Awareness Monism (9/11)
[This blogpost is a part of the series Awareness Monism, originally my Master’s thesis. Go to the disambiguation page here.]
Part 2: A few AM parallels
AM is just another formulation of the same (perceived) truth, another framework attempting to verbalize and conceptualize (in order to communicate) an insight, that many other isms before it have tried to express. This in itself is of course a contentious claim, because many of the isms which I (and others) would identify as attempts at expressing the same thing, perceive themselves to be in contradiction with each other[1], and uniquely veridical in a manner that the competing isms fail to be, even though these others are understood to potentially hold lower or partial truths.
In this chapter, I give an overview of two philosophical views—one contemporary, one ancient—that noticeably resemble AM, and which I believe communicate the same basic insight.
[1] Fo example, certain variants of Buddhism and Advaita Vedānta.
Daniel Kolak’s Open Individualism
I first grasped more explicitly the insight (or the metaphysical hypothesis) that I believe AM expresses through the work of Croatian-American philosopher Daniel Kolak. I believe that what I call “the gist” of OI—that we are all the same “person” (in a specific sense)—is identical to AM. His formulation, Open Individualism (OI), is posited in the context of the discussion of personal identity as one of three possible answers about what we are. The other two are Empty Individualism, the position which Kolak ascribes to Derek Parfit (but also Robert Nozick and Sydney Shoemaker), and Closed Individualism, the default (and false) “folk philosophical” view.
To answer the question of how many persons there are, one needs to have set criteria for how persons are counted. These serve as both “unifiers across borders” and dividers (metaphysical “glue” and “scissors”[1])—i.e. they determine what distinctions in the world constitute boundaries between objects. Kolak distinguishes between borders and boundaries—distinctions in reality that, respectively, serve as possible and actual such criteria. He analyzes identity as consisting of individuation (boundaries at a time) and identification (boundaries over time). A boundary is a thus closed border—it individuates an object from the rest of the world at a particular time, and serves as a basis for identifying the same object over time. Kolak indicates several different borders within reality, and demonstrates how none of them necessarily constitute boundaries between persons. This, however, is not the default view.
Kolak identifies Closed Individualism as the naïve, and false upon consideration, default view of personal identity. According to this view, “personal identity is closed under known borders of individuation and identification”[2]. That is, some borders in reality are clearly defined and so easily also constitute boundaries between us, like those between individual pebbles[3]. The position is defined by 4 assumptions[4]:
(1) the single continuous individual assumption: a person is a single spatio-temporally continuous individual (a view the problematic personal identity scenarios call seriously into question, and which OI and EI deny);
(2) the survival and identity assumption: a person survives as long as there is an individual identical to them, i.e. that personal identity matters to survival, or more precisely that it is not the case that “all that matters” can be preserved without identity (a view OI confirms, but EI denies[5]);
(3) the intrinsic features assumption: a person’s identity only depends on the properties of that person (as opposed to extrinsic relations, like uniqueness—something which OI confirms, but EI denies);
(4) the individuation and separateness of persons assumption: there are definite boundaries between persons (a view OI denies and EI weakens).
Empty Individualism is the (“more sophisticated”) view that preserves the assumption that personal identity is closed (i.e. boundaried) under some known individuating and identifying borders, but recognizes the features that constitute those borders (e.g. psychological connectedness) as fluid, and thus as sometimes incapable of fixing the boundaries. Identity and survival in the ordinary sense are seen to some degree as conventional and not tracking deep metaphysical truths. Borders between people are fuzzy, like those of rivers, lakes, and oceans. EI casts doubt on or outright denies all four CI assumptions.
Open Individualism holds that identity is not closed, but open, even under known individuating and identifying borders—that is, the borders between us do not constitute absolute metaphysical boundaries between people. The consequence of this is that there is only a single person, i.e. that all persons everywhere and at all times are actually the same person. Thus, the possibility of deep, metaphysical personal identity is preserved even despite the recognition of the fluidity of border-constituting features like psychological connectedness. Kolak is of the opinion that OI is actually more conservative than EI, because it preserves personal identity, whereas EI denies it[6]. On that account, it is preferable—that is, if one is ready to bite the bullet that comes with the view, which is that all persons are identical, i.e. are the same person.
