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Is your existence unlikely? Or inevitable? Discussing Arnold Zuboff’s universalism

Many view the fact that they are here, experiencing the world, as something insanely improbable… but what if it were instead entirely inevitable? The philosopher Arnold Zuboff walks us through a mind-bending argument, which he calls universalism (aka open individualism), where the improbability of your existence vanishes. It doesn’t matter which sperm met which egg, or how your ancestors got together, or how anything at all in the past unfolded, because wherever there is first-person experience, there is the same “I.” Zuboff’s new book, Finding Myself: Beyond the False Boundaries of Personal Identity, features a foreword by Thomas Nagel (author of “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”), who says that many will view the claim as “incredible, even outrageous” — but says it is too well argued to be ignored and an “important contribution.” We discuss why Zuboff sees universalism as resolving many of the core quandaries of consciousness that are puzzled over, and why he’s entirely certain it’s the right view. Other topics include: how universalism ties into views of a multiverse and the anthropic principle; how it ties into ideas of religion and a higher power, and more. If you’ve ever lain awake at night wrestling with the sheer weirdness of being alive at all, you’ll want to listen to this episode.

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TRANSCRIPT

(transcript is generated automatically and will contain errors)

Arnold Zuboff: So your own conception, there were, on average, 200 million sperm cells competing to get to the egg, if any of the others but the one that did get to the egg, in the usual view, you would never have existed. There’d be no experience. You’d be eternally blank. 

Zach: You’ve never have escaped the abyss. 

Arnold: But now consider your conception couldn’t have occurred unless your mother and father had been conceived and let’s say one in 200 million for each of them. For those three conceptions to have gone right for you to exist in the usual view, it’s one in eight septillion, right? 24 zeros or something? So that’s pretty bad. But of course your grandparents had to have been conceived first for your parents. Could have been one or 200 million of those multiplied and then we haven’t even got started yet. Whereas, in the universalism, it didn’t matter what sperm cells hit, what eggs, it was going to be you.

Zach Elwood: That was the philosopher Arnold Zuboff, talking about what he calls universalism, which is the view that we’re essentially all the same person – the same first-person “I” experience. 

Another way to put this: as Arnold was explaining, in the quote “normal” view of things, people view it as astronomically improbable that we would exist – that our first-person experience would exist at all. But in the view of universalism, it is entirely inevitable that you or I, our first-person experience, would exist, simply because there is only one I, and wherever there is first-person experience, that universal I will be present. 

Now, of course, if you’re new to these ideas, this will probably sound quite crazy to you. It definitely did to me at first. But you should know that there are some smart and non-crazy people who believe this, and the more you dig into these ideas, as I did, you’ll find that they make a lot of sense, and help resolve some serious quandaries about consciousness that philosophers have been puzzling over for a long time. 

Arnold is the author of the recently published book “Finding Myself: Beyond the False Boundaries of Personal Identity.” The foreword of that book is written by the respected philosopher Thomas Nagel, who you might know of from his often-referenced paper “What is it like to be a bat?” I’ll read a little bit from Nagel’s foreword:

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 

Nagel goes on to write: 

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 

This idea that we are all manifestations of the same first-person experience is also known as open individualism, and it’s a concept I explored a few months ago in my talk with Joe Kern, author of The Odds of You Existing. 

Now, if you’re like me when I first heard of these ideas, you’ll have a lot of objections that spring to mind. Rest assured that your objections and skepticism is addressed and considered by the people thinking about these ideas. This talk will of course only be a rough introduction to these ideas, and it’s hard to talk off the cuff about these ideas, as they are so contrary to our normal ways of speaking – at least I find it difficult to talk about and keep my ideas clear; our normal language is just tough to navigate, I find.

In this talk with Arnold, we also talk about ideas about a multiverse, we talk about why the laws of our universe seems so precisely configured for complex life, we talk about God, souls, and higher powers, we talk about societal implications of people believing in universalism, I talk about laying awake at night thinking about the sheer strangeness of existence and tough existential questions, which I’ve done a good amount of — and maybe you’ve done that, too. I hope this talk serves to get you interested in the topic, and maybe you’ll read Arnold’s book or other writings on the topic. 

Ok, here’s the talk with Arnold Zuboff, author of “Finding Myself: Beyond the False Boundaries of Personal Identity.”

Zach: Hi, Arnold, thanks for joining me.

Arnold: It’s a great pleasure.

Zach: Pleasure is all mine. Maybe we could start with when it comes to open individualism or universalism, as you call it, maybe you could talk about what your focus has been, as obviously, there can be different areas to focus on within this philosophy.

Arnold: Yeah, there are a couple ways I might like to introduce it. One way is to ask a question or make a statement first. There are loads and loads of conscious things in the world. The question is, how do you know which one you are? And first, let’s consider whether you have a checklist of facts about yourself and you’re searching among them, making little checks—oh, yeah, right parents. No, I don’t think you do that. You do something much simpler than that. You just find that you’re the “one” whose experience is first person in character and is immediate in your face.

Zach: Yeah, you’re the one thinking I am here right now.

Arnold: Yeah. It’s here, mine, now, and the pains hurt in a way they don’t if they’re someone else’s. And that’s immediate. I use the word immediacy a lot to indicate all of this. This is the basis of two crucial things being present in the world. Your presence in the world is by way of this first person kind of experience. Without that, there wouldn’t be anything that was you. There’d be no reason to count anything as you if you didn’t have that. So, that’s how you find yourself. Then the objective facts about the thing that you think you are constrained into being, they’re like after thoughts.

Zach: The various contents and details about your life. Yeah, it’s separate from the first person ‘I am here’ perspective. Yeah.

