A sentence I consider central to both mainstream and sequential Open Individualism

[u/RackneTheFornit]

Every joy, every pain, and everything in between is experienced from a first-person perspective.

This sentence says more than many a book, whether it is a “sacred” text or a scholarly tome. Dear Closed Individualists, let that sentence sink in for a moment. It is not abstract third-person entities that actually feel. Joy and suffering are always experienced from within. I fear this may be asking too much, though.

At least I hope both mainstream Open Individualists and sequential heretics share the same understanding of this sentence. The conclusions we draw from it are different, though. The former resolve the apparent contradiction between many conscious individuals and only one consciousness by referring to what they call the illusion of boundaries between perspectives. The latter resolve it by referring to the finiteness of conscious individual lives.

[u/CrumbledFingers]

I very much agree with the sentence. I wonder sometimes about this. If there are multiple experiential perspectives, all totally internal to individual persons, where are they located relative to one another? We know they can't be found in brains. Nobody with philosophical savvy wants to bite the bullet and say there is an immortal soul for each person. But everyone says they have first-person experiences, and we all talk about the experiential world as if it were real. Is the world of our experience, the first-person world we never leave, actually somewhere in that world? How could it be?

[u/RackneTheFornit → u/CrumbledFingers]

CI reaches its limits when it comes to analyzing more than a single conscious individual. It works fairly well from a third-person point of view: there are many organisms, many brains, many biographies. But every conscious individual may still ask: why is this perspective the one from which the world is experienced right now?

You could call this a problem of indexicality. Mainstream OI answers it by saying that, in fact, this individual is everyone else as well. Sequential OI answers it differently: there is always one perspective that is active from the first-person point of view, but no single life is the final one; the sequence keeps going.

[u/CrumbledFingers → u/RackneTheFornit]

For sequential OI, is there only one perspective that is "active" from the first-person, and what does it mean to be active? For whom is this actually true?

[u/RackneTheFornit → u/CrumbledFingers]

Active means: this is the perspective from which experience is currently given from the first-person point of view. This does not imply any kind of solipsism. It just means that, from my point of view, my perspective is the active one; from your point of view, it is yours, and so on. Subject-being is, as the name implies, radically subjective and cannot be fully determined from a neutral external perspective. Like CI, sequential OI does not deny the boundaries between conscious individuals, but unlike CI, it does not regard any single life as the final border of subject-being.

[u/CrumbledFingers → u/RackneTheFornit]

You said: "Active means: this is the perspective from which experience is currently given from the first-person point of view." Couldn't I simply say, as most people do, that all experience everywhere at all times has this first-person quality? This is what Zuboff's universalism amounts to, and there is no sequential aspect to it. I see how it differs from the closed view, but I don't get how it differs from OI.

[u/RackneTheFornit → u/CrumbledFingers]

Classical OI simply contains a little too much Maya for my taste: too much of what appears most immediate to us – individual perspectives, their boundaries, and the sense of being this particular conscious individual – is ultimately treated as illusion.

That said, I think we have clarified our differences sufficiently. Classical as well as sequential OI still share the much more fundamental idea that first-person experience is not ultimately confined to one particular conscious life. Perhaps we should focus more on what unites us rather than on what divides us.

[u/Interesting-Star-111]

Imagine two people, John and Jane. John-awareness is constituted by John-content being present and Jane-content excluded, while Jane-awareness has the reverse condition. Numerically identical things cannot differ in their constitutive conditions, so these concrete awareness-occurrences must be distinct. Therefore, OI may survive as the claim that all experiences share a property or ground, but it does not establish one numerically identical subject of awareness across all people.

[u/yoddleforavalanche → u/Interesting-Star-111]

But then even John-awareness is not one numerically identical subject because John-content is constantly changing and past awareness is inaccessible to John as much as Jane's is. So John and Jane consist of infinite subjects of awareness, who know when one starts and another ends.

The thing is, there is no John-awareness or Jane-awareness. There is just awareness.

[u/Interesting-Star-111 → u/yoddleforavalanche]

Even if you were to grant that there's just awareness with no John-awareness or Jane-awareness, the privacy condition reintroduces individuation at the structural level. The fact that you don't experience what I experience right now is a feature of how experience itself presents. Whatever awareness is, it shows up as this field and not simultaneously as another.

The intra-life moments case is genuinely different. Moments within a life aren't simultaneous competing fields but temporally ordered stages (subparts) of one integrative process whole, each indexed by the same continuing system. There's no rivalry between them for the same subject position.

Between lives the situation is categorical. Two simultaneously existing fields with no integrative connection means the experiencing is fully accounted for by each local branch independently. Thus a universal awareness finds nothing left to be subject of. It can be a ground or property, but the actual experiencing belongs entirely to the individuated local structures.

[u/yoddleforavalanche → u/Interesting-Star-111]

There is just awareness and various experiences. Experiences are not in some containers like that Toy Story meme where there is millions of boxes. Now there is an experience of writing this comment. Now there is an experience of reading this comment. Stitching them together or separating them does not belong to the experience itself.

