Last episode, I argued that consciousness, the simple fact that it's like something to be you, is the basic stuff of reality. That leaves a question I promised to answer: if consciousness is fundamental, how many consciousnesses are there? In a very real sense, that question is the same as asking how separate we really are.
In this episode, I walk through the three possible answers, one door at a time, in plain language. No background in philosophy required.
In this episode:
- Solipsism, the idea that only my mind exists, and why the world's pushback rules it out (including the objection from dreams)
- Panpsychism and the "combination problem": why no one can explain how many small minds could merge into one, and why we have never seen it happen
- Why we see minds divide all the time: the drive you don't remember, the feelings you set aside for a work call, and dissociative identity disorder
- A remarkable 2015 case of a woman whose sight came and went depending on which identity was present
- How your dreams already show you one mind appearing as many
- The honest limits of this argument, and why I still find it the most reasonable answer
- What the Upanishads, the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, and the philosopher Bernardo Kastrup each concluded
- Why "separate, but not ultimately separate" changes how we understand loving our neighbor
As always, I end with the whole argument in sixty seconds and what I hold as conviction and as hope. The practice for this week: in your next conversation, notice both the wall between you and the other person and the awareness you share.
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