Arnold: That’s right. This immediacy I’m talking about is the general character of it. The details could be changed in so many ways with this same general character applying. And it’s the experience of having that that’s at the heart of what I’m talking about. Another way I have of introducing my particular approach to this is to say that the usual view that all of us believe almost all of the time, the usual view needs to be reversed. Okay? So my view, which I call universalism, is a reversal of the usual view. The usual view says that I am a particular thing with a lot of objective facts attaching to that, some of them being essential to me and some of them are less essential, but I am that one thing. And if something’s going to belong to me and be mine, it has to belong to that thing. For example, a hat. The usual view says if an experience is mine as opposed to someone else’s, it’s because it belongs to this thing that is me. The reversal of the usual view that interests me is to think instead that there’s something about the experience that makes it mine. And what makes an experience mine is this very character of immediacy first-person nature-subjective center of everything. That’s what makes an experience mine. And then whatever might be having the experience or whatever thing might be having experience has to be me. If the experience is mine, carrying presence in the world and self interest within it, then whatever the hell thing is having, it is me. I speak in the book about what the dog is and what the tail is.

Zach: Right. In the traditional view, you’ve got these ideas of entities, these selves or these entities, and these things have various attributes. And one of those attributes is having a first-person perspective. But what you’re saying, you’re flipping it around and saying anything having to do with self or me is just about that first person experience. That’s the primacy. That is the important thing and not the rest of the things, and that experience is the same across all the entities. It’s the same manifestation of an experience.

Arnold: Yeah, that’s what it is for an experience being mine, and that’s what rules here. In the usual view, the body of the dog is a particular thing. And it’s argued that it’s a physical thing or mental thing that’s more important, but it’s being a particular thing in the world that’s me. And then the tail being wagged by that dog is the experience being mine. In my view, the body of the dog is the experience being mine, which is determined solely by this character of immediacy, and then the tail that is being wagged by that dog is whatever thing that happens to be me.

Zach: When it comes to trying to explain this to a lay audience, because I think these concepts are so hard for people to quickly wrap their minds around them, but I’m curious what you think about this. When I’ve tried to explain it to people who are new to the idea, I’ve basically said, “In the traditional view, it’s very unlikely that we exist. We experience ourselves as being incredibly unlikely. Like, what are the chances I’m experiencing this now? What are the chances I am here?” But in your view and the universalism view, it’s viewing yourself and your experience right now as inevitable because no matter what or no matter where that sense of self and that sense of I came into being, it would be having that experience and it would be thinking like, “Wow, it’s incredible that I’m here,” but it’s inevitable that you are here because you are a manifestation of the same I experience. I think it’s that flip between seeing something as very unlikely to seeing something as inevitable that, I think, helps make the connection for the audience.

Arnold: Oh, that’s great. What you’re saying is great. But you’ve really leapt ahead.

Zach: Yeah, I’ve leapt ahead. I think why I did that was to try to—for people that are maybe completely lost—to maybe help them see it from a… We can come back to that. But maybe let me…

Arnold: No, no, no. Let me do it.

Zach: Sure, sure. I like to think in terms of what’s the elevator pitch to somebody completely new to this.

Arnold: Yeah, okay. I mean, the elevator has already arrived and I’m still talking about your experience—uncontroversially—your experience having immediacy. Right? What you’ve correctly indicated here is that if you find yourself in the world as “the one” whose experience is immediate first person, you can quickly come to realize that, in fact, there isn’t just one conscious thing in the world whose experience is immediate and first person in character. In fact, anything worth calling experience would have exactly that character in it, that same general character that picks out which one you are. Now, what universalism does very quickly say is that this means that there are a lot of tails being wagged by that experience that’s mine. All the things that have experience are just tails latching onto that. All of it is equally mine since that’s the thing that makes the experience mine, and there’s nothing else involved in it. All of it is equally mine. 

Now what happens, and this is key to understanding the whole business, what happens quite naturally is this, the contents of experience are cut off from each other. Why? Because experience comes about in different brains in these distinct conscious things. So in each, it seems as though the only experience that has the character making it mine is the experience involving that particular content. And because of that, it seems that my experience being mine and the experience of being me is limited to, first of all, that content, and then to the thing whose content it is. But that’s a mistake. I am there in all the experience because that involves something so simple, something universal to experience. But it inevitably seems to me, in each case of me, that this is the only one. Because the content is not integrated.

Zach: I think that’s where most people would lose you because they’re like, “Well, how could it be that we are separate but the same?” And I think your analogy about the book and, you know, like a story can be in multiple books and be the same story, I think that analogy—and maybe you have other analogies to help explain it—but I think that’s where a lot of people would be like, “Well, how can we be separate? What does it even mean to be the same thing if we’re separate?”

Arnold: Well, you know what might be particularly useful as a first step in attacking that is to think of brain bisection.

Zach: Yeah, that’s one of your first stories and that’s maybe how you got started on this whole journey back in the day. Oh no, you got started on switching the brains out, not the brain bisection.

Arnold: Yeah, yeah.

Zach: But go ahead with the brain bisection.

Arnold: Okay, let me wheel in brain bisection here. There was an actual operation done on people suffering from epilepsy that involved cutting the bridge of nerves between the two hemispheres of the brain. It’s called the corpus callosum. It was cut because it would prevent seizures from moving from one hemisphere to the other. At the time it was caught, as I understand it, it was thought the thing only kept the brain from sagging, so no great loss in cutting. But then it was realized later that most of the integration of the activities of the hemispheres was carried through the corpus callosum and communicated through it. So experiments were done with the split brain patients, in which information was carefully isolated in the way it came in so that it would only go to one hemisphere or the other. And what was discovered, I think quite unsurprisingly, though shockingly, was that these people could have non-integrated contents in their experience. In each hemisphere, there’d be content that was not available to the other. Right? So it would be like the situation I described among all these conscious things, a failure of integration across them for contents.

