r/OpenIndividualism

Nonduality is the name of an understanding of reality that is arrived at in multiple ways both experiential and logical, but I would argue that it has the distinction of being a perspective that requires one to believe absolutely nothing that is not given directly in first-person experience. All other metaphysical positions come with some baggage that can never be proven, or even evidenced, in our experience. Nonduality proceeds directly from a standpoint of universal skepticism about all assumptions not given in our direct perception of life, whatever life may be. This post will give a (probably lengthy) account of the chain of reasoning that leads to the non-dual conclusion: that you alone are what actually exists, and you are just the simple awareness of your own existence.

We begin with the observation that, while we know that we exist beyond a shadow of a doubt, we can have all kinds of doubts about what we are. We seem to be a person with a body and a mind, but this may be an illusion, since we have the clear experience of believing ourselves to be a particular body and mind and being mistaken about that, such as when we are dreaming. Thus, the fact that it strongly seems as if we are a body with a mind is not evidence that we are actually a body/mind.

When do we seem to be a body/mind? In our experience, we seem to cycle through three distinct states. In our current state, the waking state, we seem to be individual beings with bodies and minds located in a world. In a very similar state, dreaming, we seem to be different bodies located in different worlds. But are these the only two states of being we know?

Importantly, there is a third state we experience: the state of dreamless sleep. In dreamless sleep, we have no awareness of a body, a mind, or a world, nor do we experience space and time. However, we are aware of our own existence, because when we leave the state of dreamless sleep, we clearly know that we were in a state with no awareness of any phenomena. Otherwise, we would experience an unbroken series of waking and dream states, and would have no concept of deep sleep; we would simply assume that for the entire time we slept, we were dreaming. We do not assume this, because we have clear introspective knowledge of having been in a state where no phenomena were present.

So, are we the bodies that we seem to be while waking or dreaming? If we were these bodies, then we would not be able to experience our own existence in their absence. Yet, while we are sleeping dreamlessly, we are aware of our existence while there is nothing else present, and certainly no body present.

If we exist and are aware of our existence in all three states, but seem to be a body in only two of the three, how can we assert that we are actually a body without accepting something we cannot experience directly? In our actual experience (in the uninterrupted awareness of our own existence), the phenomenon of seeming to be a body in a world rises and subsides. It rises in the waking state and the dream state alike, along with memories that create the impression of a continuous flow of time across multiple waking states.

Since we have the impression of continuity in both waking and dreams, there is no basis to conclude that the waking state is actually a continuous one while our dreams are intermittent and fleeting. The impression of continuity may certainly occur in a dream, where nothing exists independently of our perception of it. The same can be said of any justification we may provide in the waking state to establish it as primary or real relative to a dream.

In principle, there is no experience we can have in the waking state, when we are convinced that a world exists independently of our perception of it, that could not occur in a dream, when we have the same conviction even though it is known to have been mistaken when the dream ends.

Therefore, no evidence could possibly demonstrate that we are actually a body with a mind in an independently real waking world that exists even if we do not perceive it. As a result, the only reasonable conclusion is that the waking state is just a long dream, within which we seem to experience other dreams as well as dreamless sleep.

So, given all this, what are we?

The answer should be getting clearer now. We cannot be the bodies that appear in only two dreamlike states, since we clearly exist and are aware of our existence without the appearance of a body in the third state without dreams. We must therefore be whatever the appearance and disappearance of this erroneous body-identity occurs in. In our dreams, though we seem to be a dream character in a world of other characters, when we awaken we know none of them were real (not even the one we believed ourself to be). The same must therefore be true even of our waking experience, since as shown earlier, nothing experienced therein can unequivocally distinguish it from a dream. Taking ourself to be an individual in an independent world is a fundamental error.

What we actually are is formless, unlimited, infinite, and eternal awareness that is always aware of ourself, even when we seem to take the perspective of an individual (due to ignorance of our real nature) in the dream that is our life. But since dreams are unreal and do not really exist, the ultimate fact of the matter is that we have never actually made this mistake; we seem to undergo change while circulating through the three states, but in reality we are unchanging and do not have any state other than existing.

As a dream is nothing apart from the dreamer, and only exists in the view of the dreamer, the whole universe is your dream-projection (but not as the person you believe yourself to be; you are all the persons and the entire world). This is what non-duality, or advaita, means: other than you as unchanging awareness, there is no second thing, no countably separate reality; whatever seems to be separate from you is only an appearance that is made of you while appearing in you, which you mistake for something independent only when you take yourself to be an individual with a body.

