excited about might be nothing.” And then the thought just popped into my head—what I now call open individualism, I hadn’t thought of it before—and I was like, “What if I am not just me, but all people?” I still talk to myself about it this way, and the way I first thought of it was like a materialist reincarnation. Reincarnation without souls; the materialist, physicalist, naturalist universe but my life doesn’t end now. When Joe Kern dies, ‘I’ become other people.
That flooded into my mind and I had a few moments—and this is interesting, other people that have come to open individualism have talked about having the same kind of mystical-almost experience. The thought flooded into my mind, and I had some days of just sitting in a park looking at an ant and just being like, “Oh, I’m that ant.” You know, that kind of thing. I had the thoughts and then I was like, “I can’t think that, that’s ridiculous. I’m a hard-line materialist now. That’s a ridiculous New-Agey kind of thought. I can’t think that thought.” But then I started to think of the kind of arguments that I could make that would be strict materialist analytic philosophy, whatever-you-want-to-call-it, arguments. That’s what the sorites argument in the fourth chapter of the book is. And then I was like, “Oh, wow!” So I talked myself into it, spent a couple of years writing, and convinced myself that, yeah, this is absolutely true.
Now, at the time, I didn’t know anybody else who believed this. I thought it’s surely possible. I hadn’t known anybody else so, but it did feel like a discovery that I had made myself and I’d written my entire argument for it, and only after that did I discover—when I published a first draft of it—I found someone who’s now a friend of mine, Iacopo Vettori, who had also written some of his own ideas about open individualism. He told me that it’s called open individualism, this philosopher named Daniel Kolak has coined this term. He invited me to a Facebook group, and then that’s… So yeah, it started out as me finding it on my own and then I found other people who believed it who came at it from their own different angles.
Zach: I think what drives, in general, the interest in what we are, you know, what drives people like Parfit to write his book, or you to go down that path, that fear or that interest in what we are and what happens to us… I’ll say, too, what drove me to be really interested in this was this fear of not just death, because I feel like that didn’t directly bother me, but I started getting these thoughts about, “Oh, what if I am one of these series people? What if I’m just flashing in and out of existence?” That kind of idea about the self, right? The empty individualism kind of ideas. It felt to me like an advanced fear of death. It was, like, “This is even worse than the fear of death. I’m dying every second, theoretically.” Right? So just to say, I think a lot of us are led down these paths by the interest and the fear of, will we continue existing, or what happens to us in the next moment or when we die, or whatever it is.
Joe: When did you first have that thought? Because you mentioned that before in your notes. That was a big moment for you, that thought of just dying every second. Did you read that in Parfit and that’s what gave you the idea?
Zach: No. Like a lot of these things, it’s hard to know how it came to be. But I remember 10 plus years ago, I was thinking about these things where I’m like—and I can’t remember if I read it. I must have read some consciousness related stuff that led me down that path probably.
Joe: Have you read Dennett or Chalmers?
Zach: Yeah, I’ve read Dennet. I read Dennet 10 plus years ago, so I’m sure one of those things led me down that path. But it just strikes me that when it comes to all this philosophical work, so much of it is about us thinking about what’s going to happen to us and what are we. It comes down to these existential fears about trying to figure this stuff out to set our own minds at ease.
Joe: It is interesting because there’s some people that have argued for open individualism from an ethical standpoint. And I think this is the direction Kolak comes from. And I know there’s some other people… I think Magnus Vinding, I’m remembering the name, he writes a lot about ethics and he takes open individualism as a reason to believe in a certain ethical idea or certain morality.
Zach: Treating others as yourself. Yeah.
Joe: Yeah. And in Kolak, I don’t see anything about… By the way, I told you my whole story, and that should explain why I’m not qualified to talk about anybody else’s ideas about open individualism. I know a bit about it, but I don’t want to speak for anybody because I really know my theory well and I don’t know anybody else’s theories that well. But I can say that I don’t remember seeing anything in Kolak about fear of death or fear of annihilation. He seemed to really be focusing more on, you know… I feel like the ethical consequences of open individualism are pretty obvious. It’s going to make you want to treat everybody as though they’re yourself. You’re just going to treat people better and care more about the wellbeing of all other conscious beings.
Zach: Yeah, you have a pretty good… You’ve been talking about this for a while. I’m curious if you had to give your thirty-second to minute kind of elevator pitch. I think you have a pretty good summary of this on your website, but do you want to talk about… Maybe you can run with that.
Joe: Yeah. So, my brother asked me for an elevator pitch last summer, and I’ve been avoiding talking about this for years because I got tired of hearing myself talk about it. Obviously, we’re recording now so this is a good time to do it again. But yeah, just kind of ruining parties and things, and cornering people. But my brother asked me and I demurred, and then he asked me again and I’m like, “All right.” And I heard myself speaking for like five minutes straight and just talking a big jumble of twisty stuff that I know he didn’t understand, and as it’s going on, I’m thinking, “See, this is why I don’t like talking about it.” Because I don’t know how to explain everything. The point is I don’t know how to explain everything about my argument it quickly. But that conversation made me think, “Okay, he’s right. I should have an elevator pitch.”
So I think I can come at it from three angles. Number one, you can start with the conclusion. Open individualism is the idea that we are all one self. There’s not a new self created at the birth of a human being or the coming into consciousness of a human being. We’re all the same self. And so I still stick to my original idea about it—materialist reincarnation. When you die, you become other people. You’re eventually all other people. There’s a science fiction story called “The Egg” by Andy Weir, who wrote The Martian. He has this short story that became viral back in 2010; somebody made a comic about it. It’s that same idea and a lot of people might know that. Andy Weir’s idea is that you’re a soul and God is pushing you toward further improvement. You’re a soul that is all conscious beings through time, eventuality. You’re all conscious beings and God is pushing you to perfection. So my version of open individualism: no God, no soul. You are all other people. There’s not the Buddhist idea of karma or anything. It’s just youare all other people.
So that’s the conclusion. I think a lot of people who believe open individualism won’t like the idea of reincarnation, and that’s fair enough. A lot of people want to talk about “You are all people right now. It’s not like you just jump to other people when you die.” And I think that’s fair enough. But for me, I’ve never been able to wrap my head around that idea. I experience myself as traveling through time in one direction, and that’s the only way I can do it. But happy for all the people that can sort of wrap their brain around the idea of you actually just are all people right now.