Zach: For people, we might say, “Yeah, these experiments were really wild—the gizonica research—where, basically they blocked something in the middle, so one eye is looking at one thing and one eye is looking at another. And they found that one eye might see something and know it was there, one part of the brain would see something and know it was there and answer correctly, you know, like check a box or something based on what they were seeing, but the other side wouldn’t know it was there and would confabulate reasons why they checked that box. It was just really mind blowing, to most people, mind blowing about you could be experiencing something and know something, but the other half wouldn’t know and would even make up reasons for why that happened, which gets into our our ability to how the brain probably works a lot of time as we’re we’re making up stories for why we do things even if we might not even know why we did things sometimes. It kind of gets into that realm too. But just to say, it was a really fascinating research.

Arnold: It was, and a lot of philosophers have had to look at that. What’s extremely useful, I think, is a certain thought experiment based on this that I like to use. Parfit first suggested something like this. Imagine I had a button I could press that was connected to a device adjacent to my corpus callosum, and that if I press the button an anesthetic would be injected into the corpus callosum, shutting it down temporarily, right? So you could have that same effect of mutually excluding experiential contents in each hemisphere. 

And so I tell a specific story like that where there’s a great concert you want to listen to tonight, but there’s some dreary audio studying you have to do. And if you plug the sound of the concert into the right ear, which communicates directly with the right hemisphere of the brain, and the audio dreary studying into the left ear, which directly communicates with left hemisphere, and press the button before these things start, they won’t interfere with each other. There’ll be two extremely different things going on.

Zach: Two streams of consciousness.

Arnold: Yeah. Yeah, enjoying a wonderful concert and doing this dreary studying. Of course, I asked the question of, what kind of evening will you have? This question is one that has troubled a lot of philosophers. Let me tell you what I think is going on here. If, instead, we had anesthetized one of the hemispheres and done the same thing with the remaining hemisphere, there’d be no doubt in our minds that I’d continue on into that experience in the non-anesthetized hemisphere. So I’d have the experience of the concert, or I’d have the experience of the studying. And it would be me. It’s crazy to think that it would stop being me. 

Now, in this case where we’ve anesthetized the corpus callosum, we’ve got both of them going on. How could either of them stop being me just because something’s going on over on the other side? That seems crazy. And what emphasizes this further is when the anesthetic wears off and the hemispheres can communicate fine with each other again, I will remember, “Oh, yeah, I was listening to this great concert. Oh dear, yeah, I was struggling through the audio stuff.” I will remember each of those experiences as having been mine. What will make the memories of them having been mine? They’ll be first person. They’ll be immediate in the memory of them. They were both mine. It can’t be the case that remembering both of them and integrating the memories like that is retroactively making them both mine, it’s simply revealing that they were both mine, but neither had the information at the time that the other was going on.

Zach: In the same way that you or I don’t have the information that is available—

Arnold: Exactly. Exactly. So what it is is there’s an illusion created—a powerful illusion in either hemisphere while it’s having its experience—that anything that was experiencing anything else at this time couldn’t be me. I’m walled off metaphysically from it. Different self, different whatever. It’s a very powerful illusion. What I call the principle you discover in thinking about this is the irrelevance of objective simultaneity. I talked before about if just one was anesthetized, you could do it a different way. In fact, this is something that’s actually been done called the water test. You could anesthetize one hemisphere and give it the remaining one—the concert experience—then reverse it so that next there would be the experience of the studying, but at different objective times, they would both be remembered in exactly the same way as when the corpus callosum was anesthetized and they happened at the same time. The objective time of these events is irrelevant to what they represent to you subjectively. They are both yours and can’t help but be yours. And my claim, looking back at what I said earlier, is that the only thing making it mine for this subject is the immediacy of the experience.

Zach: Yeah, one of the powerful things about the universalism idea is that it helps make sense of these various quandaries that philosophers have struggled over. Like you mentioned you had a really good passage in your book talking about how there’s basically this desire or impulse to preserve some sort of idea of self amongst the various other philosophical views. For example, the idea that identity is defined as some continuity of psychological content or experiences, which is more in the par fit view, it doesn’t matter where it is, it matters what it is, basically the content. And then there’s the view that, no, identity matters based on the body it’s or the brain it’s in… This biological continuity. But in both cases, there’s an impulse to preserve some sort of separate identities of some sort. But open individualism or universalism is resolving that by saying, “Well, those are all unnecessary because these different first-person experiences are the same thing.” So it resolves all the quandaries like, “Am I this person? If I get in a teleporter and make a copy of myself, if I split my brain?” Universalism is saying those are resolved because they don’t really matter, and yourself is all the same and your first-person experience is all the same.

Arnold: That’s right. If you’re trying to trace what you are in all these specific ways, not knowing whether you want to follow the psychological pattern or you’re more interested in the thing that’s having the psychological states, the result is a mess. Let me say something about what I think the two positions are—the two very basic positions in the classic debate about personal identity. This is the question in the traditional debate: What makes a future person remain me, so that any pains it has are mine and are going to be mine in the future, so that I don’t sympathize with them, but I am concerned about them in terms of self-interest?

Zach: Yeah, that’s the practical discussion. It’s like, “Am I the same person? Am I that same identity I was when I was younger? Am I the same identity I am when I’m older?” That’s kind of like the practical impulse of the question.

