Awareness Monism (6/11): Arguments
[This blogpost is a part of the series Awareness Monism, originally my Master’s thesis. Go to the disambiguation page here.]
4. Arguments
It is conceivable that there is only one awareness, i.e. that all experiences “have the same being”, take place in the same now. So far, in my showing the conceivability of AM by explicating the nature of awareness, I was laying down the conceptual groundwork—pointing to that which the claim of AM is about. By definition, “awareness” is something about which it is conceivable that there could only be one of it (AM), or many (AP). My claim in this thesis, however, is narrower—not that AM is just conceivable, but that it is true.
AM and AP are mutually exclusive. If AM is true, AP is false; if AP is true, AM is false. Arguments in favor of AM are therefore arguments against AP, and vice-versa.
None of the arguments on offer for either position, as far as I am aware, constitutes a decisive proof. Whether AM or AP is true is a question that ultimately cannot be answered decisively in the same way we can discover how a pineapple tastes or whether the cat sits on the mat. It is a question that concerns a matter which transcends our ability to check how things really are. In principle, it cannot be answered with certainty[1], just as we cannot with certainty say that other people are indeed not p-zombies, or that we see colors the same way.
The arguments are mostly appeals to parsimony[2]—the gist is that AP seems to entail a very inelegant arbitrariness in reality. However, there is no reason in principle as far as I’m aware why reality should be unarbitrary and beautiful, and not all sorts of random and jagged.
1) The haecceity problem
How could there be more than one awareness? What would it even mean for there to be more than one awareness? If AP is true, it means there are multiple different awarenesses. Given that awareness itself is empty, i.e. content-free, the difference between the individual awarenesses (if it even makes sense here to talk of individuals) cannot consist in their simply manifesting different content. There is no quality that could distinguish them, in the way that ordinary objects are distinguished one from another—by their spatio-temporal coordinates, their color, shape, etc. They could be manifesting different content, but that could not be the only difference between them (under AP)—they would have to be somehow intrinsically different. But what could this intrinsic difference consist in? And how does it even make sense for there to be different awarenesses, if what awareness is is simply the now, givenness, being of experience?
So Fasching[3] asks: “how many of these potential Is are there, and what could characterize one of them as me?” and “How can there be a plurality of such “primal facts”? What makes that precisely these exist and not those—and what makes one of them me?”
However: I can conceive of there being an experience that is not mine, and indeed most people seem to implicitly believe this to be the case. For example, it is easy to imagine that your experience reading this sentence is not mine like the experience of writing this sentence is mine, i.e. that I am not you. Intuitively, AP seems much more appealing than AM. We seem to normally operate under the implicit assumption that AM is false.
But how could we make sense of a plurality of empty awarenesses? Perhaps an analogy could help to make sense of the notion: it seems possible to imagine there being multiple parallel universes, parallel space-time dimensions, totally causally disconnected from one another. They would all still be space-time dimensions—but different ones. We could imagine there being a hundred universes with the exact same (types of, not tokens/particulars) objects and manifesting the same progression of events. They would simply, each of them, be different. But different how? It’s not like they could be placed in different places in some meta-space. This would have to be some kind of basic, unanalysable difference.
Given that in order for there to be more than one, there would have to be some inherent difference between the empty subjects, they would simply have to be “different by fiat”, in their haecceity, not in virtue of anything else, but purely and simply different—they would have to be different substances. This might be possible, although unsatisfyingly arbitrary (why that many?) and unparsimonious.
2) The problem of incarnational particularity / Hellie’s vertiginous question
If there is more than one awareness, there either needs to be some sort of mechanism that determines which awareness gets paired up with which experiences/perspective, or this happens somehow at random. This is what I call the problem of incarnational particularity.
What accounts for my being only this particular person, if I could be anybody? We are brought back here to Hellie’s vertiginous question[4]—in his terminology, why is the E-subject (the subject that is E) me? Why am I not Hellie?