Now, that’s the conclusion. For my personal approach to it, there’s two ways I can start with. Number one, I can ask people if they’ve ever had that thought that I had when I was five. You ever wonder, “Why am I me and not somebody else?” There’s a lot more questions you can ask along that same line.
Zach: Like how unlikely it is for me to be here.
Joe: Yeah. The question of, “Why was I even a possibility to exist at the beginning of the universe, rather than not?” Again, the creation of a certain human being with certain DNA from certain parents doesn’t explain that. Because genetically identical people, even if you’re not identical twins split from a zygote, it’s still conceivable that they could exist.
Zach: We should remind people that we’re talking about the ‘I’ feeling. We’re not talking about specific people and traits. We’re talking about the internal feeling of being present and of existing. The ‘I’ feeling. I just wanted to emphasize that.
Joe: Yeah, thanks. I guess there’s another part of this. There’s the perfect doppelgänger thought experiment I do that tries to isolate that ‘I’ feeling, but maybe we can get to that later. So you can start with that question. The thing I find is when I ask people that question, a lot of people have had that thought. And it’s pretty common for young people to have it. I cannot remember who wrote the paper, but there was a book he quoted of… There’s a novel [A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes] where there’s a little girl named Emily, seven or 10, who has the same realization. One day she’s playing and all of the sudden she looks down and it’s like, “Oh, here I am. And now I’m stuck with this now for the rest of my life. What am I doing here now, here?”
Zach: Why am I here? Yeah.
Joe: Yeah, I’m not being articulate about it, the novel was quite good. Yeah, that’s one way I can… It’s not really a pitch in the idea, but telling people what I’m talking about. And a lot of people recognize that idea, like, “Oh yeah, I’ve had that same thought!” That might be a hook to get people into the way I’m thinking. But a lot of people have never had that thought and don’t understand what it’s about. And again, fair enough. So then the third way I might say it is, have you ever thought about what are the odds of you existing? What are the chances of you having come in to exist? People think about this a lot. What are the chances your parents meeting? That one sperm and that one ovum had to join. If it had been any other sperm, you wouldn’t exist. This combination of DNA had to come into existence. That’s another way into it, and you think, “Yeah, boy, I’m really amazed at how long the odds are that I came into existence, and yet I did. That’s shocking and I feel so lucky.” My point is—in everything I’ve written—is that it doesn’t make any sense. You can’t think about the odds of you existing. You might be able to jump ahead and see how open individualism solves that. If you are all people, then you exist, no matter what consciousnesses exists.
Zach: I think the strength of you focusing on that, specifically it’s like when you start thinking about… Because, as you say, most people imagine there’s some factors in the past. All these factors had to align for my ‘I’ feeling to exist right now. All these factors, whether it was when the sperm and the egg met up, or the ancestors, or whatever it is, but then as you break down in your book, it’s like when you actually think through logically, what was the defining thing that would have led to this ‘I’ feeling now? You’re left with an idea that, “Oh, if I had replaced the smallest amount of the egg with a little bit of different matter, would that have led to a completely different ‘I’? And you start breaking down the sorites argument of why would a slight difference in all these factors have led to a completely different ‘I’? You start realizing, “Oh, maybe the most efficient answer is that the ‘I’ that I’m feeling now was inevitable, and if the ‘I’ that I’m feeling now was inevitable, then I am everyone. That’s the logical steps that you walk through. And I really like that approach because I had come at it from different angles and somehow I had never really even thought about the common thought that, “Oh, it’s really rare for me to exist, and all these factors had to align,” which is interesting, because I think in open individualism, you can arrive at these things from different angles by examining different parts. You know, there’s different Parfit-like thought experiments.
I did like your focus because I think that makes it accessible to a lot of people who are like, “Oh, yeah. When you start thinking about it, yeah, why would this specific combination of factors and all these things have led to my specific feeling of ‘I’? It also gets into questions like, if you had moved somewhere else when you were a kid, would you still be the same ‘I’ feeling you are now? It starts breaking up the idea that your ‘I’ feeling is the product of all these factors. And then you start thinking, “Oh, the much more efficient answer is that I am going to always exist wherever there’s a conscious being.” I did like that approach.
Joe: That idea of would I exist if… If I had been adopted by a family in—I’m in Japan now, let’s say South Korea. If I’d been adopted by a family in South Korea right after I was born, raised in South Korea, speaking Korean, and Joe Kern was still alive there then—this body was still alive there then—would I exist as that person? The content of my life would be completely different, but would I exist as that person? My intuition is that, yeah, I’m going to exist. Once that sperm and egg join in the zygote and then it creates a human being, I’m going to be wherever that object and the things that grew from that object are in the world. I’m going to be there. That’s kind of the hook for me. The longer I think about this and think about my approach to it, I realize that that’s my essential hook. It’s like if you believe that you would be in South Korea right now under those circumstances, you believe you’re a completely different person—content, language, everything about your life is completely different, but you still exist. It’s not the same as if you had died right after you were born—then you’d think, “Oh, I wouldn’t exist anywhere. I’d be nobody nowhere.” If you think you’d be in South Korea right now, then my argument, through many steps, is that then you should also believe that you would be anybody else. Even if a different sperm and egg had joined, then you’d be that person. And that leads to open individualism.
Zach: Right, you’re using the instincts that we have about ourselves in different situations to apply to everybody in different situations.
Joe: Some people do not believe that they would be in South Korea right now if that happened. They think that’s a different person. I wouldn’t exist. Maybe they think they wouldn’t exist in the same way that they wouldn’t exist as if they had died when they were young. I think that belief is kind of like empty individualist, but a lot of people don’t know that term and they wouldn’t call themselves that. But yeah, if you don’t believe you’d be in South Korea right now under those circumstances, then my argument will have much less power for you—
Zach: That instinct might not work, but other parts of the argument may work. There are people listening to this who—almost everybody, this will be new to if they made it this far—there’s so many objections that spring up, right? Like the defenses of the normal way of seeing people. One of the objections would be, “How can we be the same people? We’re in different bodies. I have no knowledge or awareness of things happening to people in these other bodies.” I think that’s one key objection, but I think the main overcoming of that objection is there’s lots of things in your own life that you have no memory of or no direct awareness of. Like, you lived when you were a kid or even a year ago, and there’s experiences you had that aren’t really available to you now. So just to say that the various objections that people will bring up, you and other people have addressed in various ways as ways to overcome… Because it is such an outlandish thing to say…
Joe: It is outlandish.
