Answering the Vertiginous Question
The Vertiginous Question is a problem posed by professor Benj Hellie and is simply this: why am I me and not someone else? In other words, how come I live in this body having this particular mind and not some other body and some other mind? How come I can cause things to happen in the world from this particular vantage point and not another (your vantage point, for example)?
This will be the subject of this article. In truth, for this to be properly accommodated, an entire book would be necessary. So I will need to take some shortcuts in order to keep this article manageably long, but do so in a way that doesn't take away from the coherence of the story. For this, I need to start with physics and then build our metaphysics on it and see where that takes us. We will see why death is an illusion, why you matter, despite your fragility when compared with the enormity of what we call "the rest of the universe", how we are all "one with the world", what can we say about the "self" and some unusual metaphysical consequences that derive from quantum mechanics. A word of caution: these things are very complicated and might get tiring. If you feel like it's overwhelming and try to get a general, straight to the point idea for the physical world part of the article, please go to the "Short Summary" (which I will make bold so it's very easy to see if you feel the need to scroll).
The Physical World
When we make observations through our sensory organs we perceive what we call "the physical world": we see objects, we hear sounds, we taste food, we smell scents and we touch the objects that we see. But notice that all of the physical world is just a representation in our mind - it's a collection of experiences: visual images, sounds, tastes, smells and touch sensations. Where we really start from are these experiences: they are what truly exists. As I am making claims about physical objects, keep in mind that I am not making ontological or metaphysical claims. For example, if I say "an apple is made of atoms", you shouldn't take this statement in an ontic way, since "atoms" is just a label of what we can observe of the structure of the apple, not what the apple truly is made of.
The physical world is, at a first glance, made of objects: chairs, tables, rivers, stars and so on. Using the tools of science over millennia, we have been able to study the basic constituents of these objects better and better. In the distant past we would say that objects are "made of" water, fire, earth. Later, as science advanced, we understood that objects were made of chemical elements which could be grouped in the periodic table of elements in a structured, cohesive way. Atoms of these elements would comprise every physical object. For example, a water molecule is made of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom, and a large collection of these molecules makes up a river. In other words, we adopted a reductionist approach to our understanding of the physical world: every object can be reduced to some fundamental pieces, some building blocks - the atoms - and these atoms are like lego pieces that build up physical objects.
The idea worked pretty well and was built on top of what we call classical physics: the world of Newton with absolute space and absolute time and its associated laws. However, as we studied the building blocks of physical objects in more and more detail, we started to see some issues with classical physics. For example, as we went down to the scale of atoms and discovered that these atoms were made of even smaller particles, protons, neutrons and electrons, things would get problematic: based on our best understanding of physics, the electrons should emit light and collapse into the nucleus of the atom in about 10^-11 seconds. In other words, the atom should be very unstable.
This pushed scientists to develop what we currently call quantum mechanics: a different formulation of the laws of physics which describes how Nature behaves fundamentally, at its smallest scale. And Nature behaves, according to quantum mechanics, in a way completely unfamiliar with what we experience at the scale where we, human beings, live. Still, this behavior can be understood and modeled mathematically, and this is exactly what scientists of the 1920s did (like Einstein, Heisenberg, Born, Schrodinger and others). I won't elaborate further on the history of how this unfolded because this is not important for our purposes. What is important is that in quantum mechanics, the familiar world that we observe is nowhere to be found. By this I mean that we are used, at the scale of ordinary life, to discuss in terms of definite "positions", "momenta" and so on. When I observe the chair in my room, it has a definite position in space. In quantum mechanics this is not really true.