Joe Kern elaborates on the dilemma:
“why should one DNA pattern bring your personal existence into being, while another does not? Or why should one set of parents and no other do so? What is it about those or any other characteristic that makes it be the thing or one of the things that brings your personal existence into being rather than another? You may see the answer intuitively already: there couldn’t possibly be any. How could any physical parameters distinguish between two different personal existences? There is nothing to logically or empirically link a particular personal existence up with any physical characteristics.”[5]
And also Schrödinger[6] wonders: “What was the necessary condition for making the thing conceived this time into you […]?”
But the questions “Why am I this particular person (human being), and not somebody else?” or “Why do I experience the experiences (the content) that I experience, and not some other?” arise only under AP—not under AM. This is not a knock-down argument, because it is indeed possible that some such mechanism exists, or that the awarenesses are paired up truly at random, or by divine fiat. But if AM is true, there is no need for such a pairing mechanism, which makes AM, again, more parsimonious.
* * *
I have also encountered an argument in favor of AM (from other defenders of the AM insight) that AP is problematic not only on the level of content: “why am I this human being?”, but that the same question could be asked about being the particular awareness (“empty soul”)—“why am I this particular empty soul?” However, I am not so convinced about this argument—the question of “why is some x something else?” only makes sense when we’re considering two (in some aspect) things that are only contingently bound together. “Why is this apple not some other apple, or an orange?” is a confused question. The apple cannot be some other apple, or an orange—then it wouldn’t be that apple. However, I could conceivably be some other human being, while remaining myself. The empty subject of awareness to whom the experiences centered around this human being are revealed could instead be paired up with different content. I, as the awareness, however, couldn’t be another awareness, couldn’t be another “empty soul”. So to ask, “why am I this empty soul?”, i.e. “why is this awareness not some other awareness?” seem to me equally confused as asking about the self-identity of the apple. The apple couldn’t be anything else—and I couldn’t be any other awareness, even though I could be some other human being (i.e. have other experiences). So I don’t think AP, i.e. multiplicity of souls, can be convincingly argued against on these grounds.
3) Zuboff’s statistical argument
Let’s say there are some particular circumstances which constitute necessary and sufficient conditions that bring about some particular awareness. For example, let’s say you (in the sense of the awareness where the experience of the human being reading this sentence now is realized) are bound to a particular set of gametes out of all possible gametes that could ever exist, each possible set of gametes having a different awareness existentially bound to it—that is, only when those particular gametes come into being, meet and form a zygote which grows into an organism with a functional brain, does your consciousness (and so you) come into being.
But in that case, the existence of your particular awareness is an incredibly unlikely event. There are countless possible alternative worlds where those particular gametes were never even produced, or never met.
However, if there is only one awareness, and your awareness simply is that awareness, its existence is not bound to some particular material conditions, and so is unremarkable.
The argument is known to me from the writings of Arnold Zuboff, who calls his conceptualization of AM “universalism”[7]. Zuboff offers an analogy: imagine you are one of countless drugged sleepers in a hotel where a certain game is played, and you find yourself awake. You are given two possible hypotheses about what kind of game is played. The first game is this: for every sleeper, a coin is tossed 75 times, and the sleeper is awakened only if it comes up in a particular pattern of heads and tails—the odds of any particular sleeper (including you) being awakened would thus be 8 septillion to 1. The second game is simpler: all sleepers are awakened regardless of what pattern the coin tosses come up. Given the likelihood of finding yourself awake under these two possible scenarios, what should you conclude about what game was actually played? In the first scenario, your waking up would be an incredibly unlikely event; in the second scenario, it would be guaranteed. Thus, based on the evidence of finding yourself awake, you should conclude that the game that was actually played was the second one, where you would be awakened regardless of the circumstances:
“You have as your evidence that you do exist. Broadly speaking, there are only two hypotheses available to explain this evidence. There is that of a narrow prefiguration, any view like the ordinary view, in which your existence is governed by incredibly demanding conditions […]. And there is the hypothesis of wide or open prefiguration, in which you, through the abstract property of immediacy, are equally well present under any conditions of consciousness that the world might happen to produce. This latter would make you a sure winner, independent of sperm cell lotteries.”[8]
If your existence (the existence of your particular awareness) is bound to particular, extremely unlikely circumstances (such as the existence and meeting of a particular set of gametes), the fact of your existence being actualized is incredibly more unlikely than if it was not bound to those particular circumstances—or to any particular circumstances, as in the case of AM.