Zach: …we’re all the same person. Everyone’s like, “What the hell are you talking about?” But I do like to emphasize, people who are curious about this, there’s many people who have worked through the objections. And at the end of the day, it requires a different way to see what we are. But when you think it through, it’s not like a crazy, magical idea. When you actually think it through, it’s like, “Oh, maybe this is just how the world works.”
Joe: I guess it’s not really a factual claim. It’s certainly not an empirical claim. Because it doesn’t really change anything. You know? You die, you die. But it’s like I look at it now… I think when I first thought of it, I thought I had solved all the problems of the world and was like, “Oh, this is just the facts of the world, I need to tell everybody.” Other people have had this experience too. Physicist Freeman Dyson talks about this in his memoir, which I learned from Kolak’s book. But now I think of it as this is an option of a way to think about yourself. It’s not just like a New Agey kind of dream option. If you fancy yourself the kind of person who really likes rigorous, logical, reductive arguments, this is an option. If you have… I’ll say it from my point of view… If you’ve come along this journey of coming to conclude, due to science and philosophy and whatnot, that maybe you’re an atheist now, there’s no God, there are no souls, and you don’t like the idea of annihilation in death, this is a way to think about existence in a different way that can make you less afraid of death.
Zach: I do think it solves so many of the problems of consciousness and self. I was reading Zuboff’s book that he sent me…
Joe: Which book was that, by the way?
Zach: I think it was Finding Myself. I don’t think it’s published yet, maybe.
Joe: Okay.
Zach: But in the intro, he basically says something like, “I think there’s many arguments in favor of open individualism, and basically none in the other ways of thinking about self and identity. I think he makes a compelling point. It just solves so many of the weird paradoxes when you start thinking through the thought experiments and stuff.
Joe: That question I started out with when I was five—why am I me and not somebody else—there’s a term for that. It’s called the vertiginous question.
Zach: Yeah, I was going to mention that.
Joe: Yeah, there’s a Wikipedia page for it so I think that’s what it’s going to be called. I’m fine with that. There’s a philosopher named—I don’t know how to pronounce his name, I think it’s Benj Hellie who coined the term. He wrote a paper so he coined the term. It’s on Wikipedia. I call them the enigmas of existence, in what I’ve written. It’s a far more pretentious name, but it does fit the fact that they’re enigmas. It seems like something that needs a solution. And I found open individualism solves those enigmas. Empty individualism, which is another kind of belief, also solves them. But I don’t know if we want to go… It’s a bit harder to talk about.
Zach: We can mention that briefly, because I kind of feel like it’s two sides of the same coin. And I will say, when you were talking about Parfit, I read Parfit’s Reasons and Persons and I was left with this sense of, yeah, but you’re not really explaining… It didn’t really explain much to me. It almost just explained away things. But it didn’t really explain… And I was kind of left… I think you mentioned it too, where it was an unsatisfying conclusion I thought he had because he basically was saying, “Oh, well, somebody is myself if they’ve got all my attributes. And if I don’t exist anymore, it’s the same…” He basically wouldn’t mind going through the teleporter or being recreated. But that was kind of unsatisfying, because it’s like, in a way that I think open individualism solves more. Because it’s like, “Oh, well, if we’re all the same, then that solves that riddle of like…” Well, yeah, it’s a very unsatisfying thing to say, “Oh, you can destroy me, but recreate me somewhere else.” I’m probably not explaining it well, but it just seemed like I was left wanting more from why he wouldn’t care about being destroyed and recreated somewhere else with all the same attributes, which I think open individualism solves that paradox.
Joe: I really wrestled with Parfit for a long time. He was one of the first things I read early on, and I had a similar reaction to him as with Dawkins’ Selfish Gene. I just found myself bulldozed into being forced to believe a lot of things I didn’t want to believe. I consider The Selfish Gene and the third part of Reasons and Persons by Derek Parfit to be the two most influential things I’ve ever read, and I agree with almost everything Parfit said. It took me a long time to decide that I felt free enough to disagree with some of the things he said because it’s a masterful book, you know? I think I disagree now with Parfit when he says that… Oh, shoot. I feel like this might be a bit too in the weeds but I guess I’ll push forward. So, Parfit says sometimes identity is indeterminate, but I feel like he equivocates identity with existence. And I read that when I first read it, like, “Oh, sometimes whether or not you exist is indeterminate.” And I just thought, yeeah…
Zach: Yeah, it was something based on if there’s another copy of you or something like that.
Joe: Yeah. I felt like I kind of have to accept this. This guy’s such a great… Like, everything else is so airtight, you know? But I lived with that for a long time, and I think that maybe if people talk about personal identity and then they make that equivalent of existence, I try to separate those two ideas. Parfit concludes personal identity is not what matters, and so maybe we come together on this, like it’s not what matters. And then when he gets into the fourth part, he makes his famous non-identity problem about like the actions we perform now are going to affect who exists in the future, and so there’s an extra element to our moral actions now like around global warming or things like that.
So, I feel like Parfit argues for empty individualism in part three and then reverts to closed individualism in part four with the nonidentity problem. This whole thing I talk about with the odds of existing and everything, that presumes a closed individualist idea of existence. That’s kind of the standard idea that most people have. Like, you know, this human being comes into existence—we now know from a sperm and an ovum—a human being comes into existence, you just exist as that person for that duration, and when that human being dies, you cease to exist. A new self is created at that moment—a new empty self is the term I like to use now—is created at that moment and then it dies and then you’re done. You’re gone forever.
Zach: Yeah, I thought so many things that I was left unsatisfied in Parfit’s book are just made complete sense of with open individualism. But so much of his arguments map over to open individualism. It’s like if he had just looked at it a slightly different way, he would be an open individualist.
Joe: Exactly. I’ll say a few things about that that I do know. Daniel Kolak, in his book I Am You, published in 2004, coined the terms open individualism, empty individualism, and closed individualism. Kolak himself also says empty individualism and open individualism are very close together. They’re both basically true and it’s just a matter of how you think about it. Right?
Zach: Right. Glass half full, glass half empty kind of thing.