Kolak, rather than trying to prove that OI is true, primarily aims to show that there are no good reasons for rejecting it; even though he ultimately holds that OI is the best view. He considers several apparent excluders of the view that could account for there being more than one person (six types of borders that seem to serve as boundaries between us), and he demonstrates how they fail upon closer examination.
Among these are the physiological border—we are made out of different physical material; psychological border—we differ in mental traits; and spatial border—we occupy different spatial locations at any given time, and the same person cannot be at more than one place at the same time. Kolak does not deny the existence of these borders, but shows that they do not necessarily constitute definite boundaries between different persons. Using Kolak’s apt description, they are “metaphysically transparent” as opposed to “metaphysically opaque”. His Boundary Dissolves serve to demonstrate that the borders we consider to be boundaries between us actually lack the metaphysical significance we ascribe to them, so that identity is preserved across them. The borders do not actually close—do not serve as inter-personal boundaries[7]. And since there are no boundaries, there is only a single person, who is everyone at all times.
* * *
So what, precisely, is this “person” that Kolak believes there’s only one of? Kolak’s take on the issue is distinctly subjectivist and phenomenological. Obviously, in whatever sense Kolak uses the term, it is not in accord with the common folk psychological/philosophical use—where it is obviously and unquestionably the case that there are many persons, and that they are not identical—and that I am not you! He seems to believe that this ordinary use, however, obscures something important, a deeper identity between us, which it makes sense to call an identity of persons, even though not of “persons” in the ordinary sense: “The subject-in itself—the I of personal identity—is the featureless form of consciousness, pure subjectivity, that lies behind the mask.”[8] It is the “one numerically identical being capable of being identified as many different Selves”[9].
Kolak distinguishes between four types of identification. Primary identification occurs when we identify some phenomenological complex within our experience as an object. For example, I can identify a certain cluster of visual percepts I currently have as a tree outside my window—„this is a tree“. Secondary identification is an identification with an identified object—„this is my favorite tree“, „these are my glasses“. Tertiary identification consists in identifying an object as oneself—„this is my body“, „these are my thoughts“. Quartic identification identifies it as an other—„this is another person“[10].
The I of personal identity, the I that there is only one of (if OI is true), the I that we all are, is the subject-in-itself. It identifies and confuses itself with, but is actually not identical to, its particular instantiations as different selves:
“Because of the virtually constant conjunction of the I (the subject qua its psychological function as identifier) with its designated object of identification, primary identification (i.e., identification as) [sic], the I’s primary phenomeno-psychological function
I am (p) [e.g., I am (Scott), I am (Kolak)]
is thus erroneously conceived by the subjects [sic] effort at self-conception in terms of the simple equation,
I = a [e.g., I = Kolak, I = Scott, etc.]
thereby alienating consciousness, subjectivity—I, the subject-in-itself, consciousness—from itself: personal (numerical) identity obscured through psychological (qualitative) identification, i.e., essential subjectivity obscured by the intuition of one’s own existence and identity.”[11]
From a phenomenological standpoint, the mind and body I am identified with (my phenomenal body-mind), i.e. the phenomenal self, are only a subset of my phenomenal world and its objects. However, the entirety of my phenomenal world is “the same being”—the same person, i.e. me.
Kolak illustrates this perspective on experience with his Dream Analog: in a dream, I find myself in a world which lacks the intersubjectivity that is ascribed to (non-hallucinatory) “real world” experience. I interact with dream characters, and oftentimes become a distinct dream character, i.e. assume the perspective that is unlike that of my waking experience. Yet all this—the world, the characters, and other dream objects—takes place “in my mind”, in me—I am them. As Kolak puts it, “dreaming or awake, what I am looking at is the subjective world existing as such in subjective, phenomenal space—[…] the world in my immediate experience is my world”[12]. There is no phenomenological difference between the experiences that take place in vivid dreams, and in “real life”—if my dream experiences, including the dream world, are all me, then in an important sense (in a phenomenological sense), waking experiences are also all me, not just those parts that are identified as my body or my mind. The person, the subject, identifies itself as the phenomenal self, i.e. the phenomenal complex of phenomenal body and phenomenal mind (phenomenal body-mind), within its phenomenal world. It becomes (or assumes the identity of) a part of itself—by identifying itself as the phenomenal self, it dissociates from the phenomenal world, within which that self is found. However:
“The person is both. The person exists not beyond subjectivity but is, itself, subjectivity—all aspects of it (in that respect, the person is like a chameleon that can be anything or anyone). Consciousness, subjectivity, as such has a dual aspect in which personal existence consists: consciousness divides itself into—it becomes—the phenomenal Self within the phenomenal world”[13].