4) The arbitrary boundaries problem
An experience either belongs to a particular awareness or it does not. It cannot only belong to a particular awareness partially, and it cannot be an indeterminate matter whether an experience belongs to a particular awareness or not[9]. Either some existing experience is immediately given like this experience, of E (sitting at her table, writing this sentence) is immediately given—in which case it is mine, i.e. manifested in the same awareness, or it is not—in which case it is manifested in some other awareness, and AP is true.
An experience is either mine or not, but whether it belongs to a particular human being is in some cases indeterminate. Because the boundaries of human beings, like all complex material objects, are in practice fuzzy and customary, there are possible scenarios where there is no clear answer to the question of whether some particular human being is the same human being as the one whose experiences are currently mine (i.e. whether some human being is E or not). In some (real or hypothetical) cases of radical psychological or physical discontinuity, whether a human being is the same as some other human being is indeterminate, and in practice is settled by practical considerations, not by tracking some deep metaphysical fact about the identity of human beings. Different things about human beings could determine their identity under different circumstances, depending on our cultural practices—depending on what is important to us about human beings. But an experience either is or is not realized in some particular awareness—it cannot be only partially realized in it; and neither can whether it arises in that awareness or not be a question without a clear answer.
Assuming that experiences are generated by or correspond to some objects in the world (states of matter, e.g. brain states), if there are multiple awarenesses (i.e. if AM is false) and so if only some of the existing experiences are my experiences, then there have to be some strict boundaries in the world which distinguish the states of matter generating my experiences from those generating the experiences of other awarenesses. If AM is true, any object generating an experience generates an experience for me—and so there are no metaphysically deep boundaries reflecting what would be metaphysically deep distinctions between experiences in the sense that they are realized in different awarenesses[10].
Objects in the world, being complex, are susceptible to the sorites paradox, and so any such strict boundaries in the world seem completely arbitrary[11]. For example, let’s say that my existence is bound to a particular brain, E’s brain (or, more precisely, to the states of that brain, so that a brain state at a particular time corresponds to a particular experience by generating it). If we replace a certain part of that brain, would the resulting experience generated by this new brain still be mine—would the resulting human being still be me? Any small material replacement (e.g. of several atoms) seems to be inconsequential—but a sufficiently large replacement intuitively matters. For example, if we replace only a small part of E’s brain, say 1/1000, it seems like the experiences generated by the resulting brain would still be mine. However, if we replace say 999/1000 of it at once, this is no longer the case‒‒it seems like the experiences generated by that brain would no longer be mine.
If AM is false, because an experience can only either be mine or not (either immediately given like this experience now, or not), there has to be a particular specific spot on the spectrum where the generated experiences suddenly stop being mine. We can morph objects into each other one small part at a time, and so there are marginal cases where it’s not clear whether an object is the original object or the new object, because our object boundaries are not defined so strictly. Such exact boundaries are rarely useful in practice, and so our concepts are indeterminate for these marginal cases‒‒our criteria for the identities of objects are not detailed enough to determine whether in those marginal cases an object is still x or already y. But the identity of objects is not a metaphysically deep problem, because what we’re doing when we’re identifying an object as x or y is simply giving it a particular name, identifying it as something that we, in our communal discourse, refer to using that name, based on certain criteria we find useful to track.[12]
Such questions about the identity of objects are what Parfit calls empty questions—questions that need not be answered in order for us to know everything there is to know about the situation[13]. The object is made out of such and such parts, and is connected to these other objects (past or present) in these and these ways (e.g. it shares certain parts). That is all there is to know. To say it is the same object or a different one does not express any new information about the world, but is just a different description of what is going on[14].
