The aim of this paper is to summarize the problems of personal
identity, examining the current theories and their defects, and comparing their
answers with those of a theory whose believers are a minority at this time,
although this theory is the only one that can coherently manage all these
problems. The theory is called “Open Individualism”, named so by Daniel Kolak in
his book I Am You, published by
Springer, Synthese Library, in 2004, and can be considered a modern version of
Monopsychism, which can be traced back to Siger of Brabant, Averroes, and
Aristotle.
The modern version does not require an appeal to God as the
ancient theory does, nor does it require us to accept anything weirder than what
is already required by the concurrent theories to manage personal identity in
some exceptional cases, like teletransport or perfect copying or surgical brain
splitting, that we will discuss later. Notwithstanding this, this theory is not
very popular because it is contrary to common sense, so to evaluate it as viable
it is necessary to be ready to overcome some of our biases and consider many
factors together, many of them currently in dispute in the philosophical
community. Here I will try to present them in a straightforward way, thereby
building a Roadmap to Open Individualism which the reader may follow to gain a
quick understanding of the reasons to adopt this Theory. Along with many
arguments that have already been discussed by philosophers, I occasionally
propose my own personal views and observations. I do not expect to be exhaustive
or fully convincing. Take them as suggestions about some issues that I think are
useful to consider in the wider discussion.
Because the terminology in this discussion is fundamental, let
me introduce the terms I will use in this paper. An
individual is a generic term to
indicate a single human being but is
not limited to human beings; it may refer to any other material entity that you
may accept as having a mind. I can also use the term
people in the same sense. Every individual has their own first-person point
of view on the world. This view is subjective, and this is why I also use the
term subject as synonymous with
individual, but to be more accurate I should specify it as a
physical subject, because
subject can be also used with the
meaning of minded subject, as we will
see in a moment. The term personality
indicates the sum of psychological traits and other characteristics that every
individual has and that distinguishes one individual from another. These
characteristics make different individuals different
persona, or different
characters in a theatrical sense.
Individuals differ in many aspects, but all of them have in common the ability
to think; this is not a part of personality. The term
person is used to indicate
the owner of the mind of an
individual, the subject that is thinking,
the minded subject, where the term
subject here is not intended as a
physical subject, but as a
mental subject. It is also called the
conscious subject, because the
experience of having a mind is
attained by being conscious. Kolak
calls it the subject-in-itself, the
subject of the intuition “I am I” and
identifies it with consciousness.
Sometimes it is also referred to as the
self, or the inner self, to
indicate a level of you deeper that your
ego, which instead represents the level influenced by your personality. The
person is generally supposed to have a
definite identity, which is called
personal identity. Open Individualism asserts that despite the fact that
there exist many individuals with many different personalities, their personal
identity does not change, so all of them are actually
the very same person. This is why Kolak entitled his book
I Am You.
To be clear, Open Individualism regards our experience of being
conscious and aware as a phenomenon that does not take a different identity
every time it exists, despite the fact that it occurs simultaneously in the
world in many separate individuals. Me and you and everybody else living in this
moment are actually different conscious living beings, but our personal
identities are not more different than your identity of today compared with your
identity of yesterday. There exist differences between individuals, but they are
all formal differences, not substantial. Every other living being is a different
version of you, in the way that you might see yourself as many different people
in a hall of mirrors, or in the way that you could meet yourself at a different
stage of your life. You should see everybody else as though they are different
incarnations of your very same inner self.
The best metaphor for this view is to regard the world as a
movie where every character is played by the very same actor, each time so
deeply involved in playing the character as to forget everything else about any
other role. You may figure out how it is possible to do this in a movie, with
skillful editing, but it is much more difficult to conceive that this can
actually happen to all our lives. There are many reasons indeed for this
difficulty, but primarily it is because of our lives taking place in overlapping
times. In this metaphor, the terms individual, physical subject and
ego refer to a single character; the
term personality refers to the
psychological traits of a single character; the terms
person, mental subject,
subject-in-itself and
inner self refer to the actor who
plays all the roles.
I want immediately to point out that this view differs
substantially from the view of many old-age and new-age religions that preach
the reaching of a spiritual unity with some “global soul”, or “the soul of God”
or whatever. All these views imply that we are separate pieces of that “big
soul”, wishing to re-join with it, but in the meantime, each of them has their
separate identity. Open Individualism does not claim that we should dissolve our
personal identities into a “big soul”, primarily because it denies the existence
of any separate identity. To be one with the “soul of God”, knowing all and
feeling heavenly, can be appealing, a beautiful dream, but it is not a promise
of Open Individualism. Maybe one day, and maybe a day not too far in the future,
we will use our technology to join together many brains to act as a single
brain, melding many minds into a single mind. This will be very revealing and
very useful to promote the Open Individualism View, but this does not mean that
once they die, everybody will experience a mind state of global awareness and
harmony with the universe. Open Individualism is not a spiritual doctrine, it is
a philosophical theory that has to be discussed in a rational way. And actually,
I think that it is the ultimate conclusion that any reductionist theory must
acknowledge.
Here I will try to examine step by step the problems that the
theories of personal identity have to face, and give evidence that there exists
a reasonable combination of answers that together form a framework based on Open
Individualism, able to solve all these problems. Daniel Kolak in his book
I Am You names the currently widely
accepted view “Closed Individualism”, where everybody has their own personal
identity, meaning that there are closed borders that definitely separate
persons. There exists another view promoted by Derek Parfit and others that we
will discuss later, which Kolak named “Empty Individualism”. Together with Open
Individualism, these views of personal identity allow us to classify every kind
of theory. The existence of a complete and coherent solution based on Open
Individualism poses a challenge to every concurrent theory: they have to be able
to supply a similar framework, or at least they have to find some fundamental
failure in the framework of Open Individualism. Otherwise, we have to
acknowledge that Open Individualism is more advanced than the others. The
consequences for each individual and for the whole of society will be amazing,
irreversible and extremely important.