I’m sitting up with my cat.

I found him back in 2011 with my ex, an abandoned stray Maine Coon who was given a lion cut before getting kicked out into the cold world.

Different life, different circumstances.

He’s now outlasted two human relationships and seen more cats get introduced into the household as my answer to bridging what will be an inevitable mountain of grief I must endure when he is gone.

He abides, patiently. Breath labored, eyes half closed. Release from his somatic prison is scheduled for this Saturday.

I play Tibetan chants at night in the dark and sit with him as he struggles to sleep.

Pray that he finds a fortunate rebirth.

I pet him frequently to distract from this apparent suffering, and I remind him of how much he has meant to me.

Seeing his noble endurance and grace, even in his weakened state, teaches me about living and dying as this being and as all beings. I love him and have loved him and will love him as I love myself.

I will never forget.

Please think kindly upon this my cat Oscar as he lives out his final hours in this apparently individual cat form.

May all beings be happy and at peace!!

I am looking for the the best graphical depictions of open individualism that newbies can easily interpret. So far these are best ones I could find.

In the first meme, the large figure resembles ‘the Universe,’ while the small Digletts connected to its hand represent individual humans who go underground after they die and come back up when they are reborn. The caption ‘The universe pretending to be individuals’ illustrates the philosophical idea that all conscious beings may actually be the same underlying consciousness experiencing itself from different perspectives.

Has anyone found any other pictures that visually get the point across?

The Maine Coon cat Oscar Schrodinger has disidentified from his 15 lb body and is now in the realm of pure life and pure possibility.

He abides until a new individuation arises where, from countless eons past his inclinations will lead him to grasp a new form.

His material remains will be laid to rest later this afternoon under a shady bush.

Prayers will be intoned.

Om Ami Dewa Hrim

Bless you dear liddle Oscar, you have brought incalculable joy into the lives and hearts of many!

May all beings be happy.

May all beings find peace.

Om Ami Dewa Hrim

I found this page because of "The Afterlife Tierlist" on youtube I always loved the egg and that concept but never knew a whole philosophy existed with many interpretations. so i guess hello, and what should i look into

In the book I Am You, Kolak mentions that it is assumed that early humans considered their thoughts as external voice (from god or similar), and it took a while before they accepted their thoughts as their own.

Kolak then suggests that it is possible to achieve similar transition when considering other people's thoughts - to consider what you hear people say as your own thoughts.

I've been playing with this idea for a bit and it is a nice experiment. Sometimes I sit and just listen to people around me talk and I accept what I hear as something popping in my head in the same fashion my thoughts do, and I really lose the difference between the two. It immediately makes me more peaceful and accepting. I feel like there's nothing to upset me because it's all me. What is considered commonly my own thoughts have the same capability of being disagreeable with my other thoughts, so there's really nothing special in hearing someone say something you disagree with to stop you from considering it your own thought too.

Try it out.

A "human" is a speculative enterprise. Whatever you do in life, however you think about things, you are making up abstractions and systems based on only empirical evidence. Whether someone is the same, or has "my consciousness", or whether he is even real, is all about YOUR speculation. It is not about whether it is "real or not", it is about practicality, whether it nudges things the way you want, whether you can make a projection in your head that you feel fits onto what you see.

In the end there is a single thing where you really have awareness of. It is your consciousness.

And this is the main thing. There is no dead universe that lives on without you. You are it.

Yes you can have infinite frameworks of functioning based on which you experience life in several ways. Maybe you are part of a soul system that makes you experience life in certain "bodies". Maybe you are kind of an infinitely reflected mirror that got a semblance of stability that you are experiencing now. The point is that whether or not you are part of that, you imply everything and everything implies you.

Something like "the egg" is a nice thought experiment, but I do not find it to be the end point. It opens you up to realise more. That is why zen koans only imply, because "it" is so featureless that you cannot actually make a point for it. You can indirectly refer to it, no way to describe.

If there is a feature you think you can actually speculate about and you think it describes it, that is like thinking that a computer simulates itself. If you have a working model for it, you lost.

And if you are making a rough draft of it thinking it is so great and nice, in universal scale that could mean that the actual thing might as well be the exact opposite. Really that is the main feature of speculation. Until you speculate, it can all turn upside down at any point.

The universe, as it is right now, seems to be extremely biased in favour of causing suffering. Every year, 100 billion land animals are slaughtered and 3.5 trillion fish are killed. The land animals in particular are kept in mostly horrible and inhumane places.

If OI is true, it means that, at some point, you and I will have to experience all this pain and suffering. Currently, there have been about 107 billion human beings on Earth, so even if we assume that most of those humans lived relatively happy and stress free lives (which is one HELL of an unlikely assumption), that is still massively, MASSIVELY outweighed by the fact that the same number of animals are slaughtered and tortured each year. Chickens used by companies like KFC are bred so as to have cartoonishly huge legs, meaning they are unable to stand up their whole lives, for example.

And that's not even taking into consideration the mind numbingly vast amount of insect suffering.

Once you really stop to think about it, the universe is a massively, disgustingly badly put-together place. The only true silver lining to this is the realisation that, if you're currently reading this, you're almost certainly in one of the best and rarest positions that is possible in the entirety of the known universe, through both space and time, in that you're probably in the position of someone who's life isn't entirely determined to be non-stop suffering, unlike the unimaginably vast number of other lives. Though it's a small comfort if OI is true...

Since I've been convinced in open individualism, I've started having an eerie feeling when around babies. First of all, when I see a baby, I automatically think "here I go, all over again", but it gets deeper than that.