Let's take the hydrogen atom. It has a proton as its nucleus and an electron. The electron is "orbiting" the proton. When we say this sentence, what we have in our mind is the electron like a planet that orbits its star, similar to how Earth orbits the Sun. And, in fact, this is how the atom is usually depicted in the physics class in pre-high school:
Let's take the hydrogen atom. It has a proton as its nucleus and an electron. The electron is "orbiting" the proton. When we say this sentence, what we have in our mind is the electron like a planet that orbits its star, similar to how Earth orbits the Sun. And, in fact, this is how the atom is usually depicted in the physics class in pre-high school:
However, like I said, this model doesn't work because the atom would be unstable. Instead, this is how an actual hydrogen atom looks like:
The shape of the electron, depending on its energy levels, looks like one of the above. In other words, the electron is not a point-like particle but a wave. This wave is smoothly distributed in space and this is the reason why atoms take up space - the atom is not "mostly empty space" like many science popularizers say these days, but it's actually filled with the wave function of its electrons. The wave function is a mathematical representation of the electron, but more than that - it is the electron. And it is able to answer observational questions that someone might "ask" the electron, like "what is your position?" or "what is your momentum?" But there is no position or momentum of the electron until you ask this question by measuring the electron. Positions and momenta are observables of the electron, not what the electron really is. And, in fact, both position A and position B are legitimate - you can metaphorically say that the electron is in both position A and position B (this is why the electron is everywhere where the wave function is, like in the picture above). The problem with this is simply that we don't have the words to properly describe this situation. If you ask David Albert, he will tell you that we can say that the electron is not in both position A and position B, it's not only in position A, it's not only in position B, and it's not not in position A and not not in position B. Because of this mess we came up with a word for such a situation: a superposition. The electron is in a superposition of A and B. But when you make a measurement you're either going to find it in A or you're going to find it in B.
This is where it gets complicated and where both physicists and philosophers don't have a consensus in the ~100 years since we know that Nature behaves this way: the electron (and any other particle) looks different depending on whether or not you have observed it, the so-called measurement problem of quantum mechanics. Not only that, but it behaves differently: an electron can interfere with itself as a wave if not measured, but stops doing that and behaves like a point-like particle if it's measured. Of course, a natural question to ask is "what do you mean by "measure""?
There are several ways out of this conundrum but they are out of the scope of this article, which is about the Vertiginous Question. Suffice to say that I think one coherent way out of this is to adopt the Many Worlds Interpretation. Let me elaborate:
Suppose we have an electron that we didn't measure, yet - it's in its undisturbed state. Depending on how we choose to measure this electron, we can measure its position or measure its momentum, but not both with arbitrary precision - this is just how quantum mechanics works: ask for the precise position of the electron and you will be completely ignorant about its momentum. Ask for the exact momentum that the electron has and you will be completely ignorant about its position. Suppose you ask for its position (you measure the electron in a way that determines what its position is). The probability of finding the electron in a particular position is given by its wave function squared.
So let's say that the electron's wave function says that it has a 1/sqrt(2) probability of being in position A and 1/sqrt(2) probability of being in position B. Square the wave function and the probability of being in A is 1/2 and the probability of being in B is also 1/2. Therefore, when you measure the electron, you will either find it in A or B with 50-50 probability. As you perform the measurement, what you are really doing is to entangle yourself with the measured electron, which is one of the most important properties of quantum mechanics. You see, we talked about the wave function of the electron. But now you are entangled with the electron, meaning that both you and the electron are described by the same wave function. As you performed your measurement, you are now quantum-correlated with the electron. Since in the Many Worlds Interpretation the wave function never collapses, both you and the electron are now described by a wave function - you don't exist as independent objects anymore: there is a configuration of the wave function describing the "you and the electron" system that says that the electron was in position A and you saw it in position A, and the electron was in position B and you saw it in position B. Both of these are true, since in the Many Worlds Interpretation the wave function never collapses but evolves smoothly in time.
Therefore, we find ourselves in a situation where there's two "you": a "you" that saw the electron in position A in one branch of the wave function and a "you" that saw the electron in position B in another branch of the wave function. Long story short, you are continuously being "measured" yourself by the environment: photons from the objects around you bump into you. All these photons behave according to quantum mechanics as well. Therefore, the environment makes continuous observations of the "you and the electron" system. This entanglement between the environment and a quantum system is called decoherence. It is this property what stops us from building super-fast quantum computers: the quantum bits in a quantum computer must maintain coherence in order to behave quantum mechanically, in other words, they must be kept isolated from the environment in order to be kept as qbits instead of regular, classical bits. If they are not being kept isolated, they will decohere, entangling themselves with the environment - they won't be in superpositions anymore but instead have definite states: either 1 or 0, but not a superposition of 1 and 0.
