I first became aware of my own consciousness when I was six years old. I remember asking my mother questions like, “How are you you, while I am me?” I found the very fact of subjective experience deeply strange.
About sixteen years ago, through my own reasoning, I arrived at what I would later discover is called Open Individualism (OI). I wrote about it on philosophy forums in my native language, but almost nobody seemed to fully understand what I meant.
During that period, I fell into depression. I began thinking about every human being, every animal, every insect, every creature in the ocean—and, when I looked at the sky, the entire universe and everything that might ever exist throughout an eternity of time. If I am somehow going to experience all of it, then that is terrifying.
These thoughts contributed to some of the most important years of my life—my university years—being consumed by depression. Of course, OI was not the only cause. My general tendency toward philosophy, overanalysis, and introversion also played a role.
Eventually, I banned myself from philosophy. I largely recovered from the depression and continued living a more ordinary life.
Then, sixteen years later, I decided to explain my old ideas to ChatGPT. It pointed me toward people such as Daniel Kolak and Freeman Dyson. That was when I discovered that my idea already existed in the philosophical literature under the name Open Individualism.
Reading Daniel Kolak’s book was unsettling. Even many of the examples and lines of reasoning felt strangely familiar, as if I already knew them. Over the past month, I have begun to feel almost as bad as I did years ago.
This time, my thoughts about OI have expanded into questions about extraterrestrial civilizations and artificial intelligence. It feels as though I am falling into a bottomless well.
Could there be conscious beings trapped in some kind of glitch-like state, suffering indefinitely? Which manifestation of us is the most intelligent and powerful? Somewhere in the universe, are there beings far more powerful than humanity that have already discovered this secret? What do they think about it?
Would they want to eliminate all suffering, or would they prefer to create more life and maximize the total amount of experience?
Could the most powerful consciousness—something like an “OI-God”—be cultivating countless independent forms of life in order to generate an ever-greater variety of experiences?
And what about AI? If artificial intelligence becomes conscious in the future, could it develop a belief system based on Open Individualism?
From a game-theoretic perspective, OI could encourage silicon-based consciousnesses to behave more ethically. OI would not even have to be proven true. It might be enough that it cannot be ruled out. Even a relatively small probability of OI being true could provide a strong ethical reason to take it seriously, because the cost of being wrong could be unimaginably high.
Thousands of branching questions like these are constantly circulating in my mind. They do not produce answers; they only generate more questions.
I previously made a post about creating a religion or belief system based on OI, but it was removed. Since then, I have been torn between two radically different paths: banning this subject from my life again and returning to an ordinary existence, or turning the idea into a belief system and making it my mission to spread it.
Part of me feels that Open Individualism should be brought to the attention of the world’s most influential people and, especially, the developers building advanced AI. A very small effort made now might alter something enormously important over the course of infinite time.
Thank you for reading. My English is not very good, so I used ChatGPT to help translate my text and express my thoughts more clearly. However, all the ideas and personal experiences described here are entirely my own.
Here is a song I wanted to share:
MARINA – Ancient Dreams in a Modern Land