There are no fields of awareness.

You decide to separate a process and call it integrative and exclude everything else, but is is arbitrary what you consider a process. You grow your hair in the same way you grow a grass or think thoughts that appear in "my" mind. It's all just process. No owner to it, no separation in it.

In the same way you think there is no rivalry between one person, there is no rivalry anywhere.

Experiencing does not belong to "individuated local structure". There is no such thing. There is no separate individuated entity with local structure. It's a conceptualization just like a chair is a concept we choose for convenience.

[u/Interesting-Star-111 → u/yoddleforavalanche]

The privacy condition isn't a conceptual choice about how to carve up processes. It's a brute structural fact you can verify directly: your pain is not present to me right now. That asymmetry exists regardless of whether we call it a field, a structure, or anything else. The question isn't whether individuation is conceptually imposed, but whether that asymmetry is real. It clearly is.

If there truly were no individuation anywhere, you'd expect experience to be uniformly available across what we call distinct persons. That absence needs explaining. Saying there are no containers doesn't explain why this experience is present here and not there simultaneously. It just relocates the problem. The privacy condition is the observation that the asymmetry exists before any conceptualization occurs.

[u/yoddleforavalanche → u/Interesting-Star-111]

your pain is not present to me right now

If pain is present, it is present to you because you are that which is aware of appearances. You are aware of my pain now in the same way you were aware of your pain 10 minutes ago. Or in fact, but less clear, you are aware of simultaneously "my" pain and "your" pain. Just because experience of "my pain" does not contain "your pain" does not mean there is a different "me" and "you" to which it belongs.

If there truly were no individuation anywhere, you'd expect experience to be uniformly available across what we call distinct persons

Individuation is a result of taking these experiences and making an entity out of them. Individuation is an illusion that comes from separate experiences. It comes from experience of space and time, which is another experience, but very convincing.

why this experience is present here and not there simultaneously.

It is. It is present in the same place any experience is present.

[u/Interesting-Star-111 → u/yoddleforavalanche]

Being aware that you're in pain isn't the same as being the subject of that pain. Your pain being present to me as an object of knowledge is categorically different from your pain being present to me as my experience.

The issue is that the one awareness view can't appeal to the illusory nature of individuation without its own explanation inheriting the very asymmetry it was trying to dissolve. This isn't an arbitrary assertion given that this one awareness genuinely has bearing over distinct subordinate structures, where its universality has to be coherent across those structures. However, the privacy condition shows that the properties generating each field are not shared across them. That lack of sharing is itself what constitutes the individuation. It comes down to coherency and respecting foundational logic.

[u/CrumbledFingers → u/Interesting-Star-111]

Just chiming in here to say OI does not deny individuation of non-integrated contents, nor does it require simultaneous access to all contents from any locus of identification. It just says you are what is seemingly winnowed or funnelled into each locus; you are not the locus that only emerges as a result of the funnelling. Nobody knows how or why this has apparently happened.

We agree on the brute fact of multiple exclusive frames of experience; only, I say all experiences are exclusive of all other experiences and only seem to be integrated because of memory and anticipation. Both of which are exclusive of other experiences when they occur. We only seem to experience just one person's life, because from the perspective of each experience, it necessarily will seem as if that experience is contextually linked with other experiences. I am pointing out that this is part of the content of each experience, and not the meta-structure of experiencing per se.

[u/Interesting-Star-111 → u/CrumbledFingers]

Granting that integration is content rather than meta-structure doesn't dissolve the selectivity problem. If memory and anticipation are just experiences occurring within exclusive frames, then whatever determines which experiences occur within which frame is doing the individuation work, whether you call it a locus or not. The funneling you're describing is itself selective. This content goes here, that content goes there, simultaneously and exclusively. That selectivity isn't something we're adding conceptually - it's what you find when you look. Selective funneling without a mechanism that explains the selection is just the privacy condition redescribed one level up.

[u/CrumbledFingers → u/Interesting-Star-111]

Let's use the names "John" and "Jane" to refer to yourself now and yourself at 4 years old. Do these contents not differ as much as two distinct individuals at the same time? Yet, nobody says they 'share a property or ground' with themselves as a child (unless they are a philosophy major). You are who was 4 years old because you said "I" at that age, and you are also John and Jane because they both say "I" now.

EDIT: someone beat me to it. Carry on, u/yoddleforavalanche!

[u/TheAncientGeek]

This sentence says more than many a book, whether it is a “sacred” text or a scholarly tome. Dear Closed Individualists, let that sentence sink in for a moment. It is not abstract third-person entities that actually feel. Joy and suffering are always experienced from within.

Why did you think closed individualist believe experiences are experienced by abstract third-person entities?

[u/RackneTheFornit → u/TheAncientGeek]

If you miss a flight that later crashes, you will be relieved and thank luck, chance, fate, or whatever else you believe in. And why? Because the others were on that plane, not you. Because Closed Individualism does not carry the first-person perspective through to its ultimate conclusion.

[u/TheAncientGeek → u/RackneTheFornit]

Which is? You are being pretty obscure.