points by lioeters 1 day ago

Thanks, that article summarizes many of the references that people (the one "I") brought up in this thread.

> Open individualism is a view within philosophy of self, according to which there exists only one numerically identical subject, who is everyone at all times; in the past, present and future.

> From this perspective reincarnation in the common sense isn't true, but rather it is that people are already reincarnated as everything because no one is traveling.

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Andy Weir - The Egg (2009)

Arnold Zuboff - One self: The logic of experience (1990)

> The apparent boundaries of persons are as illusory as those in brain bisection; personal identity remains unchanged through any variation or multiplication of body or mind. 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.

> Any conscious being would necessarily have been you anyway.

Leo Tolstoy - Esarhaddon, King of Assyria (1903)

> ..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.

Fred Hoyle - October the First Is Too Late (1966)

> 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.

> 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".

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From Chandogya Upanishad (8th to 6th century BCE), in the dialogue between Uddalaka and his son Śvetaketu.

  Bring a banyan fruit.

  Here it is, sir.
  Cut it up.
  I've cut it up, sir.
  What do you see here?
  These quite tiny seeds, sir.
  Now, take one of them and cut it up.
  I've cut it up, sir.
  What do you see there?
  Nothing, sir.

> This finest essence here, son, that you can't even see — look how on account of that finest essence this huge banyan tree stands here.

> Believe, my son: the finest essence here — that constitutes the self of this whole world; that is the truth; that is the self (ātman). And that's how you are, Śvetaketu.