And: „The phenomenal Self, then, unlike the subject, is extended in phenomenal space: superidentified consciousness contained within superobjectified consciousness”[14].
So consciousness, what Kolak calls a “person” (the person), creates the phenomenal world by objectifying itself, and then creates a Self for itself by identifying with a certain part of that world—the phenomenal body-mind. This amounts to the phenomenal world being given from a point of view, centered around a phenomenal body-mind. My world, as it is given to me, is me, even though this is obscured to me by the fact that I identify myself only as a part of that world:
“At each moment identification dissociates the subject from its objects (i.e., the “object-images”) […], thereby creating a Phenomenal World within and into which the I of personal identity (consciousness) is projected and phenomenologically bound through identification as, at the present moment, Daniel Kolak, a memory-bound, ‘objectified subject:’ the illusion of phenomenologically border-bound personal identity over time achieved through the illusion of non-identity with objects at a time (the Transcendental Illusion).”[15]
Since I am that to which the world is given, it is conceivable that a different world could be given to me, that I could be identified as a different body-mind. The person (i.e. me) is in that sense empty: “If I were essentially tied to any element of my persisting body-character-memory complex—to DK—I could not imagine being some other persisiting body-character-memory complex.”[16] Kolak compares it to a screen, in itself blank and contributing no content, that however serves as the ground onto which images can be projected, and which unifies them. It makes the appearance of images possible.
A phenomenal body-mind constitutes a phenomenal center of a point of view (a perspective), a “phenomenal locus of movement and intentionality”[17]. Its borders however do not constitute my boundaries as a subject for whom these psychological objects exist. Personal identity is thus, on Kolak’s view, not something that is derived from facts about certain kinds of relations (identity, continuity, connectedness) between psychological objects (i.e. content), but is a simple identity of the subject for whom these objects appear (and with a subset of which the subject identifies, i.e. phenomenal body-mind).
It occurs to me that this is a subjectivist account of identity, that considers identity and survival “from the inside”. Bodies and minds (memories, personality) are in some sense publicly available—experiences themselves are not. My body and my mind (while I am this particular person) are revealed not only in my own experiences, but also in experiences of others (of other people)—or, more precisely, not only from this perspective, but from other perspectives too. However, how they appear is different from inside (to me) and from outside (to others). For example, I normally cannot see my head, and I have phenomenal access to what is going on inside my body that does not exist in other perspectives, not centered around this body; and my mind is given to me in a more direct way than to others, who only get access to how my mind (feelings, thoughts, personality, memories) expresses itself in my behavior.
The subject-in-itself, consciousness, that which Kolak calls a (the) person, and about whom he takes the problem of personal identity to be about, is not bound by its phenomenological borders. It transcends that which it identifies as. That which identifies and that which it identifies as are not the same. The identified-as (the phenomenal body-mind) is a form the subject assumes. In that sense, it is also what the subject is—not the “is” of pure identity, but rather of the relation between a (the) substance and its mode. E can wear different clothes every day, assuming different particular forms, and while in one sense she is changed by this variation, in another sense she is not changed at all; or, E can do different activities at different times, and again, there is a sense in which this changes her, and a sense in which throughout these changes, she remains unchanged. E is in this sense the ground of change. However, the subject grounds change in an even more basic manner—whereas E is defined by and made out of a certain (fuzzy) cluster of qualities, the subject is not. As their witness, ground, or realizer, the subject is beyond (or underneath) qualities.
We could say that the person is the phenomenal self in the way that an actor is a particular character they’re playing. The person, the subject, wears the phenomenal self like a mask. However, masks and roles, unlike the phenomenal selves, hide a face and a personality underneath, suspended while the mask is on, or the role is assumed. There is no face and no personality behind the phenomenal self; the subject in itself is utterly faceless.