Joe: Yeah, exactly. I was looking back at Kolak a couple of days ago trying to prepare for this and I discovered I could not find an actual definition of what Kolak means by empty individualism. As far as I understand it, it’s just whatever Parfit argued for in part three of Reasons and Persons. That’s empty individualism. I take it to be the really austere view that consciousness just comes into existence whenever matter of the appropriate organization comes into existence. In our case, probably we can attribute it to our brains. Consciousness comes into existence when matter organizes. If it just popped into existence right now, you’d have a conscious being for a few moments. You know? That’s kind of what I take empty individualism to be at its ground level. It’s just that idea.
Zach: It’s a bunch of disjointed moments of existence. It’s almost like you could view it as consciousness is an illusion because it’s just a bunch of moments of coming into being. Yeah.
Joe: I guess at ground it is the idea that there’s nothing else to that. There’s like no… Parfit calls it a ‘further fact’ in Reasons and Persons. There’s no further fact to it than that. There’s nothing in the universe that would be a self that continues to exist through time. It’s just consciousness exists in this moment because this brain exists.
Zach: It is a very similar view because it’s… To me, it’s very similar. I can see how similar it is because that’s kind of how I view open individualism, except it’s like the glass half full, glass half empty. As you say in your book, even if that’s true, even if we are a series of disjointed moments of selves or whatever, it’s like we still attain everything we want. What more could you want? You couldn’t imagine another world where all these things…that you wouldn’t be getting what you wanted out of. So even if the empty individualism or open individualism of us being a bunch of series of moments, we’re still getting what we want. Right?
Joe: Yeah. Yeah, the thing you want obtains. I came through reading Parfit, again had a period of depression of how austere that is. But at the end of the day, you read his theory and then at the end of the day you think, “Wait, what have I lost? I still have everything that I always thought I had in existence. I still exist now.” I retreat to the Cartesianism of—Descartes—of the one thing I can’t doubt is that I exist right now. I didn’t lose that. I also didn’t lose the fact that, to me, I still existed when I was five. I have memories when I was five. I existed then. I haven’t lost anything. And again, this is how empty individualism and open individualism are basically two ways of looking at the same set of facts. They’re not really in conflict, they’re just a matter of interpretation.
Oh, one thing I wanted to say is that Kolak’s argument for open individualism, Parfit read the manuscript, and provided a bunch of comments on it. I don’t know what those comments were—
Zach: They’d be cool to see.
Joe: Yeah, yeah. Maybe Parfit thought the same thing. He didn’t tell Kolak to change the whole book, it’s garbage, you know? So maybe Parfit thought the same thing. Like, this is a different way of looking at the same thing that I argue for. I always wonder if Parfit accepted the label empty individualist for himself, or if he just kind of like…
Zach: Mmmm. Like so many of these philosophical things, it’s like life in general, it’s so easy to take the same idea and look at it very depressingly or look at it positively. I feel like that’s true for so many ideas in general, and it’s like in this case, it definitely seems to be the case where it’s like, yeah, you could use it to be an extremely depressing stark view of the world. But as you argue in your book, everything is still there that we want there to be there in terms of our sense of self seeming to continue over time and us having memories and seeming to be a person. So… Oh, go ahead.
Joe: This thing you talked about of being… I learned it from part three of Reasons and Persons, Derek Parfit’s book, which, by the way, anybody can read, I think. It doesn’t require any prior philosophical knowledge. You don’t even have to read the first two parts of the book, which are about ethics, I think. I’ve never read them. Part three, anybody can read that if you’ve read any kind of popular science or something. Anyway, what I want to say is I found that idea that you mentioned earlier about becoming a new person every minute or every second or whatever. I found that in Parfit, and that’s one of the arguments that made me—
Zach: The series person. Yeah.
Joe: Yeah, the series person. That’s one of the arguments that lessened my ability to believe in the soul—kind of dropped my credence for belief in the soul. Because if you think about it all happening once every day when you go to sleep, you might be scared. By the way, did you read chapter five of my book? It’s not included in the main manuscript; it’s an addition. It’s okay if you didn’t. It’s fine.
Zach: I may have, I can’t remember.
Joe: Okay. It’s a separate document.
Zach: I think I might have read that. Yeah.
Joe: Okay, I just reread it. I hadn’t read it in years. I just reread it and didn’t even remember—a great example of this—I didn’t remember writing it. I didn’t remember having these thoughts, and I’m like, “Yeah, yeah, this makes sense.” So if your body’s going to be disillusioned… Disillusioned? Dissolved. No, that’s macabre.
Zach: Destroyed.
Joe: Yeah, destroyed in your sleep and a brand new body that’s the exact same mental content and exactly the same is going to wake up in the morning… You know, you think, “Well, if this body is destroyed, I’m going to die, and it’ll be a different person in the morning,” then you think, “Well, boy, that might be really scary.” But then if you crank the time span down to, what if that’s what happens every second? Or what if me and you—this is back to the thought about my brother, why am I me and not him—what if our empty self—empty self, by the way, is just the raw point of view, not including content like the content of your mind. We have pretty good evidence that the entire content of our minds are physically embodied in our brains. But we still have this idea of an empty self. And so what if our empty selves just swapped every second, would you notice that? If you think it will happen every hour, you might think, “Oh, I’d notice that. I’m going to be over there for that hour. I’m going to be over there where you are for that hour, and you’re going to be over here. And then in another hour, I’m going to come back over here. I’m going to have all to have all the content of your mind. I’m going to think I’m you at that moment. And then when I come back here, I’m going to think I’m me, but I’m going to be here and not there.” But then you think about what if that happened every second, or every 10th of a second, or every microsecond, you would just experience being this human being at that point. If it’s changing that often. And then you realize, “Well…” Yeah. So, what have you lost if you think about… It’s what you were talking about with Parfit: what have you really lost when you accept everything? You still have everything you thought you had in the first place.