Arnold: Yeah. Or, will those pains hurt for me instead of somebody else? And the two usual answers have been—they’re both attractive—it depends on the identity of a thing. There’s a particular thing I am, and its continuing identity into the future determines whether the pains had by the thing, you know… Well, it makes the pains had by the thing be mine, right? If it’s continuing into the future, that’s where I’m going to be located, wherever that is. And the thing could be an immaterial soul, like for Descartes, or it could be a body, or more particularly, the brain—as for many philosophers since the 20th century. 

But the opposing view is one that was started by Locke, and the view is this: that no, it’s not the identity of the thing that’s having the pain or whatever; it’s whether the pain is part of a mental process continuing on. So that process in certain puzzle cases might be continued into a distinct mental substance, or more recently, into a distinct brain. Right? The memories and anticipations that are in your mind would somehow magically or in some science fiction way, continue on in a different thing. And according to that side of the debate, that would be you. The pains would be yours if that mental process was continuing on.

Zach: Right, which is kind of Parfit’s view, at least in reasons and persons. Right?

Arnold: Yes, except that he complicates it. He’s also what I call a naturalist. He thinks we make a mistake in our ordinary way of thinking about this, and he wants to drop that our identity is all or nothing. That’s a crucial part of what he is saying, right? Locke is more purely a philosopher. I mean, he is in the tradition of Locke in that he emphasizes completely the mental side of it. And I’m not sure why. I don’t think he ever argues for it. But he introduces this new sophistication of getting rid of anything from it that doesn’t seem natural, so he ends up with a strange kind of hybrid position. It actually has something perhaps in common with Buddhism. Now, getting back to the traditional, classic debate, the point I was making was that the whole focus of it is on this continuation into the future. Strangely, they never asked themselves what made a particular body or particular mental process mine to begin with.

Zach: Yeah, let me read that paragraph of yours, just for the audience here, because I really like this paragraph. You said, “Note also that in this old debate on personal identity, all that is questioned is which condition preserves me. The debate ignores completely the primary question: which is what made a mental substance or a brain or a psychological process be mine instead of somebody else’s in the first place? Only universalism answers that question.”

Arnold: Yeah, that’s right. And then I point out this particularly bad… When you look at psychological continuity, [chuckles] it’s carrying on from some past state that at the beginning had no psychological continuity.

Zach: It goes through when you’re a baby or a child. It goes through immense changes, right?

Arnold: Yeah. So, how the hell… You know, what are you even talking about continuing? And and my answer is—I think this is a good illustration what you meant by cutting through all this mess—my answer is, “Yeah, any of those baby experience or experiences in the womb had immediacy and were therefore mine, and that it’s continued in a mental process, that’s not important.” Each side of that debate made its most powerful point against the other side when it said, “Hey, you could still have the ‘it’ be mine, without your thing. In the case of psychological continuity as the supposed criterion of personal identity, they’d say, “Can’t you imagine being shifted over into a different thing and continuing thinking of yourself as yourself, the way Locke emphasized?”

Zach: Both sides can attack each other, and universalisms over on this side saying like, “Well, those are both strengthening my argument.” Right?

Arnold: Exactly. Because there was a very powerful argument against psychological continuity, which is, I could be the one having amnesia.

Zach: Yeah, I don’t find that argument. Both, as you say, they both have various weaknesses when you think about these various…

Arnold: Where they’re weak is where they’re trying to restrict the other one. Where they’re strong is where they say, “As long as you’ve got the psychological process continuing—doesn’t matter which thing it’s in—as long as you got the thing there, it doesn’t matter what’s happening with the psychological process.” But you put those together, and it’s universalism.

Zach: I feel like you would say it’s an Occam’s razor approach with all the, you know… Maybe that’s a good pivot to you’re known for the probability arguments, probably most of all, the various awakenings in rooms and those ideas. Maybe you could talk a bit about why you focus so much on that. I think some people have a hard time understanding why you see that as so conclusive. In some of the Reddit threads and discussions you’ve had, I’ve seen people not really understand that the probability argument in context with the first person experience is such a conclusive or very conclusive point. Maybe you could talk a bit about that.

Arnold: Let’s move to that. There’s an analogy to the argument I’m going to use to establish universalism that I call the hotel inference. There’s a hotel with countless rooms. I don’t want to say infinite rooms. I don’t want to get into… [crosstalk]

Zach: Billions? Trillions?

Arnold: No, it’s more. Let’s say countless rooms. We’ve got all the rooms we ever need.

Zach: Now, am I ruining it by saying that analogizes to the idea that we’re one of countless senses of self that could exist? But anyway, I might be getting ahead of that. But that’s the analogy. Yeah.

Arnold: Yeah. Well, maybe it’s not quite as direct as that analogy.

Zach: Oh, yeah. Sorry, keep going with the setup. Yeah, sorry.

Arnold: Okay. So in each of these countless rooms, there is a single induced sleeper—someone who’s made to be sleeping. One of two games is about to be played; what I call the easy game, and what I call the hard game. For each of these sleepers, there is a coin that is going to be tossed a thousand times. Now, in the hard game, each sleeper has been assigned a list of heads, tails, heads, tails. A thousand-long list of random heads and tails. That’s that sleeper’s list. It’s like a security code for that sleeper. And the coin in that room is going to be tossed a thousand times. That sleeper will only be awakened if every single random toss of the fair coin matches what’s in that sleeper’s list. If even one flip goes wrong, he’ll sleep forever. He’ll never be awakened. This is happening for each of these countless sleepers. This is where countless becomes useful. Because there are countless rooms, there will be some that are awakened. And extremely rare, there may even be quite a few. But it’s a hard game because it’s extremely hard for any particular player to be awakened. In the easy game, they’ve got the coins there. There’s no assigned list, no security code, but they do in each room toss a coin a thousand times. But it doesn’t matter, all the sleepers will be awakened in the easy game.