So the same subject assumes all the different psychological identities—including Kolak, me, and you. Personal identity is preserved across these qualitative boundaries, which enclose only the different psychological selves or identities. Underneath, there is the same, numerically identical person:
“Thus ultimately to say that we are all the same person means that we are all the same subject-in-itself, the same consciousness, aware of its existence and identity (I am I), the same self-consciousness, liberated: the same open (non-local) self-conscious individual. Subjectivity (e.g., self-consciousness) can thus be regarded as the “fifth, non-containing, or open” dimension (degree of freedom) of the “objective universe,” one and the same self-conscious being (…) localized at each and every space-time intersect of situated subjectivity, the multiperspectival open individual I limited to being literally no one and being therefore literally everyone, the existential fulcrum to all our many worlds.”[18]
* * *
For Parfit (whom Kolak identifies as an empty individualist), personal identity is defined by relation R—psychological connectedness or continuity with any cause—and uniqueness. However, in Parfit’s view, it is not personal identity that matters in survival, only the relation R. Thus, what matters is preserved in cases of fission, even though identity is not (because uniqueness is not), or even though it is an empty question. Kolak disagrees. According to him, psychological factors, like the sharing of memories and personality, do not determine personal identity—and neither are they what matters in survival. According to Kolak, personal identity is what matters in survival:
“I, unlike Parfit, Shoemaker, and other Empty Individualists, do take
Q1 Will I survive?
And
Q2 Will there be some person alive who is the same person as me?
as equivalent.”[19]
So for Kolak, personal identity is not a function of continuity of content, but of identity of the subject-in-itself. Personal identity is preserved across psychological boundaries, and does not require uniqueness.
Kolak illustrates his intuition that this is the case with a thought experiment: let’s imagine there’s a virus (“Memoraids”) which gradually causes complete amnesia and creation of new memories and personality, and that during the amnesia, and after the generation of a new personality and memories, there is a period of intense pain. Kolak insists: “if I had Memoraids I would be afraid of pain, not death”, and so, “Memoraids is not a way of dying but a way of getting new memories and a new personality”[20]. Survival is thus possible without any psychological connectedness. Psychological borders between people are not not boundaries between us, and so they do not exclude personal identity.
In fission with psychological connectedness, Parfit argues that what matters (in survival) is preserved. And because personal identity is not preserved in fission (because a single person cannot be identical with two different people), personal identity is not what matters (in survival). Kolak maintains that because personal identity is what matters, and in cases of fission what matters is preserved, this means that personal identity is preserved—which entails that a single person can be identical with two different people. That is, the same person can exist at more than one place at a time, simultaneously experiencing multiple independent streams of experiences. Note that Parfit and Kolak agree that what matters (in survival) is preserved in fission. But for Parfit, what matters is psychological connectedness, whereas for Kolak, psychological connectedness is irrelevant, and what matters is personal identity.
For Kolak, being the same person experiencing multiple phenomenal selves (or perspectives) at the same time is no more mysterious than experiencing multiple such selves over time. We normally identify two occurrent phenomenal selves (p1 at t1 and p2 at t2) as the same person if they are linked by memory—but Kolak points out that postulating such an identity is always to “identify the living with the dead: it is to believe in reincarnation”[21]. I was E a moment ago, I am E now, I will be E a moment from now—distinct phenomenal selves, each one occupying its own spatio-temporal place, each one undergoing different experiences, are identified as the same person. That is, the borders between these three persons (E a moment ago, E now, E a moment from now) do not constitute boundaries between them. Even in the ordinary (Closed Individualist) view, they are identified just as distinct “incarnations” of the same person (the same person at t1, t2, t3). So the temporal borders between E a moment ago and E now (“multiple incarnation over time”) do not, even on the ordinary view, constitute a boundary. Kolak suggests the same is the case for spatial borders (“multiple incarnation at-a-time”).