Now you might wonder what does this have to do with the topic of this article, which is about your personal identity. We are getting there. What I'm trying to describe to you is the fact that mathematically, it's not that the electron has a wave function and you have a wave function and planet Venus has a wave function, independently. As objects in the world interact and observe each other, they get entangled. They decohere. They are thus described by the same wave function. And, in fact, the entire universe behaves as a wave and is described by the aptly-called wave function of the universe.
We've come to the essential point of this entire physical story: the entire universe has a wave function (whether this evolves in time or not is another story for another day - if the energy of the universe is zero, then the wave function of the universe is static, meaning that time is emergent, not fundamental - but let's not go that rabbit hole in this article). In even simpler words, if we adopt the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics, then the universe can be described as a wave function and there are countless copies of "us" in all the possible configurations allowed by this wave function, with each branch contributing to the overall wave function depending on its thickness (for example, if you could see the electron at position A with 10% probability and the electron at position B with 90% probability, even though both scenarios happen (there's a copy of you seeing the electron at A and a copy of you seeing the electron at B), A contributes just 10% to the overall wave function and B contributes 90%).
Also notice something else which might seem trivial but it's actually really important: in quantum field theory, each particle is an excitation of a particular field: an electron is an excitation of the electron field; an up quark is an excitation of the up quark field; a photon is an excitation of the electromagnetic field; and so on. But because we have this property of entanglement, the wave function of the universe rules over all the quantum fields - describes configurations of the relationship between different quantum fields and their associated excitations - the particles. Nature behaves as if it is structured in separate quantum fields, but this is just a model. In other words, we can't talk about "you" and "the electron" separately. Or, indeed, about anything in the entire universe separately. This is what is known as quantum holism: we need to look at the entire universe as a whole, not as individual parts. The entire universe is one whole thing. This goes hand in hand with yet another thing called mereological nihillism: the idea that objects made of parts don't exist, only the fundamental building blocks. It is us human beings the ones that create categories and separate things into "objects" for convenience. If I want you to give me my smartphone I can simply say "give me my smartphone" and you will know what I mean, but that doesn't mean that my smartphone is an ontologically different thing than the rest of the world, a self-existing object, a true separate entity.
Also notice something else which might seem trivial but it's actually really important: in quantum field theory, each particle is an excitation of a particular field: an electron is an excitation of the electron field; an up quark is an excitation of the up quark field; a photon is an excitation of the electromagnetic field; and so on. But because we have this property of entanglement, the wave function of the universe rules over all the quantum fields - describes configurations of the relationship between different quantum fields and their associated excitations - the particles. Nature behaves as if it is structured in separate quantum fields, but this is just a model. In other words, we can't talk about "you" and "the electron" separately. Or, indeed, about anything in the entire universe separately. This is what is known as quantum holism: we need to look at the entire universe as a whole, not as individual parts. The entire universe is one whole thing. This goes hand in hand with yet another thing called mereological nihillism: the idea that objects made of parts don't exist, only the fundamental building blocks. It is us human beings the ones that create categories and separate things into "objects" for convenience. If I want you to give me my smartphone I can simply say "give me my smartphone" and you will know what I mean, but that doesn't mean that my smartphone is an ontologically different thing than the rest of the world, a self-existing object, a true separate entity.
We need to combine these two into mereological quantum holism: reality is one and is described by the wave function of the universe. Physically, this means that reality is a superposition of configurations with all possible configurations having more or less a contribution on the total wave function, depending on what we understand as "probabilities" (remember the 10% vs 90% example: some configurations contribute more to reality than other configurations).