Now here’s the inference that interests me. Imagine you are a player in this and your eyes open, you’re awakened, and you understand these conditions. Can you have some kind of interesting thing to say about whether the hard or the easy game was played? And my answer is definitely yes. If the hard game was played, something incredibly improbable had to happen before you could have been awakened. So, you know, it’s immensely improbable that you awaken by way of the hard game. Whereas if the easy game was played, easy! Fine. So you can know, not only that it was immensely more probable that the easy game was played, but for all practical purposes, you could know that it was played. Now there will be these occasional winners of the hard game. Really rare, right?

Zach: Astronomically rare.

Arnold: Astronomically rare. If they’re rational, they’ll win before the easy game was played and be wrong about that conclusion. Right in the reasoning, there’s nothing else they could rationally think, but they’d be wrong about which game was played. But you don’t have to worry that you’re one of those because it’d be so improbable you’d be awake to be making the mistake.

Zach: People probably get the analogy, but this maps over to the usual view that we are astronomically rare, right? Like you often hear people like Dawkins talked about this in one of his books. Joe Kern, when I had him on, he had some of Dawkin’s views—the traditional view—that it is astronomically rare that all of these things would have happened to lead to me being here. My ancestors had to couple in just the right ways, a sperm and an egg needed to combine in just the right ways… That’s the normal view that, somehow it’s these magical astronomically ridiculous chances that I am here now. But the easy game in your thought experiment is saying, “Well, the fact that I am here now is easily explained if I am always going to be the one here experiencing it now.”

Arnold: There are all kinds of things that had to happen for you to come into existence, on the usual view.

Zach: And it’s not even possible to draw the lines on where those things would be. But the normal view is like everything from the start of the universe to the coupling of the egg and the sperm, maybe even some things after that, had to come together in just the right way.

Arnold: I’m very glad you say that. That’s a great background. But what I do is I focus on the conceptions involved so I can get a mathematical handle on it.

Zach: Right. Even just focusing on the conception is mathematically astronomically ridiculous.

Arnold: It’s so great. And I have a lot of fun with it in the book. In your own conception, there were 200 million sperm cells competing to get to the egg. If any of the others but the one that did got to the egg, on the usual view, you would never have existed. You’d be eternally blank. It’d be a potential brother or sister born instead.

Zach: You would never have escaped the abyss.

Arnold: Never. So that’s pretty bad already. But maybe one in 200 million, maybe I got really lucky. But now consider your conception couldn’t have occurred unless your mother and father had been conceived. And let’s say one in 200 million for each of them, for those three conceptions to have gone right for you to exist on the usual view, it’s one in eight septillion. Is that twenty four zeros or something? So that’s pretty bad. But of course, your grandparents had to have been conceived first, or your parents could have been one in 200 million of those multiplied. And then we haven’t even got started yet. Whereas in universalism, it didn’t matter what sperm cells hit what eggs, it was going to be you because of the immediacy of experience. That’s all that’s involved in it being you.

Zach: I think a lot of people would say… That’s what I would have said a year or two or a few years ago. I think the main argument people would make is like, yeah, from that angle, the fact that I am here is very improbable. But what if that’s just the way the world works, and every being that comes into being has a separate first person experience, and that’s just the way it works. And then once that happens, they will reach faulty conclusions about how unlikely it is? Yeah, what would you say to that?

Arnold: That’s why the hotel inference is so handy here. Because in the hotel inference, we’ve got winners. And those winners are wrong in inferring the easy game was played and everyone was awakened. That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t infer that. Suppose the usual view is right, and I do exist in this miraculous, incredible…

Zach: Like give a soul kind of idea, yeah.

Arnold: Well, souls can be dealt with the same way. Universalism sets itself against any view that says that I am just one particular thing of a sort.

Zach: I shouldn’t have mentioned soul, that’s getting into a whole different thing. I just meant like a different first person.

Arnold: Even people who believe that souls are kind of deposited in the body, they think that the sperm cell lottery goes on. They don’t think all those souls exist as human beings.

Zach: Correct me if I’m wrong but I think you would say it’s one thing to say if the odds are astronomically long, someone’s got to exist or somebody comes into his existence. It’s another thing to find yourself in that first person experience.

Arnold: Exactly.

Zach: I think that’s what gets to me about this when I’ve thought about this. I mean, it is so astronomically ridiculous that I would be here experiencing this. And then you added the fact too, of like, once you get into the idea of, “Well, am I even the same sense of self from moment to moment?” There’s the series kind of questions which have sometimes bugged me late at night. I used to lay awake thinking am I continually sprung into existence and immediately go out of existence every moment? Well, that makes it even more ridiculous because who is this new me that is randomly being created every second too? That’s like an extra level of astronomically ridiculous odds. What are all these “me’s” that are coming into existence? And you start thinking, well, universalism resolves that because it’s saying it’s all the same manifestation of me.

Arnold: Yeah, that’s right. Exactly. Those conditions are even tougher in Buddhism, where there’s only a momentary self and it’s distinct from all the other momentary selves. Boy, is it tightly defined. You know? At least in the usual view, you got a bit of flexibility there in what you are…

Zach: Because there’s this underlying instinctual assumption that we do exist over time, right? But if you cut that away, then you just have all these senses of self springing into existence, whether it’s other people’s selves or it’s our own self. So then it’s like, where are all these senses of self coming from? It kind of boggles the mind that there would just be this abyss of selves and then these various selves are just springing into existence. Universalism does help resolve that.

Arnold: Yeah, absolutely. Let me say one more thing about what universalism is like that’s kind of related to what we’ve been discussing. Universalism is a really minimal claim.