There is no deep metaphysical truth about whether a brain that consists of 6/10 original and 4/10 replacement parts is still the original brain, or whether it belongs to the same person (or human being)—it depends on where we decide to draw the boundaries of our use of the term “person”. This depends on what we find useful for our purposes, since the word “person” has important functions in our discourse and cultural practices; but our cultural practices can change, and what we find useful can change, and so the concepts we operate with in our discourse (the way we use our words) can change.[15]
However, if AM is false, then it is actually the case that only some states of matter correspond to or generate my experiences. And so it is the case there are deep metaphysical boundaries in the world, circumscribing states of matter that correspond to the experiences of different awarenesses; and we could then aim to make our concepts (e.g. the concept of “person”) align with these boundaries. There is a fact beyond the facts about the compositions of the objects and their relations to other (past) objects—the fact of what awareness their corresponding experiences are realized in, i.e. whether they generate an experience for awareness a or awareness b, for me or not for me.
Whether an experience is mine or not cannot be arbitrarily decided. The criterion is clear: whether an experience is mine depends on whether it is immediately given and realized in the same way this experience now is realized. As the ground of content, awareness is simple, indivisible, not made out of parts. Therefore if a particular awareness corresponds to (is generated by) only certain material states, to only certain objects in the world, the boundaries of those objects must be absolutely sharp. That is, they must be there on the level of the smallest possible distinctions—any particular state of matter that corresponds to an experience either corresponds to an experience for me, or it corresponds to an experience that is not for me.
It is not entirely clear what would even constitute this lowest possible level of distinction. But even if there could actually be such absolute boundaries in matter, the problem here is that any such boundaries seem completely arbitrary. Why should it be the case that a brain with a certain number of original particles is still completely me (i.e. corresponds to an experience that is mine), but if we take just one more away, suddenly it is completely not me (i.e. corresponds to an experience that is realized by some other awareness)?
The problem here is that of binding the existence of awareness to particular material conditions. An experience is either mine or not—there can be no question of fuzzy boundaries, or of it being mine only to some degree. But whether a particular material object still exists or not, i.e. what the boundaries of material objects are, can in some circumstances be unclear and only decidable by setting them down arbitrarily. We determine the boundaries of complex objects, to suit our practical needs. We call some parts of reality extended in space and time by the same name if it’s convenient to track them as the same object. But these definitions are usually not very detailed—they only specify identity criteria for situations that are common enough to become a practical issue. There are scenarios for which our criteria simply are not granular enough to yield unambiguous answers about whether an object is the same object as some other object. If I replace half the parts of a ship, is it the same ship as the original ship? If I cut a ship in half, and build two new ships adding new material to the resulting halves, which of the resulting ships, if any, is the original ship? These are not metaphysically deep questions, but empty ones. So whether an experience belongs to the same human being or not depends on where we decide to draw boundaries of human beings, that is, which properties we decide are important enough for us to focus on and take into account in personal identity considerations.
We use only those boundaries in reality that are useful to track as identity criteria for objects that figure in our discourse, i.e. we include them in our concepts[16]. But whether an experience is mine is a determinate matter, inherent in the experience itself—there is no drawing of boundaries based on convenience; we are asking about a distinction in reality, not a discourse-dependent boundary of a complex object. If there are multiple awarenesses, there are corresponding real and deep metaphysical boundaries in the world.
I don’t see why, in principle, it couldn’t be the case that there simply are such arbitrary deep metaphysical boundaries in reality. Certainly, it could be the case that, e.g. with these atoms, the generated experience is still mine—but when we eliminate or swap one more atom, it is no longer mine. But why these boundaries, and not some others? There is no obvious way they should be.
AM does away with awareness-corresponding boundaries completely. If AM is the case, then all experiences are mine; all states of matter that correspond to an experience correspond to an experience in the same awareness. If AM is not the case, then there must be deep metaphysical boundaries in the world that distinguish between parts of reality that correspond to experiences manifested in different awarenesses. Any way these boundaries could be seems completely arbitrary.