Also notice something else: nowhere in this story have I mentioned anything about space and time, besides the example of finding the electron in position A or position B. Finding the electron in A or B is an experience that us conscious observers have: we see the electron either in A or in B. In other words, space and time are also representations - classical observables like positions and momenta and spin (spin is yet another observable of the electron). This is a possible explanation for why we can't unify quantum mechanics with general relativity - because general relativity describes space and time, which is a classical observable, not part of the quantum underpinning of how Nature behaves. It only makes sense for us conscious observers making observations - spacetime is not ontic (it's not something that fundamentally exists, irreducible). And indeed, the most promising way of understanding spacetime quantum mechanically is for spacetime to emerge out of quantum mechanics, not to quantize gravity.
Also notice something else: nowhere in this story have I mentioned anything about space and time, besides the example of finding the electron in position A or position B. Finding the electron in A or B is an experience that us conscious observers have: we see the electron either in A or in B. In other words, space and time are also representations - classical observables like positions and momenta and spin (spin is yet another observable of the electron). This is a possible explanation for why we can't unify quantum mechanics with general relativity - because general relativity describes space and time, which is a classical observable, not part of the quantum underpinning of how Nature behaves. It only makes sense for us conscious observers making observations - spacetime is not ontic (it's not something that fundamentally exists, irreducible). And indeed, the most promising way of understanding spacetime quantum mechanically is for spacetime to emerge out of quantum mechanics, not to quantize gravity.
Short Summary: The universe can be described by a wave function in which there are observers in countless superpositions. Each of these observers, from their perspective, observe classical things: electrons in definite positions, space, time, energy and so on - the things described by classical physics. They do not experience any quantum weirdness other than the different behavior of unobserved systems vs when they measure them.
Metaphysics
What can we say about this whole physical situation from a metaphysical standpoint? How should we interpret what I have thus far described? It is here where I subscribe to Bernardo Kastrup's metaphysical framework of Analytic Idealism: the idea that the fundamental nature of reality is mental and the physical world is a representation in the mind. Remember that in the chapter on the physical world I have started with "when we make observations..." which already implies mentality as what exists.
So Nature is mental. Good. What about the self? What do we mean by "you" or "I" or "him" or "her"? What about cloning someone? Suppose there's a way to exactly clone myself, atom-to-atom, and create a completely identical copy of me. Would "I" live in both of the physical brains? Observe the world from two different vantage points, control two mouths, four arms, four legs, get hungry in one body and get thirsty in another? I think most people would say that what would really happen is that something akin to an identical twin brother would be instantiated, but he will be his own "self", separate from me.
Now let's do another thought experiment: both you and me will get under general anesthesia and using some ultra-modern technology, my entire mental contents will be moved to your brain and your entire mental contents to mine (meaning, my preferences, desires, memories and so on will be moved to your brain and the other way around). Would I become you and you, me? What body would I control when I would wake up? Would it be your body, since my entire mental contents were moved there? Would it be my body, since my brain is still in my body, just changed by the updated mental contents of yours?
Now let's do another thought experiment: both you and me will get under general anesthesia and using some ultra-modern technology, my entire mental contents will be moved to your brain and your entire mental contents to mine (meaning, my preferences, desires, memories and so on will be moved to your brain and the other way around). Would I become you and you, me? What body would I control when I would wake up? Would it be your body, since my entire mental contents were moved there? Would it be my body, since my brain is still in my body, just changed by the updated mental contents of yours?
What if I want to quickly travel to Mars? A teleporter could read the information in my body, destroy me, transfer that information to the teleporter machine on Mars and there re-materialize me, atom by atom. Would it be me? Would "I" retain the control of that newly-created copy of me? Or would it be like my twin brother example? What if I'm not destroyed on Earth but the information is carried over to Mars and there the copy is instantiated? Would there be two "me"?
We can come up with these examples until we're blue in the face. Not only that, but we can do something else: suppose you want to get rid of me but you're not a murderer. You are this very sophisticated scientist which decides to simply change me. As I sleep, you start messing up with my brain in countless ways. Maybe you kill 1 neuron. Or maybe 10 neurons. Or maybe you change the synaptic strength of my neurons in weird ways. When I wake up, would I still be me or would I stop existing and someone else would take my place?