Zach: Right. It’s not some grand spiritual, you know, making claims about we’re all the same spiritual being or anything like that.

Arnold: Yeah. I mean, people might be tempted to turn it into that because they’re used to thinking integration defines who I am. So, maybe Zuboff saying it’s all integrated, you know, some common mind or something. No, nothing like that. My whole point is that integration is irrelevant to whether an experience is mine or not. Here’s the minimal character of it. I can allow the world to be exactly like what any one of many many varieties of usual views would have. Right? With different views of what consciousness is, different views of whether there is integration beyond ahead… I’m not interested in that insofar as I’m talking about universalism. It’s neutral regarding all of that. So, what is it I am saying? 

One way of representing it would be this. Let’s say we have a line, and on the left end of the line, you’ve got all kinds of incidental things to whether something is you. Like wearing a blue shirt, most people would agree it’d be a weird view to think that I exist with my self interest—my presence in the world—only so long as I wear a blue shirt. If I change into a red shirt, I’m not here anymore. Now let’s move to the right on this line towards more substantive-seeming things. Like having a body composed of certain atoms, or put in the sperm cell lottery… We could emphasize mental side of it, or emphasize the physical identity of body or the brain… All those things are sort of in a middle area. And that’s where most views of personal identity are. Actually, the Buddhist view is way over on the left here with incidental things, because its slightest change in experience is someone else’s. Now we’ve slid over to more generous views of what can be you.

And what are we sliding over here? It’s the line separating what’s inessential from what’s essential. Way over on the right side of the line is a very abstract, general thing—the immediacy of experience. I am not quibbling about what any of the stuff is on this line. I’m just saying that the line between what’s essential and inessential should be slid all the way over to the right and come to rest under immediacy of experience. All the rest is like a blue shirt. It’s all inessential to whether it’s me, right? And that’s why they all have probability problems and universalism does not. And as you say, Buddhism is way over on the left.

Zach: When I was watching that talk of yours with Professor Brown—I can’t remember his first name—there’s also this view that you’re you’re making some claim about what the self is, or something he seemed to be caught up on. He was basically saying, “Well, I don’t believe in the self in a Buddhist or nihilistic way that everything is an illusion.” But I think people can get caught up in your ideas that they think you’re making some claims that there’s some self. All you’re saying is, it’s this first person experience. And he didn’t seem to be denying that, but it does seem like some people can have an obstacle to even admitting that there is a first person experience. And even if you think the ongoing continual self is an illusion or something—kind of like in a Descartes way—I don’t think you can deny that. Like, something is having an experience here. That’s all you’re saying it is.

Arnold: It’s all I’m saying.

Zach: Do you get a sense that he was kind of balking it, like he was like, “Well, I think it’s an illusion,” and you’re saying, well, you don’t disagree that there is an experience being had, right? Something is happening here. But I think it’s interesting because there can be this very nihilistic pushback to even admitting that there’s an experience being had, right?

Arnold: Yeah, all kinds of views in philosophy, that’s for sure. [laughs]

Zach: And with all these ideas, it’s easy to talk past each other because the language we end up using can be so different and the concepts are so non-intuitive. So it’s understandable that there’s various difficulties in communicating about it.

Arnold: I don’t know, maybe I’ve got across that. I think there’s something special about universalism. I think it’s unlike any other philosophical view I know in that…

Zach: Because you resolve so many quandaries, in your view, and resolve several major quandaries. Right?

Arnold: And there’s nothing brought in that really should be controversial. There’s immediacy that’s there. Maybe eliminative materialism doesn’t have it. I don’t know. But it has to be a pretty strange view not to have that in there somewhere.

Zach: Some listeners of this will have seen or listened to a previous episode where I talked to Joe Kern, who has a book called The Odds of Existing. His focus is on… There’s a lot of overlap, but his focus is on- Oh, there it is!

Arnold: He just sent it to me.

Zach: Oh, me too. Yeah, he sent it to me. So his intuitive focus is to focus on when you get down to the—as you call it—the sperm cell lottery when you actually examine, like, well, what would logically make sense? Like, switching out minute parts of the sperm or the egg, would that really result in a different I? These kinds of questions. And when you really start to examine the logic of it, it’s really hard to have a logical point where something starts being a separate self or stops being the same self. So he’s kind of examining the physical arguments of this astronomically slim view of ‘you’ slash I existing. And if I had to say what I think you and Joe Kern… The similarity I see is that you’re both arguing trying to logically examine these usual boundaries that we think of separating oneself from another. 

You’re both attacking these various logical boundaries. He’s attacking this idea that there’s these different physical combinations that would lead to different selves, or even, like we have a different experience our life goes a different way when we’re young and those kinds of things. There’s similar ideas where people might think, oh, these are different people and these are different selves. He’s attacking those foundations. You’re attacking a different foundation of switching out parts of the brain, or whatever. You’re also much more focused on this first-person perspective idea, whereas he’s more talking about these, you know, you could do it from a distance even of like, are these different selves? But I think you’re both attacking these foundations that most people would intuitively think lead to different selves and you’re both saying, “Well, when you really start to look at these things in different ways, there’s not any clear definition of when a new self would have come into being and an old self would have been left behind.

Arnold: But there’s a very important factor here, and I’m not sure how he scores on this. I’m not interested in simply saying there’s just one person. What’s important to me is that it’s you. Right? Because there being just one person could be as bad as the Buddhism thing. It could make things worse than the usual view because at least in the usual view, you got a lot of chances for you to come into existence. But if there’s only one person, why are you that person?

Zach: Yeah, you’re very focused on the ‘me’, the I aspect, the first-person aspect.