And any such boundaries would, of course, be undetectable. We would have no way of determining whether they in any way correspond to the object boundaries we normally operate with and refer to with our words. This is because experiences are private: we have no way in principle of determining whether a state of matter corresponds to an experience at all in the first place; and there is no way for us in principle to determine what awareness an experience corresponding to some material state (e.g. a particular brain state at a particular point in time) is realized in, or whether it is ours or not.But if there is only one awareness, there are no deep metaphysical boundaries in the material world that correspond to different awarenesses. All existing experiences exist in the same awareness, regardless of what regions and configurations of matter they correspond to, and regardless of how those configurations are connected or not to other past and present configurations of matter.
[1] Of course whether something can be “known”, and “known with certainty”, ultimately depends on one’s criteria for what counts as “knowing something”, and what counts as “certain knowledge of something”.
[2] AM is quantitatively more parsimonious than AP—reality containing just one awareness is simpler than one containing many. I do not consider this a very interesting argument, so I only mention it in this footnote. However, one could perhaps argue that the arbitrariness of there being a particular number (more than one) of awarenesses is much more troubling than there being some particular number of e.g. apples, since awareness is not a material object, and I do not see how there being any particular number of them could be causally (physically) explained. Again, we would be dealing here with a metaphysical fiat. That is what we are ultimately dealing with even if AM is the case, though. At some point (e.g. when dealing with immaterial, indivisible substances), causal reasoning simply no longer applies.
[3] Fasching 2016
[4] Hellie 2013
[5] Kern 2020, p. 42
[6] Schrödinger 1964
[7] Zuboff 1990
[8] ibid., p. 56. Zuboff himself is an AMist; he calls his formulation of the insight universalism.
[9] This point is also obvious to Klawonn (2009, p. 44): “[i]n an ontological and pre-reflective sense there are no degrees of consciousness. Either an experiential content is primarily given ‒ or else it is not.”
[10] That is, if AM is true, there are no distinctions between experiences in how they are realized; they are all realized in the same way this particular experience is realized, i.e. for/in me.
[11] Joe Kern (2020) examines this problem in detail, picking the gametes which together created the zygote that became a particular person as the material conditions to which the existence of some particular awareness (he uses the term “personal existence”) is bound. He shows how this “gamete dependence claim” (“If the gametes that produced you had not joined, then you would not exist.”) cannot be upheld, precisely because of the fuzziness inherent in drawing boundaries in matter. Again, if any such boundaries were to exist, they would be extremely arbitrary: for example, the difference of a single atom.
[12] We pick certain distinctions in reality as boundaries of objects that figure in our discourse (that we have a name and a concept for). In this way, we draw boundaries around the spatiotemporal clusters we find useful to keep an eye on. But these object boundaries do not exist outside of us, outside of our discourse, “in reality”; there are only the different distinctions we can choose to focus on or overlook, based on what is convenient.
[13] Parfit 1984, p. 213 “[…] even without answering this question, we can know everything about what happened. If this is true of some question, I call this question empty.”
[14] Or, we could say it only informs us about how we use certain terms.
[15] For example, in a society where teletransportation, mind uploading, or mind merging were normalized, we would likely operate with different concepts when talking about “persons”; or perhaps we would stop using the term and create new terms for our new concepts that better reflect our cultural practices.
[16] We track only some properties and some boundaries in the world explicitly, by using them as boundaries of objects defined in our discourse. For example, we have a handy concept and a term for a cup, but not for only the bottom side of the cup, or the cup and the 1cm of air around it, or a cup only on Tuesdays, or a cup and Mount Everest. We can still track and talk about these things, but we have to describe them, they do not have a designated “shortcut” concept and their own term.
What we talk about is what is useful to talk about—usually it is continuous in time and space (or expresses a certain easily trackable pattern, e.g. days of the week or months), and so manipulable in one way or another (mentally or physically), and important for our lives.