There’s an idea in physics that there might in fact be only one electron in the universe, an electron that moves through space and time in such a way that it appears, when humans observe the world around them, like there’s many different electrons all throughout the universe, all with precisely the same physical properties. There might be more to it, I wouldn’t be qualified to say, but I view this one-electron universe model as an ontological koan. It makes us think “hey, reality could be this way rather than the way we think it is and we would be none the wiser — let’s try to deepen our understanding of reality in light of that.”

There’s a short story by Andy Weir called The Egg. It falls under the umbrella of metaphysics porn which also covers The Matrix and Fight Club, the kind of story that makes some part of you believe it’s true for the first half hour after you read/watch it, giving you a philosophical high — an intimation of a mystical experience. I don’t want to deny you that, so go read it; it’s short, shorter than this post, you’ve got no excuse. Did you read it? Well in case you’re reading this after the collapse of civilization and Weir’s story has been lost to time, I’ll summarize the relevant detail. A man dies and meets God, who informs him that he (the man) is everyone. Everyone he has met, and everyone he hasn’t across the planet and throughout history, past and future, is him. Every time he dies, he’s sent to be born again as a different person in a different place and at a different time. God then sends the man off to be reincarnated as someone else. The Egg describes a one-consciousness universe.

Derek Parfit’s theory of personal identity detailed in Reasons and Persons relies on what he calls person-slices, snapshots of a person at an instant in time. This is somewhat contentious because it’s hard to make sense of what a person-slice is — what would it be like to be a person-slice? This seems to me to be analogous to asking “how can we observe a snapshot of an electron in time?” We can’t! Observation can only be done over an interval of time, but just because we can’t observe electron-slices doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t expect to be able to observe electrons over time, nor does the fact that we can observe electrons over time suggest that electron-slices are a nonsensical concept. Likewise, if there’s nothing it’s like to be a person-slice, that doesn’t mean that person-slices are nonsense.

The one-consciousness universe in The Egg is beautiful because it’s easy to comprehend, but it’s painfully anthropocentric. If consciousness is fundamental to the universe, we shouldn’t expect it to obey laws that reference human beings. This would be operating on the wrong layer of abstraction: human beings are not fundamental to the universe, they are emergent properties of some fundamental building blocks, like quarks and electrons. I find the one-electron universe model to be useful for helping us transcend our parochial intuitions about consciousness because it is sufficiently weird, without being too hard to comprehend. Let’s say that there is a fundamental constituent of the universe called the conscion. It flits around throughout space-time visiting places all throughout the universe, and imbuing everything it visits with consciousness. Certain physical configurations, namely person-slices, exhibit continuity properties which make it like something to be the continuous sequence of those configurations through time. The order in which the conscion visits your person-slices makes no difference to what it’s like to be you — in fact, it could visit one of your person-slices, then visit someone else’s, then go back to yours and it would make no difference. It could even visit one of your person-slices more than once, without changing what it’s like to be you in that instant.

You are your person-slice at this very instant. The continuity of your experience is not the result of the essence of consciousness (the conscion) flowing through you from one moment to the next, it is not necessary that it do so. For your subjective experience to be continuous requires only that the person-slice that you are in this instant be continuous with person-slices past. And the notion of a person-slice doesn’t rely on the existence of consciousness, even a p-zombie can be viewed as a continuous set of person slices.