Chapter 10
The Multiplicity Of You
Now we arrive at one of the most radical and most important ideas in Ixperiencit Theory: conscious multiplicity.
If multiplicity sounds wrong to you, you are in good company. It violates one of our deepest intuitions, the feeling that there is exactly one "you," housed in exactly one body. But examine what the idea actually claims, and you may find it harder to reject than you expect.
The standard view of identity says: there is one you. You exist in one place, at one time, in one body. This is what we might call the singularity view of consciousness. One person, one consciousness, end of story.
Four Theories of Conscious Existence
To see where multiplicity fits among theories of identity, it helps to consider four possible theories:
1. Nonexistence. There is no persistent self at all. Consciousness is an illusion, or at best a momentary flicker with no continuity. Each moment of experience is independent and unconnected to any other. This view has affinities with certain Buddhist philosophies that deny the existence of the self.
4. Universality. You are every conscious experience everywhere. All consciousness is one. This view has affinities with certain Hindu and panpsychist philosophies.
Multiplicity is the scientifically supported middle ground. You are not one body, but you are not everything. You are every physical system that produces your ixperiencitness.
Ixperiencit Theory argues this goes too far. While it is true that the self is not what folk psychology imagines it to be, it is not nothing. Ixperiencitness is real (you really do experience being conscious) and it has continuity and structure over time. Denying the reality of the self throws the baby out with the bathwater.
Why Multiplicity Follows from Our Premises
To see why multiplicity follows from our premises, consider the sheer vastness of physical possibility.
The observable universe contains roughly 10^80 atoms. It has existed for about 13.8 billion years and will continue to exist for trillions of years (or possibly forever). In all that space and time, the number of possible arrangements of matter is staggeringly large, far larger than the number of atoms, because each atom can be in many different positions and states.
Among those unimaginably many arrangements, some will produce brain structures and functioning identical to yours. Given the scale of the universe and the precision required, this is a strong probability — though as we will see in Chapter 20, the exact likelihood depends on cosmological assumptions that remain uncertain.
The Challenge to Intuition
This challenges our intuition, because we are used to thinking of ourselves as tied to one particular body. But as we established in Chapters 4 and 5, the same pattern can exist in multiple places.
Think of it this way. Imagine that two identical brains exist simultaneously, in two different locations. Both are structured and functioning identically. According to our premises, both produce identical conscious experiences. Which one is "you"? The answer is: both. There is no principled way to say one is "real" and the other is a "copy," because there is no difference in the conscious experience. The experience is the identity, and the experience is the same.
This is exactly like two ocean waves with the same shape, amplitude, and frequency, moving through different stretches of water. Which wave is the "real" wave? The question is meaningless. Both are the same wave pattern, because a wave is not the water molecules it passes through; it is the pattern those molecules instantiate.
Multiplicity Through Time
Multiplicity encompasses more than multiple instances of you existing simultaneously. More importantly for the question of immortality, it includes instances of you existing at different times.
If, a thousand years from now, a brain comes into existence with organization identical to what yours has right now, that brain will produce your ixperiencitness. It will experience being you. From its perspective — which is your perspective, because the experience is the same — it will be a continuation of your consciousness.
And from your perspective, when it comes into existence, you will experience being it. Not because some kind of signal travels from your current brain to that future brain (there is no need for any such connection), but because the experience is identical, and experience is what you are.
Key Terms in This Chapter
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The remaining text (examples, counter-arguments, and longer connective passages) is in the book.