Zach: Yeah, I did read that section of your book. Actually, I had pasted a part of that section into something as a good explanation. But I was going to say when I was talking about the fears I had where I was laying awake at 3:00 in the morning, imagining myself flashing in and out of existence every moment and a new self being created, I came to see that when I’m reading more about open individualism and your work too. I came to see that as, “Well, it’s kind of ridiculous to imagine all of these different selves waiting in the wings to be created and a new self coming into existence every moment.” Open individualism makes more sense there because it’s like, well, it’s much more efficient explanation to just have them all be the same self coming into existence. Right? And if that’s true for me in that scenario, then that would be the same self coming into existence for other people. That made a lot more sense of my fears and it put my fears in context of like… Well, a), I always thought your point was true: Regardless of all these fears, everything still attains for me. I still perceive myself as a persistent being over time, I still have these memories, etc, etc. So, worrying too much about it is kind of… No matter what the truth is, too much worry is unproductive. Open individualism did make a lot of sense to me because when it came to the efficiency of just imagining all this string of new selves coming into being is kind of silly when you think about it. It’s related to your points in your work of imagining, like, “Oh, if the sperm had slightly connected in a different way, a new self would have come into being. Where are all these selves coming from?”
Joe: Where are all these selves coming from, yeah.
Zach: Where’s this repository? Some people would be like, “Well, those are the souls waiting to come into existence.” But leaving aside those kind of views, yeah.
Joe: My ultimate knockdown argument, for myself, against… why I couldn’t believe in the soul anymore—this was a big part of it, this series-person thing that’s like, what are all these souls coming into existence? And what difference would it make? But the thing for me was I had this thought—and I’ve told this to people several times over the years, I don’t know if anybody’s ever understood what I’m trying to say, but I still think it’s a good thought—it’s like, if you can imagine God creating souls, and he’s going to create you, he’s going to create Joe Kern, he’s going to create me… What could he be thinking about in order to create a soul that is me rather than someone else? If you take out all the characteristics of me, you know, the genes, the whatever, the content of my mind—
Zach: Just the sense of self.
Joe: Yeah. From an objective standpoint, to somebody outside, what could he think about to create the self that was just me and nobody else? You know? That’s my…
Zach: Yeah, what would it be? There’s nothing distinguishing. It’s just the feeling of ‘I am here.’ Yeah, right.
Joe: And when you talk about an infinite number of possible selves coming into existence, it brings that thought out starkly. There’s no end to the number of ‘I’s. If you believe the closed individualist idea that we’re each separate selves that come into existence and then cease to exist, then there’s no end to the number of those that could be created.
Zach: I think another common objection for people that are new to these ideas and haven’t looked into it much, a common objection to this is basically “you guys are overthinking it. Every creature that comes into existence will necessarily have their own subjective sense of ‘I’, their own sense of self.” I think that’s the most common objection. And I see that when it comes to the vertiginous question threads online, people are like, “You guys don’t get it. There’s no mystery. When there’s an entity that comes into being, it has its own sense of self, and there’s nothing mysterious about it.” I have my own thought and I can tell it, but I’m curious if you want to give a thought about that.
Joe: Yeah, I think that’s the most cogent criticism of my idea of open individualism, and it’s the one I’ve wrestled with the most, kind of led me to a lot of the more in-the-weeds arguments that I’ve made. Chapter three of the book would be that section. I come back to using that idea of, if you had been raised in South Korea, would you be there now? I can’t really reconstruct my argument off the top of my head, but every time I reread it, I become reconvinced. So I think it must be good. [chuckles] Have you seen the TV show Severance?
Zach: Yeah.
Joe: Okay, love that show. Just watched it for the first time two months ago and it’s got me rethinking my whole theory more than anything has in a long time. I still believe my conclusions, but it’s got me rethinking it. And I’ve written some blog posts about my reactions to the show Severance. Anybody who’s seen Severance can read those blog posts, and it’s probably the best introduction I’ve written to the way I think about these issues.
Zach: I read some of that, yeah.
Joe: If you haven’t seen Severance, you can read them, but I don’t recommend it because I love the show so much and I don’t want to spoil any of it. So just watch the first three episodes of Severance and then you can read the blog post. But yeah, Severance got me thinking about this. This isn’t going to necessarily be a very coherent thought, but just… Derek Parfit talks about what it takes for a person to continue to exist. And this is what the entire study of personal identity is about: what it takes for a person to continue to exist. And this idea that anytime matter forms into the right form, then there’s consciousness. And so there’s consciousness here, there’s consciousness here, and then the only reason that those two consciousnesses think they’re the same person is because there’s a string of memories from one to the other. I think that’s the empty individualism. That’s what Parfit argues for. That’s the empty individualist idea. That’s the most austere, “Those are just the facts. There’s nothing else.” And I think that’s true. Those are the facts. There is nothing else. It’s just memory.
I was rereading Dennett [Consciousness Explained] this past year, and I don’t understand his argument for the pure physicalist explanation of consciousness, but I think he’s right that it is, but I don’t understand exactly why he thinks it is. But I think a big part of his argument is that consciousness is a memory of things that the animal has already done. There’s those studies, like, you think you’re making a choice but actually the choice was made, and then by the time you think you’ve made it, the body already made the choice. And the choice doesn’t become conscious until microseconds later or whatever. That’s like all of consciousness. There’s all this stimulus coming in and it’s all being entered into your nervous system, but you’re only aware of one bit of it at a time, and it’s really external factors or your own mind that triggers you of which part to be aware of. It’s a bit of a tangent. [Chuckles] Consciousness… What was I talking about?
Zach: Well, we started out by saying the objection that, “Hey, you guys are overthinking it.”
Joe: Okay. So, the entire study of personal identity is about what it takes for someone to be the same person through time, right? But nobody ever—
Zach: Yeah, being that persists over time. That’s the normal view of self.
Joe: And nobody else has ever talked about the origins. What I obsess about. I understand it’s a strange thing to be obsessed about for a lifetime, sperm and eggs, but that’s what the belief is, and so that’s what I talk about; the sperm and the ovum joining the origins, what makes a person come into existence in the first place? And I think Parfit walks back a bit on what he concludes in part three, and when he talks in part four about origins. He even says, you know… His phrasing is much better, much more eloquent, much more careful, but basically, that you must believe you would not exist if that sperm and ovum hadn’t joined. Even in a footnote, he says there’s lots of questions we can have about identity through time, but surely no one questions this fact that you wouldn’t exist unless the sperm and ovum joined.
Zach: Open individualism was too much of a crazy thing for him to think of.