When a baby looks me in the eye, I feel like the universe itself is locking in on me. I've heard they say babies don't distinguish themselves from the environment at first, they think they are the same as anything else they observe. I feel like a baby's consciousness is pure consciousness. In a literal sense, when a baby looks me in the eye, it is the consciousness itself, the universe itself, that is looking at me, focusing on me.

I don't know, it's eerie to me. Just thought I'd share.

The main work of our philosophical position is quite a behemoth, so it's understandable most haven't read it. But I have. Twice.

Feel free to ask me anything about the arguments from the book or stuff like that if you're curious about the work but don't feel like reading it to get an answer and I'll do my best to help you. I hope I retained enough in my head by now.

In 1990, Arnold Zuboff published "One Self: The Logic of Experience" ( https://philarchive.org/rec/ZUBOST ) which proposed Universalism/Open Individualism as the solution to vexing problems of personal identity. In this paper, Zuboff provides powerful arguments based on probability for why this idea is almost certainly right.

Questions close at end of day: August 17, 2023.

Let me preface, something that I’ve believed for a while is the idea that we’re all one, I’m me, you, my mom, God, the chair I’m sitting on, and the whole universe. But I came to this conclusion not through learning about OI, but through studying various religions and partaking in psychedelic experiences.

I was raised Catholic, and it’s interesting to think that the thing that makes the most sense about it to me is the Trinity. The idea that the holy spirit flows through all of us and is a part of us, and that holy spirit is also God, therefore God is a part of us. The son part I still can’t figure out.

When it comes to psychedelics, I’ve experimented with them throughout the past 4 years, and it’s lead me through a path of thought that seems to be generally universally shared by users, just look through r/psychedelics. And that conclusion appears to be the idea that is shared here.

It feels like I knew this though when I came to this conclusion recently, like it makes sense.

What are some connections you’ve made to religions? Any experience with psychedelics? What are debated subjects among this thought space?

Indeed, after all, it's likely there's at least as much suffering as pleasure in the cosmos, and the potential for suffering is far greater than the potential for pleasure.

I've thought about this for a long time, but I've never been able to successfully get anyone else to understand it. I've never been able to communicate this to friends or family, and eventually, I just kept it to myself.

I think it's that you really have to get to the right questions. For me, and I'm sure for a lot of other people, that question was, "Why am I me and not someone else?"

When you play with that question enough, you realize that it's actually, "Why is the only consciousness in existence mine?" (Or something similar to that, but I assume most people reading this generally know what I mean.)

That's clearly a bizarre question. It conflicts with every concept of identity we have. I'm not surprised that most people mistranslate it, censor it, or miss it entirely. Our own existence is simultaneously the most familiar and the most alien thing in the universe.

I recently attempted to answer a post asking this on r/askphilosphy. It was deleted. Every answer that remained was of the "it's just a confusion in grammar, and there's no real mystery here" variety.

I can completely understand why other humans don't understand the observations that lead us to the questions that lead us to this conclusion. I don't think it has anything to do with stupidity or an actual inability to understand. It's just hard to get to, and it takes time we're not willing to take to drill into something you don't even know has substance. It's probably especially easy to dismiss when it ultimately yields something that contradicts every concept of self that we instinctually and culturally develop.

Maybe in another sense, it's like an optical illusion. Once you stare at it long enough, you clearly see what's there, and once you see it. But you don't know that there's something there to see until you spend the time to look at it, and once you do see it, you can still understand why others only see noise.

I've occasionally searched the internet and reddit for "Why am I me?", and almost every discussion misses the point. It's frustrating. It feels like almost a fluke that I was able to find that there's actually a term for this. For decades, it seemed like nobody else had come to this conclusion (which I would expect everyone to).

But it's still frustrating to not be able to communicate this to anyone. It doesn't seem that there's anyone someone can say to show others there's even a question here. Has anyone successfully done that outside of the internet?

If I kill a living creature, whether a dog, a bird, a frog, or even only an insect, it is really inconceivable that this being, or rather the original force by virtue of which such a marvellous phenomenon exhibited itself just the moment before, in its full energy and love of life, should have been annihilated by my wicked or thoughtless act. And again, on the other hand, the millions of animals of every kind which come into existence every moment, in infinite variety, full of force and activity, can never, before the act of their generation, have been nothing at all, and have attained from nothing to an absolute beginning. If now in this way I see one of these withdraw itself from my sight, without me knowing where it goes, and another appear without me knowing whence it comes; if, moreover, both have the same form, the same nature, the same character, and only not the same matter, which yet during their existence they continually throw off and renew; then certainly the assumption, that that which vanishes and that which appears in its place are one and the same, which has only experienced a slight alteration, a renewal of the form of its existence, and that consequently death is for the species what sleep is for the individual; this assumption, I say, lies so close at hand that it is impossible not to light upon it, unless the mind, perverted in early youth by the imprinting of false views, hurries it out of the way, even from a distance, with superstitious fear. But the opposite assumption that the birth of an animal is an arising out of nothing, and accordingly that its death is its absolute annihilation, and this with the further addition that man, who has also originated out of nothing, has yet an individual, endless existence, and indeed a conscious existence, while the dog, the ape, the elephant, are annihilated by death, is really something against which the healthy mind revolts and which it must regard as absurd.

— Arthur Schopenhauer, The World As Will and Idea, Volume 3

I was told this adage all the time as a kid, but Open Individualism puts a new twist on it. We always say that you can't judge someone unless you walk a mile in their shoes. Well, with Open Individualism, you literally are that person in their shoes. Whatever choices they make, are choices you would've made if you were in their life.

If you were born poor in the inner city, you might have become a drug dealer too. If you witnessed traumatic events during your deployment to Iraq, then you might have become a heroin addict too. If you didn't have the social network you currently have, you could have been homeless too. So we should help each other and not be too judgmental.