Arnold: Exactly, that’s the whole thing that matters here. Not how many there are, but where you are. And your existence is really easy in universalism, because it’s the youness I’m talking about. It’s what makes it you. So I’m not interested so much in breaking down the boundaries between so that it’s all the same person, I’m interested in who the person is.

Zach: I want to move on to the anthropic principle and how universalism is related to that. And I’ll say personally, I myself have long believed that there must be many universes of some sort that all have different physical properties. Whether that’s the quantum many worlds theory, whether that’s infinite worlds in space, whatever it may be, because the basic idea that for me to exist, obviously the universe has to be finely calibrated for me to exist. And what are the chances that we live in the one single universe that would lead to that? In the same way that it’s astronomically improbable that I would be here fundamentally like we talked about from that astronomical chance perspective, it’s also similarly or even more improbable that we would live in the one universe with all these physical properties arranged. And a quick point about this is the fact that we even have gravity, right? If gravity was to pull too much, or if it never pulled at all, the universe would never lead to any sort of combinations of things. So just to say—and you go into this in your book about the nuclear strong forces at atomic level—there’s all these things that are calibrated. 

Another example is just the fact there is an abundance of different types of materials. You can imagine a universe where there was just one type of material, in which case, probably nothing would ever be even created at all. So just to say, there’s all these things that are perfectly calibrated to have life exist, which to me, leaving aside creator god type scenarios and if we’re talking pure logic, to me, that is a no brainer that there must be many worlds with many different physical properties, however those are being created. So that’s kind of to me maybe why universalism and open individualism was intuitively attractive, because I’d already embraced this idea of reaching for something to help explain these astronomically slim circumstances. But I’m curious how you tie in the universalism to the anthropic principle there.

Arnold: Yeah, that’s great. I know that without universalism tied together with something like a multiverse, you cannot explain the anthropic principle in the sort of way you’re talking about. Right? It’s essential to explaining the laws of physics. Now, when I was an undergraduate back in the 60s, I read an article on the anthropic principle by a guy named Tennant who had a religious explanation of it. I remember in 1968 it suddenly occurred to me that if matter was actually very protean in character, existing according to different laws—and let’s call them again, countless forms or countless distinct universes…

Zach: Countless hotel rooms with different physical properties in each one.

Arnold: It’s very closely related to the hotel. If that were the case, then it could be probable that there’d be one or more universes that just happened to be at the right levels of forces, the right sizes of particles and so on, so that life could come about and eventually consciousness could come about. And then here’s the thing. There are now many physicists who think this way. And then what they say is this—and try to notice the problem with it—they say, “And of course, we would have to be in one where all those laws were fine tuned for the existence of life and consciousness. We couldn’t be in any universe where that wasn’t the case.” And then some of them leave it there. And I, when I first thought of this, left it there. But my excuse is I was already thinking about personal identity in this very fluid way. It was 1961 when I came up with this thought experiment of exchanging quarters of brains, and I’d be in both things. It was loose enough for me so that I could be in this anthropic universe that happened to come up. But anyone who believes in anything like the usual view is not helped at all by there being all these universes occurring where it finally becomes probable there’s at least one anthropic one. They’re not helped at all.

Zach: You’re saying they’re not helped because it just becomes so much more astronomically improbable or…

Arnold: Well, because nothing would make it your universe. You being in the anthropic one would be the same kind of look as if there were only one kind of physical world. It doesn’t help at all. I tell this story in the book where, when I came to University College London in 1974—you know, I’m an American, raised in Connecticut, and I came here to University College London to teach philosophy in 1974 and they had new people. There were three people joining that year and they each gave talks to the faculty. And there was a guest there from the States, a logician named Robert Stallmaker, who was quite young like me back then, and I gave a talk where I argued that there must be many universes of different sorts and so on to make it finally probable that there was one that had these laws that we could live in. 

And he talked to me for a long time after, and he was absolutely right in attacking what I was saying. And he used a wonderful analogy to make his point. Suppose I was playing an extremely difficult game of Russian roulette, where five of the six chambers have bullets in them, and you have to do it a hundred times and spin it around, your survival is pretty unlikely there. But you found you survived. And then you said to yourself, there must have been lots of games of Russian roulette like that being played, because if there were enough, there’d be winners. So that explains my winning. It doesn’t. What would explain it is if I would automatically be whisked to the place where all the chambers were empty.

Zach: That you exist in all the places in all the scenarios.

Arnold: No, let’s put it this way. That I exist where it’s successful. Or I have this analogy I use in the book, there’s an enormous roulette wheel with zillions of spaces along it, and this one ball is going to roll around land somewhere. And there’s only one space where a particular sleeper would be awakened. So I’m sleeping. I’m in induced sleeping like the hotel case. I wake up and it’s explained to me that only this ball falling into that space would have them wake me, otherwise I’d sleep forever. I’m just dumbfounded against, you know, whoever heard of such luck? Okay, then let’s change this to there being lots of roulette wheels on each of them. There’s the one space which represents anthropic physical laws that the ball could land in. But let’s say there’s a distinct sleeper attached to each wheel, right? Because in the usual view of personal identity, even if there was someone just like me, even in this universe but somewhere else, it’d be a mere duplicate. It wouldn’t be me. And certainly in another universe, it wouldn’t be me.

Zach: That’s an interesting… Yeah, I think I’ve been having trouble understanding how you’re tying those two ideas together. But yeah, when you start talking about, say, there was an exact duplicate of yourself in many worlds, why would one be you and one not, right? That’s where you’re getting at.

Arnold: Or rather, what I’m saying is I’ve already established that they would all be equally me.

Zach: Yeah, I guess I’m having trouble tying into anthropic things.