Joe: And so to answer, it’s not really a direct answer to that objection that yes, every—I call it the everyone is someone viewpoint—every conscious being is going to be someone. It’s going to have that sense of self. That’s just a basic, easy fact to see. But it doesn’t answer the counterfactual questions of like, “If the world had gone differently, in what situations do I place myself there? Am I there? And in what situations am I not there? What situations do I exist? What situations do I not exist? It’s kind of a roundabout argument against that, but that’s the thought that I return to every time.
Zach: Yeah, I think so many of the objections that people instinctually have are basically manifestations about the normal view… They represent the normal view that we are these things, these beings that have a beginning and an end and then persist over time. So somebody who says something like, “Well, it’s very simple. When a creature comes into existence, it has a point of view. It has a sense of self.” But they don’t realize that that’s just a manifestation of the view that it’s very simple in the sense that there’s this persistent being over time. Because, like you say, you and me or open individualists are not denying that a creature has to have a sense of self, right? An entity has a sense of self. But when you actually dig into the complexity of it and think about it, there’s not the idea that it’s this persistent creature over time. This being over time is what we’re talking about. It’s what we’re debating. And so the objection that an entity has to have a sense of self and it’s very simple, it’s not really solving anything. It’s saying what we also believe. But they believe it’s a good objection because I think they’re seeing it under the hood. It’s like there’s this persistent being over time. So I think their objection is actually representing something under the hood that they’re not even realizing that their objection contains, which is the normal view of closed individualism. Because you and I or anybody espousing these views wouldn’t deny that a creature that comes into existence almost certainly has to have a feeling of ‘I’. We’re not denying that. We’re trying to get at what is that feeling of ‘I’ that is there, right? That’s hard to talk about, but hopefully—
Joe: Yeah, a lot of this is hard to talk about.
Zach: Oh, it’s all extremely hard to talk about. Yeah.
Joe: And I think… What are we? We’re about an hour in now, and I think the whole concept we’re talking about is the empty self idea, right? And we’ve never even talked about what that is. Some people have no idea what that is. Some people are going to kind of have an intuitive idea of it, which is how I came at it. In the first chapter of what I wrote, the perfect doppelgänger thought experiment is this idea of being replaced by an exact copy of me, but that isn’t me. So you can imagine someone sitting next to you right now that is genetically identical to you and as similar as possible to you, but it’s a different person. If you die, you’re gone. That person keeps existing. If they die, you stay here, that person ceases to exist. Their subjective self ceases to exist. And then you can imagine like, okay, so then just make yourself disappear. You never existed. And that person is exactly in your place, atom-for-atom, exactly moving through the universe exactly as you have your entire life and has lived your exact same life the exact same way you have, but is not you. You never existed. That’s how I isolate the idea of the empty self. At first, I framed it as this is what I mean when I say ‘I exist.’ It’s like the thing that exists in this universe but doesn’t exist in the other universe where he replaces me is what I mean when I say ‘I exist.’ If we can, just for the sake of argument, say that everything is atom-for-atom identical in that other universe as in this one, then that’s what I mean when I say ‘I exist.’ And I use that just to talk about what I mean when I’m talking about my existence, to avoid confusion.
Zach: Because there is a lot of confusion. I really like your explanation of drawing out the important distinction between the ‘I’, the feeling of existing, and the traits that we have as humans.
Joe: Yeah, the content.
Zach: The content. Right. Because, like you say, even very smart people… like you start out with Dawkins. And I agree with you, it’s like he seemed to be conflating the two in ways that just don’t make sense, but that represents the normal view that most people have of conflating those kind of ideas.
Joe: Yeah, the empty self and content is how I describe it. The two things people think they’re talking about when they say ‘I exist.’ For the Dawkins quote, it’s from Unweaving the Rainbow, the very first part. He states, more eloquently than anybody, this idea that you wouldn’t exist but for the existence of these gametes joining—the sperm and egg joining. I’ve got to say, it’s the only point I’ve ever disagreed with Dawkins on before, was that one. But I think he states this common belief very eloquently, and that’s the belief that I think is wrong.
Zach: It really gets into this instinctual feeling that it’s such a natural thing to think, because I think we all instinctually know it’s very strange for us to be here. By which I mean it’s very strange for me to be experiencing this. We all sense that instinctually, and so we look for reasons why that strangeness must exist, and we say, “Oh, it must have been the chance encounters of all these things that happened.” Right? It’s understandable why Dawkins and so many people, that that’s the instinctual view. Because we’re looking for an explanation of like, we know that it’s weird for us to to be here. So we’re like, “Oh, it must have been all this…” But getting back to your ideas, it’s like once you start examining, it’s like, “So you’re telling me that everything in the entire universe had to precisely align, and the egg and the sperm had… And all my ancestors had to do all this stuff, and all these things had to line up, and the correct egg and sperm had to meet in exactly the right way for, as you say the empty self, or the feeling of ‘I’ to exist.” When you start examining that idea, it kind of breaks down, which gets you more into the open individualism way of seeing things.
Joe: Yeah, that’s a good summary. That’s good.
Zach: I was going to see what you thought of this. Another way I was thinking of it the other day to try to explain it to someone, I would say, “Another way to see this is I am no more myself in the next moment than I am you in the next moment.” That gets into maybe what you were saying about, it’s hard to imagine ourselves being the same sense of self across the board at the same time. But that’s a way I was thinking of explaining it, where if we were all series people, in a way, it’s like it helps explain how we could all be this communal kind of manifestation of the empty self or the ‘I’ feeling.
Joe: I think it’s similar to a thought I had early on. As I was in the middle of arguing myself into open individualism, I think I had a similar thought. There’s nothing more I can articulate about it than what you said. This is kind of what Parfit does, too, when he talks about if we loosen the connections between myself now and Joe Kern in the past or Joe Kern in the future, if we loosen those connections, then it also takes down the barriers between me and other people.
Zach: Right.
Joe: And Parfit almost ends with the open individualism conclusion at the end of part three when he talks about—this is one of the most famous passages of that section of the book—about how he used to envision himself as in a tunnel on a journey that was just going to end. And now the walls of that tunnel have fallen away and things are more… When I first read that before I ever thought of open individualism, this was four years before I even thought such an idea was possible, it confused me a bit because it seemed like he had just argued this really—
Zach: Nihilistic view.
Joe: Nihilistic, dismal view about… There’s a better word I’m thinking of, but yeah.
Zach: Dark.