In fact, there's about 85000 neurons that die each day in the human brain, yet you still maintain your individuality, your sense of "I-ness". So I think it's safe to say that killing one neuron doesn't suddenly change your subjective perspective - you don't disappear from existence and someone else takes your place. Instead, you simply change over time, maintaining your "I-ness". No matter what I do to you, your identity remains. It's transformed, sure, but from the inside it's still "you". Even if I start making significant changes, you will have different desires, memories, habits, but from your perspective it will still be the same "you", just different. But what if I cut your brain in half, in the middle? The two brain hemispheres are connected through something called the corpus callosum, which is a fiber bundle "highway" that unifies two brain hemispheres:
In fact, there's about 85000 neurons that die each day in the human brain, yet you still maintain your individuality, your sense of "I-ness". So I think it's safe to say that killing one neuron doesn't suddenly change your subjective perspective - you don't disappear from existence and someone else takes your place. Instead, you simply change over time, maintaining your "I-ness". No matter what I do to you, your identity remains. It's transformed, sure, but from the inside it's still "you". Even if I start making significant changes, you will have different desires, memories, habits, but from your perspective it will still be the same "you", just different. But what if I cut your brain in half, in the middle? The two brain hemispheres are connected through something called the corpus callosum, which is a fiber bundle "highway" that unifies two brain hemispheres:
Sometimes, surgeons must cut these fiber bundles in order to stop severe epilepsy. When they do this, they create two separate selves, each belonging to each brain hemisphere. Here's a video from VS Ramachandran describing such a scenario:
The two selves can answer questions (although only the left hemisphere can talk), have preferences and so on. Which one is the former "you", the one before the corpus callosum was cut? Did "you" disappear? What if the surgery is undone and the hemispheres are connected back together? Do you suddenly reappear in existence, out of nowhere?
What about before you were born? Was there a "you" or were you "created at birth"? What about after you die? Do you cease to exist?
All these questions are legitimate, although people don't really take them seriously. The pervading metaphysics in our current society is materialism - "you" are the product of your brain. Destroy the brain and "you" don't exist anymore. But as we just saw, this is problematic, as I can alter your brain in countless different ways and from your perspective, you are still there, not to mention all the other scenarios. Most materialists also insist that the self, "you", is an illusion. It doesn't really exist, it's confabulated by the brain.
I insist that we should really think of this the other way around, just like we did when we adopted Idealism. It's not that there's a physical world that "generates" consciousness. It's the other way around: there's mind and its representations, which is the physical world. Similarly, there's only one self. You can call it any way you like: "The Self", "God", "Nature", "The I of the World", it doesn't really matter.
There's "you" and there's "You". The one with the capital letter is the only thing that exists, the "You". The "you", with the lowercase letter, is one of the contexts in which the "You" finds itself in. Let's make this more concrete and take Alice and Bob as two separate people. Alice has a passion for fashion and Bob loves modern cars. Notice that both of them has a self - they both say "I" this and that. "I love fashion", says Alice. "I really like to watch car races!", says Bob. Adopting Bernardo Kastrup's Analytic Idealism as our metaphysical grounds, what Alice and Bob really are are dissociations of this "Self" - fragments of the Self, perspectives from which the Self looks at what the Self thinks as "the rest of the world". Alice sees Bob as a physical object, from her perspective - she doesn't have access to any internal world of Bob's. Bob also sees Alice as a mere physical object - he only has access to his internal life, not Alice's. But this is really only because the Self, living in both Alice and Bob, is dissociated.
There's "you" and there's "You". The one with the capital letter is the only thing that exists, the "You". The "you", with the lowercase letter, is one of the contexts in which the "You" finds itself in. Let's make this more concrete and take Alice and Bob as two separate people. Alice has a passion for fashion and Bob loves modern cars. Notice that both of them has a self - they both say "I" this and that. "I love fashion", says Alice. "I really like to watch car races!", says Bob. Adopting Bernardo Kastrup's Analytic Idealism as our metaphysical grounds, what Alice and Bob really are are dissociations of this "Self" - fragments of the Self, perspectives from which the Self looks at what the Self thinks as "the rest of the world". Alice sees Bob as a physical object, from her perspective - she doesn't have access to any internal world of Bob's. Bob also sees Alice as a mere physical object - he only has access to his internal life, not Alice's. But this is really only because the Self, living in both Alice and Bob, is dissociated.
