Empty, Open and Closed Individualism

Abstract

Closed Individualism posits a continuous self persisting through time, aligning with subjective experience but facing challenges, such as Heinlein’s pain-memory anesthesia thought experiment. Empty Individualism proposes that we are a different person at each moment, comprising discrete “I’s,” which helps explain phenomena like alienation from past selves and internal psychological conflicts. Open Individualism, or the Hypothesis of the Unique Subjectivity, suggests a single, universal subjective entity underlies all individual experiences, with each perceived self experiencing only a fragment. This view, like Empty Individualism, provides a rationale for altruism based on an expanded concept of self-interest, where aiding other sentient beings is akin to aiding future or constituent parts of oneself. The potential for using computer simulations to model and evolutionarily assess these competing metaphysical frameworks is suggested as a method for evaluating their likelihood and understanding their implications, particularly for psychology and the long-term ethical goal of reducing or eliminating suffering across all sentient beings. – AI-generated abstract.