Arnold: I automatically find myself wherever there’s consciousness. It’s the lubricant that you need, along with the many universes, to make this work so that I’m there. I’m not stuck with one Russian roulette game. I can take advantage of any of them where I win. I am actually there.

Zach: You are always there. Yeah.

Arnold: Yeah. Otherwise, the other universes don’t help in explaining the anthropic principle. So in other words, what I’m saying is to have a thorough understanding of physics, you need universalism packaged together with a multiverse. That gives you that your universe will be anthropic. Without universalism, it doesn’t work. It’s just as bad as there being only one physical world. Someone would be in an anthropic universe. So it is like the hotel. It’s just an extension of the argument for universalism.

Zach: A small note here. I’ll be honest and say that I don’t fully understand Arnold’s arguments here. It seems like he’s just adding to the statistical improbability argument. I feel I’m missing why he thinks it is a separate form of argument. But I’ve struggled with grasping a few ideas and points in this area that I later did understand. So I wanted to keep this in here and just note my own confusion. I’d say, if you want to try to understand Arnold’s points, of course you should read his new book, Finding Myself.

Okay, back to the talk.

I wanted to pivot to how certain would you say you are that universalism is the true state of things? If you somehow knew for certain that it wasn’t true, what do you think the most likely explanation would be?

Arnold: It’s the only game in town, as I sometimes say in the book. Yeah, it is.

Zach: So you would say you’re basically near a hundred percent certain?

Arnold: Yeah, I’m a hundred percent certain. I’m a hundred percent certain. I mean, it’s the hotel inference.

Zach: Another question I like to ask people in general is, you know, some people watching this—if they made it this far—would be saying, “Well, it’s simple. God gives us a soul, we each have our own souls, the religious view, right? And to me, I’ll say that I find existence in the universe so mind blowing and strange and unlikely in the first place that it would be hard for me to be that surprised about any of the many ideas there are that explain us being here. Which is to say I guess I’m not strongly atheistic. Like, I wouldn’t be shocked to find out that even though it would mainly push the questions back further, I wouldn’t be shocked to find out there was some sort of higher power or creator. But I’d like to ask you, how strongly atheistic are you? Do you leave open some smidgen of where there could be some sort of higher power?

Arnold: Universalism is entirely neutral in regard to that. It’s got that covered. There’s a section in my book where I look at what I call the Somebody Up There Likes Me version of the usual view, where you had a special favor from God. I’m not in the least in my book on universalism attacking the possibility of there being God. But that he would select you for existence is just as improbable as you being selected purely by the sperm cell lottery, which presumably he fixes if he wants someone… [laughs]

Zach: Yeah, it’s rigged or something.

Arnold: Yeah, he wants you. And furthermore, not even a twin of you.

Zach: He wants your very special sense of self to exist.

Arnold: That’s right. That’s right, because it’s just like all the others. [laughs] So, of course, he singles out you.

Zach: Right. The same questions apply, and I think you would also say, theoretically, universalism could coexist with any religion because I can imagine a Christian take on this where it’s like, “See, we’re all the same. We’re all manifestations of God, or whatever.” You can imagine it combining with other things because it doesn’t directly, you know, interfere with…

Arnold: Well, you will be God. If God’s mind includes consciousness with immediacy, you would be God. If God was wise enough and knowledgeable enough, he’d know he was all these beings he was fooling around with. So actually, that has an interesting effect on the problem of evil. Because the problem of evil is how would he allow all this suffering? Instead, it just becomes a puzzle. Why does he want to subject himself to all this suffering?

Zach: I think you and I are kind of on the same page in thinking that universalism, if more people embrace it, would be a good thing in terms of people seeing themselves and other people and seeing other people in themselves or vice versa, just recognizing that we’re all dealing with the same manifestation of experience. I think it would lead to people being more empathetic and less morally righteous.

Arnold: Yeah, yeah. Not even empathetic, just be self interested not to cause yourself—

Zach: I would say even theoretically, embracing like, “Oh, this could be possible,” even leads to more empathy in a lighter form even if you didn’t go all the way.

Arnold: It also does away with the fear of death as annihilation.

Zach: Yeah, in some sense, it’s comforting too because it’s saying that in some sense, death is an illusion. Because we will always be here experiencing things wherever there is a consciousness. So there can be various nice things about it, although I think some people would say… I think it’s possible, with any philosophy, to implement it in such a way that it becomes a dangerous implementation.

Arnold: Sure. But why would you want to do that? You’d just be hurting yourself.

Zach: Yeah, exactly. Although I think some people might say like, “Oh, imagine some dystopian version of this where the people in power say that death doesn’t matter, so it doesn’t matter if people die that much, etc, etc.” But that, that, to me, is kind of a way from how I think most people would interpret this. But yeah, I’m curious for your thoughts on how you see this as a positive force.

Arnold: Sure. Oh, also, it throws a monkey wrench into retribution.

Zach: You can still want to punish people for practical reasons, but it gets rid of this idea that someone must be punished because they’ve, you know, they must suffer because they’ve done a bad thing.

Arnold: Yeah, the victim and the perpetrator are the same person, so causing more pain to the victim.

Zach: Can you imagine a future society where universalism is kind of like a secular religion and it leads to better things happening?

Arnold: I can imagine it, and I really hope for it. I keep emphasizing the simplicity of it. It really is not a complicated thing at all. It simplifies everything. It’s so easy to bear in mind. It’s got a great thing to go against, which is this illusion that there are distinct selves, distinct eyes, but it’s so powerful in itself as a thought that I think it actually could moderate a lot of bad stuff that comes about on account of the illusion.

Zach: That was a talk with the philosopher Arnold Zuboff, author of the book, Finding Myself: Beyond the False Boundaries of Personal Identity.