Identified as a particular phenomenal self, I interpret certain other (past and future) phenomenal selves as me, based on the fact that I have memories that correspond to what happened to those selves at that time. Kolak points out that whereas empty individualists hold that memory sometimes creates the illusion of personal identity over time (in fission), Open Individualism reveals that memory creates the illusion of a lack of personal identity at-a-time (“illusory dismembering of personal identity at-a-time”): “In both views, it is memory that gives rise to the illusion. On Parfit’s view, the illusion is identity. In our view, the illusion is non-identity.”[22]
However, it seems to me that the disagreement between Kolak and Parfit is not metaphysically deep. Parfit operates with different definitions and criteria for what constitutes a person, identity, and survival; Kolak disagrees. However his disagreement doesn’t seem to me to imply a substantial disagreement with anything Parfit is saying—Kolak might disagree with Parfit’s claim that personal identity is not what matters, but this seems to be a case of metalinguistic negotiation, a disagreement about how to use our words. When Parfit talks about persons, he is talking about something different from what Kolak is talking about when he talks about persons. Parfit does not discuss the subject-in-itself—he discusses people, human beings, determined and defined by their psychologies (personality, memories). He is interested in a different kind of object (and he really seems to analyze people as objects, defined by their content—not as subjects, the for whom of the content). He explicitly dismisses Cartesian egos as irrelevant for the question of personal identity. For Kolak, on the other hand, what we are, first and foremost, are empty subjects of experience. Our psychologies and physiologies are, if anything, secondary to what we are; we are not defined by what form we assume.
But is this a disagreement? It doesn’t seem to be a substantial one. We might say that Parfit and Kolak disagree about “what we (I) really are”—but again, what is the “we” that they have in common that they could be in disagreement about? A claim about what is real, in this context, is an external question (in Carnap’s sense). “What we really are …” is here a statement of value—fundamentally, it says, “Look here! Focus here!” (and implicitly also: “Not there!”). It seems to me, however, that the point of Kolak’s work might not really be to offer a solution to the problem of personal identity (contra Parfit and others), but rather to communicate the insight of our essential sameness at the level of the empty experiencing subject—what I call “the gist” of OI, and which is identical to the claim of AM. The insight (or the metaphysical hypothesis) stands on its own. Even if we disagree with Kolak that there is only a single “person”, that personal identity is what matters in “survival”, that psychology is not what matters to identity or survival, because we prefer a more content-oriented understanding of what “we” are (i.e. if you insist: “I am a particular human being! I couldn’t be Queen Victoria—that makes no sense, by definition!”), the claim he is laboriously pointing to stands on its own, and is existentially world-shattering if true.
[1] Kolak 2004, p. 29
[2] ibid., p. 7
[3] Others do not—else there would be no continuous individuals, no identity between different spatio-temporal slices of people.
[4] “Assumption” might imply a statement which can be in principle false—I don’t think this is here the case. Here, the assumptions simply seem to be axioms or definitions from which one starts their argument, where the true/false distinction doesn’t apply. What we talk about when we use the word “person” is not a matter of matching ourselves to some deeper reality about what the word truly means; the “assumptions” cannot be really false, even though they might point to a more or less useful concept.
[5] More precisely—Parfit in particular confirms that in some situations, even if there is nobody identical to me, all that matters (in survival) can be preserved—that certain scenarios are as good as survival, even without personal identity. I.e. what matters (of myself to me) survives, even if I (the same person) do not. Both CI and OI deny this—I survive if there is a person identical to me, and what matters (in my survival) is that I survive, i.e. that there is a person identical to me. In my opinion, these views do not actually constitute distinct metaphysical proposals, but simply express different intuitions about survival, determined by one’s self-conceptualization (what they see as mattering). Different views carve out, focus on, and track different parts of reality, but they do not seem to be in actual disagreement about what is going on—as opposed to which parts of the goings-on we should be talking about.
[6] Kolak mentions that OI is preferable also on ethical grounds, because it can more readily serve as the “metaphysical foundation for global ethics”.
[7] This is shown for example by pointing out how the same kinds of borders already operate within what a closed individualist considers to be the same person.
[8] ibid. p. 237
[9] ibid., p. 242
[10] Note that identifying something as an other presupposes identifying something as not-other, i.e. me, mine.
[11] ibid., p. 235
[12] ibid., p. 326
[13] ibid., p. 332
[14] ibid., p. 333
[15] ibid., p. 456
[16] ibid., p. 519
[17] ibid., p. 396
[18] ibid., p. 239
[19] ibid., p. 352
[20] ibid., p. 262
[21] ibid., p. 494
[22] ibid., p. 496