Joe: The dark view that we are nothing at all. And then he ends with this. Again, I took him at his word that this is how he felt, because I had tremendous respect for him after reading the entire part three. So I took him at his word that this is how he felt, but I had to think a long time about why would you feel that way? After everything you just argued about the self and personal identity and existence, why would that argument make you feel more open to the world and other people and everything? I think I understand it now. I don’t think I can articulate it at all, but I think I understand it.
Zach: Yeah, it gets into the relationship of the so-called empty individualism and the open individualism. Because, yeah, I think he probably did see many of the things we’re talking about. He was just coming at it from a different angle that sounded kind of depressing the way he explained it. But I think he did… If I had to guess, I think he did see many of these points that we’re talking about. It’s like the glass half full, glass half empty kind of thing.
Joe: We’ve got to get Daniel Kolak to release his Derek Parfit notes. I’d love to read them.
Zach: When the world eventually embraces open individualism, that’ll be some of the founding mythology or documents of… [chuckles]
Joe: Yeah, I agree. To be clear, I mean the notes Derek Parfit wrote about Kolak’s manuscript.
Zach: Right, yeah, Kolak’s book. Yeah, totally. That would be really interesting to see. Yeah, that would be foundational.
Maybe I can pivot over to one of the reasons I’ve always found these kinds of ideas—I’ve been drawn to them, and I would include in there ideas about doubting free will and going down those rabbit holes—I think it’s just because I’ve always had this instinctual, I don’t know, maybe call it low self-esteem in the sense that I see myself as… I think it’s tempting to reach for kind of egotistical ideas of what we are as people, and that we are some persistent entity that has a beginning and end. That we’re this consistent thing. I’ve always been drawn to the views or the ideas where I’m just an unfolding of some processes. I’m just a cog in some machine that I don’t understand. I’m an unfolding of physical or other processes that I don’t understand. So I think I’ve always been drawn to these things because I didn’t think—
Joe: When you say drawn, they’re comforting or depressing?
Zach: No. Well, neither maybe. Maybe depressing. I’ve always struggled with depression and anxiety so I might be drawn to them for a low self-esteem reason. But however I come to them, they make sense to me because I can’t help but see that we tend to overemphasize our amount of control in the world. Like our specialness. We have a tendency to think that we’re special, that we are in control of things, you know? So I’ve always been interested in these things that knock holes in that because it’s like getting back to the… What is it? The Copernicus thing of we would assume that the sun’s orbiting us and it doesn’t come naturally to us too. We tend to think that we’re the center of the world.
So just to say, I think a lot of these ideas. They can be very counterintuitive, but they can contain a lot of logic and power when you look at them. And then when you start examining them more, they’re not nearly as depressing as they seem at first.
For example, I would say that about free will too. I think a lot of people are disheartened by the idea that we might not have free will, and I actually think there’s a lot of magic even in that idea, because that means if I don’t have free will, I’m still here experiencing all these things, which is an amazing thing even if I don’t have free will. That means I’m animated by something that is beyond me, right? That’s an amazing idea, too. So just to say, I think a lot of these ideas go against our instincts, but they can be very interesting and non-depressing and even positive to examine.
Joe: Have you ever heard… I think it was Wittgenstein that said it. I don’t know that much about the history of philosophy, but this is just a quote that anybody could have heard. I know it as well as anybody. It was that people used to think that the Sun orbited the Earth because that’s what it looks like, but they never asked the question, “What would it look like to us if the Earth orbited the Sun?”
Zach: Thinking about how it can manifest the same ways.
Joe: Yeah. Our first impression of how things are, that’s what it looks like. But then you think about what other version of reality would look exactly the same to us from our perspective? I guess that’s the point.
Okay, so you’re talking about accepting lack of free will, for example. My whole life has been a series of coming to accept things about the universe and myself that I didn’t want to. Number one was Dawkins selfish gene theory.” Number two was Parfit, his tearing down of self, identity, the soul. Number three was eventually the soul, which I think Dennett and a lot of other philosophers really helped. And then the whole thing about the Earth orbiting the Sun, that had already happened before me so I’d already grew up accepting that. But you can see how if you grew up thinking that the Earth was the center of the universe, it can make you depressed. It really messes up your view of your place in the universe and can make you really depressed. And so in my lifetime, I’ve gone through these steps: the selfish gene theory, lack of a soul, and I came through on the other side. Oh, and then lack of free will, that was another big one for me. That can be depressing. I just find that every existential thing that comes up to me like that that makes me really depressed for a short period or a long period, eventually, I just come to accept it from one way or another. Open individualism I came up with in order to deal with the lack of a soul. That’s the only one I ever solved. All the other ones, I just accepted. Lack of free will, I just accepted. And I thought I’d come to all of them. I thought I’d come to every single, “What new fact about reality is going to disturb me next?” I thought I had ended that. I’m like, “Great. I understand reality now and I feel pretty good about it, so life is all right.” And then recently, I finally—
Zach: Oh no. You stumbled across something—
Joe: Another one. I finally became convinced that the quantum multiverse is the correct view of quantum mechanics.
Zach: Oh! I’ve believed that for a long time. We have that in common.
Joe: Did that ever depress you?
Zach: No, no more than the free will. But we should talk about that another time. Maybe we’ll continue that offline. [chuckles]
Joe: Yeah I’ll just tell you real quick my reaction. Yeah, so I read David Deutsch’s first book, Fabric of Reality. Beginning of Infinity is more famous, I like Fabric of Reality better. And I was basically convinced by his argument for about twenty to thirty perc… I was convinced of his argument, but I didn’t feel like I had to think about it too hard. And then I started listening to Sean Carroll’s Mindscape podcast. He’s a big multiverse, Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics guy. After about two straight years listening to him, it just hit me one day. It’s like, “All right, Joe, you can’t ignore this anymore. The quantum multiverse is probably true.” And it just made me so anxious and depressed for a while.
Zach: Oh, we should talk about that.
