Open individualism

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Not to be confused with Universalism.

Open individualism is the view in the

subject, who is everyone at all times, in the past, present and future.[1]: 617  It is a theoretical solution to the question of personal identity, being contrasted with "Empty individualism", the view that personal identities correspond to a fixed pattern that instantaneously disappears with the passage of time, and "Closed individualism", the common view that personal identities are particular to subjects and yet survive over time.[1]
: xxii 

History

The term was coined by philosopher

Tat tvam asi" meaning "You are that" is an example.[citation needed] Others who have expressed similar views (in various forms) include the philosophers Averroes,[3] Arthur Schopenhauer,[4] and Arnold Zuboff,[5] mystic Meher Baba,[6] stand-up comedian Bill Hicks,[7] writer Alan Watts,[8] as well as renowned physicists Erwin Schrödinger,[9] Freeman Dyson,[10] and Fred Hoyle.[11]

In fiction

Leo Tolstoy in the short story "Esarhaddon, King of Assyria", tells how an old man appears before Esarhaddon and takes the king through a process where he experiences, from a first-person perspective, the lives of humans and non-human animals he has tormented. This reveals to him that he is everyone and that by harming others, he is actually harming himself.[12]

In the science fiction novel October the First Is Too Late, Fred Hoyle puts forward the "pigeon hole theory" which asserts that "each moment of time can be thought of as a pre-existing pigeon hole" and the pigeon hole currently being examined by your consciousness is the present and that the spotlight of consciousness does not have to move in a linear fashion; it could potentially move around in any order.[13] Hoyle considers the possibility that there might be one set of pigeon holes for each person, but only one spotlight, which would mean that the "consciousness could be the same".[11]

"The Egg", a short story by Andy Weir, is about a character who finds out that they are every person who has ever existed.[14]

See also

References

  1. ^
    ISBN 978-1-4020-3014-7
    .
  2. S2CID 43009328
    .
  3. ^ Ivry, Alfred (2012), "Arabic and Islamic Psychology and Philosophy of Mind", in Zalta, Edward N. (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2012 ed.), Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, retrieved 2019-09-07
  4. ISBN 978-9811059537
    .
  5. doi:10.1080/00201749008602210
    . In all conscious life there is only one person—I—whose existence depends merely on the presence of a quality that is inherent in all experience—its quality of being mine, the simple immediacy of it for whatever is having experience.
  6. ISBN 978-1880619131. Archived from the original
    (PDF) on 2021-04-30.
  7. ^ "Mushroom scene from, American - The Bill Hicks Story". YouTube. May 18, 2014. Today, a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration. That we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There is no such thing as death, life is only a dream and we're the imagination of ourselves... Here's Tom with the weather.
  8. ISBN 978-0394417257
    . For every individual is a unique manifestation of the Whole, as every branch is a particular outreaching of the tree. To manifest individuality, every branch must have a sensitive connection with the tree, just as our independently moving and differentiated fingers must have a sensitive connection with the whole body. The point, which can hardly be repeated too often, is that differentiation is not separation.
  9. ISBN 978-1-107-60466-7
    . The only possible alternative is simply to keep to the immediate experience that consciousness is a singular of which the plural is unknown
  10. ISBN 978-0-06-011108-3
    . I called it Cosmic Unity. Cosmic Unity said: There is only one of us. We are all the same person. I am you and I am Winston Churchill and Hitler and Gandhi and everybody.
  11. ^
    ISBN 978-0-06-002845-9
    .
  12. ^ Tolstoy, Leo (1906). Twenty-three Tales. Translated by Maude, Aylmer and Louise. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 256–263.
  13. OCLC 985702597
    .
  14. ^ Prisco, Giulio (2015-07-18). "A short story about Open Individualist resurrection by Andy Weir, author of The Martian". Turing Church. Archived from the original on 2020-11-08. Retrieved 2020-05-04.

Further reading

Articles

Books

External links

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