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All of which is to say, this nonduality stuff is not the unfounded belief that we "don't exist" or "nothing is real". We exist and are real, and are in fact all that is real, but we are mistaken about what we are. Since we make this mistake whenever we know ourself as an individual with a body in a world, the reality of whatever we perceive is also mistaken. However, so long as we are under the sway of this delusion, and by all means I still am, we have no reason to behave as if this world is false. We should not use nonduality as justification for being cruel to others, since the only reason we would want to is because we feel someone else has something we want. If we are cruel, it is because we see the victim of our cruelty as separate from us, so nonduality can never justify cruelty.

On the contrary, knowing that everybody (or every body) including "yourself" is an appearance in a vast, unlimited awareness is an excellent reason to recede from egotistical behavior and practice compassion. What is worth pursuing in this world if it has no reality apart from you the pursuer? The sting of desiring this or fearing that becomes weaker and weaker as we progress on the non-dual path.

I will do my best to respond to any earnest questions while completely ignoring personal attacks or bad-faith remarks. Thanks for reading all this, if you in fact did read it all. :)

There is no answer to the apparent dilemma of how our lifetimes are experienced, either one-by-one or all at once. Neither option makes any sense.

Simultanaeity is not absolute, so that cannot be a factor in how experiences are distributed. There is no universal clock that applies everywhere, such that we may say this event happening on Earth is happening simultaneously with an event in another galaxy. It's not that we can't know when things happen far away, it's that the concept itself is incoherent at those distances. Thus, if you want to claim as a brute fact that you are every conscious being everywhere "now", you are naming a category of beings that doesn't actually exist.

Sequences of events in time depend upon prior causes. My experience of being this person is one extended mental event, but what is its cause? I can in principle find the cause of all the *contents* of my experience, but the reason that I am experiencing this life now is not to be found in any experiential contents, since my access to any experiential contents whatsoever is what we are trying to explain.

But sequences of events in time can only meaningfully apply to those very experiential contents. In other words, time is a way of arranging objects, phenomena, things, discrete variables in awareness. It makes no sense to say that event A took place before event B if both events are totally undetectable by any conceivable means of observation.

Yet, that is exactly what would need to be true if "my next life" were a real event in time relative to "my current life". This is because the one subject of OI has no qualities of any kind other than awareness, so nothing can meaningfully be said to "happen" to that subject to push me from life A to life B rather than to life C, D, or n. What would it even mean to say that my featureless, unchanging locus of subjectivity has "moved" from one body to another, if any movement would need to involve being affected in some way by another object. What object could affect the subject?

Thus, it is incoherent to say you are experiencing all conscious lives right now as well as to say you will experience them all in a sequence. If open individualism is true, it must be true in a way that is not described by either of these options. It must be that time itself is just not the right category of relation to apply to what we actually are.

Arnold Zuboff published his first work on this idea in 1990, his paper "One Self", and named it "Universalism". Daniel Kolak published his book I Am You in 2004, and named it "Open Individualism". In this work he never mentions Zuboff, so perhaps wasn’t aware of him at the time. The same idea has been called by other names in the past. So how did it come about that "Open Individualism" is the name we're using now (on Reddit, Facebook, Wikipedia, Wikiquote, etc.)?

Like many people, I stumbled on the idea through my own reasoning before learning that anyone else had thought of it. When I put my first writings about it online in August of 2016, Iacopo Vettori found them and told me the idea was called "Open Individualism" and that Daniel Kolak had written a book about it. He invited me to join the Facebook group he and some others had created in 2010 under the name "Open Individualism". They also had created the Wikipedia page for Open Individualism the same year. In 2016, Iacopo was not yet aware of Zuboff, and amazingly, it seems no one else had yet dropped his name into any Facebook discussions over the course of the past six years either. I can't remember the exact year, but Iacopo told me around 2018 about discovering Zuboff's work.

I don’t think there was much discussion of the idea in academia up to this point, or at least there was no single term the idea was being discussed under. So I think Iacopo and his compatriots are the reason the term "Open Individualism" has spread rather than any other. To this day it seems to still be much more discussed in public forums like this than among academics. (In addition to the historical reason, the term “Open Individualism” does have the benefit of being distinct—"Universalism" can and does mean many different things in different contexts. But I think the primary reason it was adopted by us is historical accident.)

If anyone has any additional information to add to this, please do. For example, I don't know how this subreddit got its name.

Here's how Iacopo told me the story a few months ago:

>In regard to the preference for the term “Open Individualism”, I can say that there is only a historical reason. I found the theory by myself in 2006, and spent some time believing I was the only person in the whole world who had this idea, so I temporarily named it “the Third Hypothesis” (the first being “living a single time” and the second “living more times, but not all the lives”, as in “normal” reincarnation theories).  Studying more, I found that in the Middle Ages there existed a “theist version” called Monopsychism, that Sigier of Brabant learned from Averroes, who in turn credits it to Aristotle. In this version, the soul of every man has a mortal part (I think they meant what psychologists now call “Ego”) and an immortal part, that is always the same for everybody, the “soul of God”. Then I thought that an appropriate name for the new theory could be “reductionist monopsychism” or “neomonopsychism”, where the prefix marks a substantially new (non-theistic) version compared to the traditional one.

