Universal Identity Jonatas Müller

(provisional version, 2013 CE)

What we are



We are, most essentially, consciousness, the sheer awareness which characterizes the experience of our existence. Whatever its nature be, consciousness depends on the activation of brain regions.



Consciousness is independent of parts of our bodies, which could be replaced while preserving it. For instance, any parts like our hair, our limbs, our organs, or our teeth, are commonly replaced without destroying or fundamentally changing who we are, our consciousness. If we abstracted only our essential part, that of consciousness, and kept all these other body parts away, we should all look very similar to one another, as relatively small aggregates of brain mass. All the rest, which is non-essential, could be thought of as clothes or accessories, which are permanently attached to us. In the future we may be able to change all of these, with cyborg body parts of our preference. Constituted by many cells, our brain mass is intricately organized in a scale that goes well into the atomic and subatomic levels.





How we change



Our consciousness is an ever-changing representation of what goes on outside of it, in our minds, in our bodies, and in the world. It is constantly recreated by receiving sensory stimulation. Aspects of our conscious experience which remain similar with the passage of time are few, and most constantly change. When our memories are not being recalled, they are not part of our consciousness. Rather, they are like data in the memory of a portable computer, which we can access on demand. Despite the outward appearance of stability in a small aggregate of brain mass, in the microscopic level there is much changing in an extremely fast rate. In our conscious experience itself we are like pictures in a film screen, ever changing into something else that bears little resemblance to what we were just a moment ago. We are not external spectators watching this film, we are the film itself.



In the subatomic world, the smallest passage of time changes our composition and arrangement to a great degree, instantly. In physical terms, the frequency of discrete change at this level, even in just one second, is a number with 44 digits, so vast as to be unimaginable... In comparison, the amount of seconds that have passed since the start of the universe, estimated at 13.5 billion years ago, is a number with just 18 digits. At the most fundamental level, our structure, which seems outwardly stable, moves at a staggering pace, like furiously boiling water. Many of our particles are continually lost, and new ones are acquired, as blood frantically keeps matter flowing in and out of each cell.





Personal Integrity



If we were to be defined as a precise set of particles or arrangement thereof, its permanence in time would be implausibly short-lived; we would be born dead. If this were one's personal identity, it would have been set for the first time to one's baby state, having one's first sparkle of consciousness. In a subatomic level, each second is like many trillions of years in the macroscopic world, and our primordial state as a babies would be incredibly short-lived. In the blink of an eye, our similarity to what that personal identity was would be reduced to a tiny fraction, if any, by the sheer magnitude of change. That we could survive, in a sense, as a tiny fraction of what we once were, would be an hypothesis that goes against our experience, because we feel consciousness always as an integrated whole, not as a vanishing separated fraction. We either exist completely or not at all.



Time, with its effects, would bring the instantaneous demise of such a personal identity. Even if our conscious experience could be produced instantly as an immovable pattern, like a rock, as a fleeting instantaneous whole, an identity based on such an immovable pattern would still require a physical connection integrating its own particles.



If we were composed of a set of particles, and particles could become part of different sets (so that a present set could have acquired some of the particles from previous sets), there would need to be such a physical connection to define to which set (among an almost infinity of possible combinations) a particle belonged. However, such a connection integrating all physical particles in a set of just one person seems unknown to physics. In a way, the universe connects everything into a spatial whole, but this spans much more than a single person. Having a personal identity related to our physical composition or arrangement, however intuitively convincing, is a false hypothesis.





Who we are



Our conscious experience can only be explained by an ability to survive physical changes in our set of particles and their arrangement, by being more than what we feel at a single time, so that we may feel these other parts of us in the future, as they become part of our consciousness. Effectively, to explain our conscious experience we must be able to become any set of different particles, in any arrangement, as long as it functionally produces self-awareness or consciousness. This insight about the true nature of identity has occurred to humans for a very long time. Quoting from an Upanishad, among the oldest preserved texts of mankind:

"If there were no objects, there would be no subjects; and if there were no subjects, there would be no objects. For on either side alone nothing could be achieved. But the self of pragñâ, consciousness, and prâna, life, is not many, but one. For as in a car the circumference of a wheel is placed on the spokes, and the spokes on the nave, thus are these objects, as a circumference, placed on the subjects as spokes, and the subjects on the prâna. And that prâna, the living and breathing power, indeed is the self of pragñâ, the self-conscious self: blessed, imperishable, immortal."

While the hypothesis of instant death seems untenable, the hypothesis of surviving change by being able to be other things than what we feel remains plausible. It does away with the problem of defining us as particular sets (or personal identities), defining us instead as a single big set, and being able to be anything within this set while still remaining there. This effectively makes us immortal, except for mortal characteristics. Our survival and identity exist in everyone, though our characteristics are personal, and currently mortal. Cryonics could only accomplish a preservation of characteristics, because survival and identity already are always preserved.



A feeling of doubt may arise for this issue of identity due to not feeling our other functional selves. But then, this is only to be expected, for we cannot feel things without a connection. If we plugged all our minds together with cables, then of course there would be no metaphysical impediments to stop us from feeling each other's consciousnesses. Lacking this connection, however, it is to be assumed that we be aware of separate things, however unintuitive this may seem. This is because the workings of our minds are dependent on the constraints of physics.



We aren't others if we be defined as our spatio-temporal characteristics, but we are others in our pure existence and in our function of consciousness itself. These are perfectly preserved in others, and this fact is a fundamental requisite for our own conscious experience in time.