This is not some crazy speculation as we already know this is happening in the human mind in what is classified as Dissociative Identity Disorder or Multiple Personality Disorder. Depending on when you ask someone having this condition what is his or her name, she could answer Alice (and report Alice's preferences for fashion) or Bob (and report his love for race cars). Alice and Bob take turns in controlling the body whose mind has this condition.
Here's the essential point of this article: I propose that Nature does exactly this but more sophisticated. Nature (or The Self) doesn't alternate between being either Alice or Bob, but lives all the possible lives in a superposition, according to the wave function of the universe, simultaneously!
How is this possible? Remember that all the classically looking configurations of the world can be found in a superposition described by the wave function of the universe. And in each branch of this multiverse there are observers who observe classically looking things, including a spacetime associated with energy, position, momenta, spin and all the other observables. The Self lives all these lives in all of the branches, since they are all instances of It, at the present tense of each dissociation - The Self lives only in the "present" of that dissociation's point of view, in that context. The branches are in such a way that no paradoxes arise between the dissociations and every dissociation is as legitimate as any other - in other words, there is no privileged dissociation, no special, discriminatory dissociation. This answers all of the weird questions we had above and more! Let's take them one by one:
- Change a few neurons of me? It's the same Self that lives that modified version of that context.
- Copy me and create a new instance next to me? The Self lives both me and that new instance, in a dissociated fashion - each instance thinks it's separate, but it's really not, just as Alice and Bob were instances of the same mind
- Copy me on Earth, destroy me and recreate me on Mars? The Self was living in me on Earth and now lives in the copy of me on Mars - it's still Me (notice the capital letter).
Any potential scenario you can come up with, you end up with the same explanation - it's You all over. Every living being is You, the real you, in everything! There is no death - death is just the ceasing of a particular viewpoint in the dream of Nature. But nobody really dies, since You live in everything that ever existed. What brains really are is a "conglomerate" of The Self - a particular viewpoint that The Self now has to look at ... well, itself, from a particular perspective in its dream. This is really a good reason to care about the future, to care about animals, to care about everything, for it is You which really lives all these lives.
I think this perspective changes the whole view of the entire world fundamentally. Death is an illusion, you are as meaningful as possible - you are basically God, just a particular manifestation of it, the same Self behind every living being. You are not small and insignificant, and neither is anything else that is alive, for they are also God, with different levels of sophistication.
I think this perspective changes the whole view of the entire world fundamentally. Death is an illusion, you are as meaningful as possible - you are basically God, just a particular manifestation of it, the same Self behind every living being. You are not small and insignificant, and neither is anything else that is alive, for they are also God, with different levels of sophistication.
So the answer to the Vertiginous Question is this: you are you because You are everybody else, too! You just don't know it! (OK, now both you and You do, but not everybody else, since "they" are still dissociated from you)
Final word
There is a weird idea that I've been thinking about and that I will very briefly mention: it seems like consciousness has a continuous, musical "nature" to it - it's like a symphony of "mental notes" that are unfolding in a myriad of ways. But one thing that I've been thinking about is Near Death Experiences. Most people having been declared clinically dead and then miraculously resuscitated have described "being dead" as being one with the Universe and feeling a sense of "infinite love". Religious texts also mention "God as pure love". So I've been thinking that maybe what the universe feels like is "pure love", intrinsically. It looks to us like stars, galaxies, black holes and so on, but intrinsically it feels like "pure love". Basically, "pure love" is the fundamental note of consciousness. Its harmonics, its overtones, are all the other experiences - when it vibrates differently (in lack of a better metaphor) it produces other experiences (in very sophisticated ways). I know this will make people roll over their eyes thinking it's a ridiculous idea but I'm mentioning it anyway, an optimistic way to end the answer to the Vertiginous Question.
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