>Only later did I learn that the book I Am You by Daniel Kolak existed, published in 2004. I read the book (and I also had an email dialog with him) so I knew that he meant the very same theory and I adopted his nomenclature. “Open Individualism” is actually an abbreviation that stands for “Open Individual View of Personal Identity”. Kolak introduced this term to contrast it with the natural view that everyone has a unique identity, called "Closed Individualism", and with the idea of ​​Parfit and other reductionist philosophers according to which our personal identity is not stable over time, called "Empty Individualism".

>Meanwhile, I met some new friends online who were already discussing the theory and also calling it “Open Individualism”. Some of them had already emailed Kolak like me. We decided to found the Facebook group “I Am You: Discussions on Open Individualism”. The group started in 2010.

>Years later, I learned about Zuboff and his “Universalism”. I also had some email dialog with him. His presentation is quite different, but the theory is the same. The first article by Zuboff on this topic, “One Self: The Logic of Experience”, was published in 1990.

On a personal note, I prefer the term Open Individualism, because I use the Closed/Empty/Open distinction heavily in my argument for Open Individualism. But it seems everybody I know has their own preferred term for it and doesn't think Open Individualism is the best term. I started out calling it "materialist reincarnation", before I knew about OI, and then I wanted to change it to Open/Closed/Empty Existence, but then that has you calling people Open Existentialists, which is terribly confusing if you're not sitting in a Parisian café c. 1930s (and even moreso if you are), so now I just use "Open Individualism".

One other note: I've recently been studying and taking seriously for the first time both idealism and some of the south Asian philosophies like Śaiva Tantra (Christopher D. Wallis' book Tantra Illuminated, recommended by a friend with no connection to OI) that have a belief very similar to what is called idealism in Western philosophy—that mind or consciousness is the fundamental element of reality, and mind creates matter, rather than the other way around. I know many of you have been swimming in these waters for many years, and I know several people in the OI world who have spoken of Advaita Vedanta, so I am very late to the party. But reading both the Western and South Asian arguments and presentations for idealism, it seems to me that "one self" comes almost for free when you adopt idealism. (Bernardo Kastrup says as much when he comments on OI in his, um, inimitable way in the AMA video posted here four years ago.) So I'm inclined to use the term "Open Individualism" specifically for the "one self" belief attached to physicalism. There perhaps doesn't need to be an additional term for "one self" under idealism, but if you believe in physicalism, you need to have a whole separate argument to arrive at it. (I would say "whole separate very elaborate argument", lol.)

My view of OI is the same as everyone else's except I believe the "Experience" is sequential, not simultaneous.so we are still everything at the same time but the experience is experienced one at a time.

Regarding personal identity, I mostly agree with Parfit that identity itself may not matter as much as we usually think. What matters is psychological continuity, such as memory, character, and other mental connections. From a reductionist physicalist view, there is no additional “further fact” about personal identity beyond these relations.

Open Individualism seems to accept many of Parfit’s arguments, but I am not sure how it can go beyond Parfit without adding the kind of metaphysical assumption he rejects. If there is no deep further fact about personal identity, how can we argue for a constant identity, even if it is universalized so that everyone is ultimately the same subject?

In this sense, Open Individualism sounds almost like a real-self view expanded to include everyone. But that seems close to the kind of view that Buddhist no-self doctrine tries to overcome. As I understand it, Buddhism does not replace the individual self with one larger universal self. It questions whether there is such a self at all.

I am also not sure Open Individualism gives a stronger ethical message than Parfit or Buddhism. Parfit’s view already weakens egoistic concern, and Buddhism can support compassion without appealing to a metaphysical self. So I wonder whether Open Individualism adds something genuinely new, or whether it either reintroduces a self or collapses back into something like Parfit’s view.

Alright, so this is something that sort of just popped into my head this morning.

So alot of people who subscribe to OI say that we all have the same baseline consciousness shared between all conscious beings right?

But what if that baseline consciousness is still distinct somehow.

like, say I have 2 red balls, both completely identical, would you say they are the same ball? no because they are clearly two different objects despite being identical, because of their placement in spacetime.

Now you can say that they both have the baseline properties of being spherical and red, but what if one of them was blue. Sure you can then say that they both share the baseline property of being spherical, but they'd still be different because of their placement in spacetime.

idk, what do you guys think?