Joe: I was just thinking about, I don’t know why, but my grandmother came into my mind. My father’s mother. My grandfather passed away in the mid-2000s, and I got to know my grandmother after he passed away. My grandfather was a preacher. Everybody said I’m so much like him my whole life so I always just focused on my grandfather. Maybe it’s kind of like, you know, male-male female-female thing might do it. But then I got to know my grandmother, and I don’t know why, but I just had this thought about—and I really enjoyed my time with her, she’s just an amazing person—I just had this thought like, “So, all that time we’re spending together,” and this could be with anybody you’re thinking about, “it wasn’t just a persistent ‘us’ spending time together, it’s like we branched a thousand times every second. And so I felt like I lost my garden. There’s a lot of different ways there can be multiverses in physics, you know? There can be infinite space. An infinite number of copies of this world exists in infinite space, infinite time, whatever. At least in those cases, I’m still here now, and this is all there is. And I have my garden that I can tend to. And I can make this space as good as I can for myself and for everybody. But the quantum multiverse, if even this space is splitting millions of times or thousands of times every second and I have no access to any other of my selves or any of your other selves, then I’ve lost the garden to tend to, and it’s like, “Well, what’s the point of caring about anything now? I can’t even tend to my own garden.” But somehow…
Zach: I think you’ll get over that.
Joe: I did. Yeah, I did. I had to take a vacation right away. Timing worked out. I went on vacation. “I can’t sit at home and think about this anymore.” And then I finally just kind of accepted it. I still don’t like it. I still hope it’s not true, but I just kind of accepted it. “All right, that’s what reality is…”
Zach: Yeah, we’ll talk more about that later. I was going to end on something… Oh, I wanted to say we should end on the idea that… If anyone’s still listening, they might think these are all very convoluted, complex ideas. Another simple solution to these mysteries is the one that maybe we do have souls. Maybe there is something special to us. Or maybe there’s some mysterious process by which we are these consistent beings over time. I just want to throw in that, like, even though I talk about this and I talk about free will on the podcast, it’s not that I’m certain of all these ideas I talk about. It’s more like, I think when it comes to logically thinking through things, these are valid theories about how things are. But at the end of the day, I find existence so mysterious and strange that even if I found out that there was a God and a soul, it wouldn’t surprise me that much because I do find all this stuff so astoundingly strange. I just wanted to throw that in. I wanted to throw that in there because I think a lot of times when people talk about these kinds of ideas, people think, “Oh, this guy’s a hundred percent believer in this.” I don’t a hundred percent believe in anything. These are ideas that I find really compelling from a logical perspective. But I just want to throw that in there and get your take.
Joe: It’s epistemic humility. That’s something I try to have about everything, and I have it about this. I feel pretty strongly atheistic. I’m pretty strongly an atheist now, and that was after reading The Selfish Gene, which I read before Dawkins had published The God Delusion. So I didn’t become an atheist because of his arguments against religion, it was The Selfish Gene. I’m pretty strongly atheist, I told you I don’t believe in souls or spirits. I have my reasons for that and I mentioned some of them here. But I want to say that open individualism as a whole, some people who argue for it, Arnold Zuboff in particular, is not anti-soul, as far as I understand his view. I have another friend that I speak with a lot, Mineta Jurášková, also goes by Edralis online, she also says she still believes that souls are possible. But they still believe this universal self idea of open individualism. They just think that it’s not necessarily purely materialistic theory. My version of it is, but it isn’t necessarily. Another thing I should say about Zuboff is that he uses his own word for it “universalism.” He doesn’t use the word “open individualism,” that’s Daniel Kolak’s word. But Zuboff and Kolak are both professional philosophers who have published peer-reviewed work on this idea of universalism in Zuboff’s case and open individualism in Kolak’s case.
Zach: Yeah, I was going to put that in the intro, there’s some real heavyweights… Just to convince people, like, “Hey, it’s not just you and me. It’s some other very smart people who have gotten peer-reviewed things out there. Yeah. I’m just curious if you somehow found out that there was a higher power and there were souls, how shocked would you be on a scale of one to ten? [chuckles]
Joe: How shocked would I be?
Zach: Would it be… How atheistic are you?
Joe: I haven’t thought of that. Actually, I don’t know, maybe not so shocked.
Zach: Because you’ve got humility.
Joe: It depends on how recently I read Richard Dawkins. If I’ve just read Richard Dawkins, I might be really shocked, because I find that guy really compelling and convincing. But in the end, I still find… So, I was a Christian, and I’m still nostalgic for those times sometimes, and I still find that comforting, those beliefs. The community was comforting, for sure. I still find the beliefs comforting. So I still think, actually, that would be nice if that was true. I don’t know. I can’t really answer how shocked I would be. Maybe I would be really shocked, but I think I’m kind of open to…
Zach: Yeah, you have the epistemic humility.
Joe: Yeah, epistemic humility. Because I keep discovering new things that I’m either forced to believe or that I am happy to believe, but new beliefs as I go along, it keeps me thinking, “Well, there still must be a lot that I don’t know, and there may be some reasons around the corner that jump out at me to make me believe something different than I believe right now.”
Zach: Well, I think you’re a lot like me because I’ve spent a lot of sleepless nights just laying in bed in the middle of the night thinking through things that really bother me, like, what happens at the edges of the universe? You know, these kinds of ideas that things are you’re never going to get an answer for.
Joe: I remember me and my brother talking about that when I was like six. Like, time. When did time start? What happened before the start of time? What happens on the other side of the edge of the universe?
Zach: Yeah, I think we have that in common. We like to make ourselves uncomfortable.
Joe: Yeah. Do you still experience depression around those big existential kind of questions, or is that something you’ve kind of…
Zach: Interestingly, I think it’s lessened. I still have anxiety and issues about various things, but the big question things, I think, have lessened. And I think that’s related to thinking through some of these things and also reading existential psychology books. My favorite book I recommend to people is Existential Psychotherapy by Irvin Yalom. It’s my favorite book. So I think as time’s gone on, I’ve been less stressed by these big questions. I’m more stressed by more mundane everyday things.
Joe: Yeah, me too.
Zach: Yeah. I think it’s gotten better. How about you? You’ve mainly found peace with it.
Joe: Yeah. Like I said, everything that comes at me, eventually, I find a way to accept it. I didn’t think I was going to ever get comfortable with this quantum multiverse thing, but now I don’t think about it that much anymore.
Zach: Maybe that’s a future episode, and we can talk about that, the psychological implications of dealing with the multiverse.
Joe: Yeah. [chuckles]
Zach: Well, I really appreciate it, Joe. Thanks for taking the time.
Joe: It’s been a blast. I’ve really loved this. Thank you.