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" "[T]here is only one way we can ever identify ourselves. That is through subjective experience. And subjective experience is universal. Its relation to anything possessing it is contingent. This means two things. First, it makes no sense to think of ourselves as one producer of our experience rather than another that would do as well—actual or possible. We certainly couldn't discriminate one of these from another through our experience anyway. And second, even if this identification had significance, it would gain us nothing because the experience itself, which is all we would have available to us of ourselves, would not cohere subjectively as we have already seen. That a body or mind or self continues on into the future is cold comfort, even if we arbitrarily and ignorantly identify ourselves with some one such particular, if its continuity cannot be translated into the sort of continuity of subjective experience that we can truly possess, where one moment belongs to another. That each of two moment instances somehow belongs to some third thing like a body is not interesting.
Arnold Stuart Zuboff (born 1946) was an American philosopher who has worked on topics such as personal identity, philosophy of mind, ethics, metaphysics, epistemology and philosophy of probability. He was the original formulator of the Sleeping Beauty problem and a view analogous to open individualism, which he terms "Universalism".
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I am countless conscious organisms, but each of these possesses only one package of experiential content, isolated from that of every other. And within any of these packages only that much of the content of experience is displayed as having the quality of immediacy that makes experience be mine. So being mine is naturally confused in each with being the experience of only that organism. One must be jolted into realising that being mine is instead an abstract quality like being red. And, further, that this is a quality that must pervade all experience. For what could count as experience that didn't have that quality? I hope that I have succeeded now in doing that jolting.
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You possess all conscious life. Whenever in all time and wherever in all the universe (or beyond) any conscious being stands, sits, crawls, jumps, lies, rolls, flies or swims, its experience of doing so is yours and is yours now. You are that being. You are fish and fowl. Deer and hunter. You are saints and sinners. You are Germans, Jews and Palestinians. This is an important result. What else can come close to it in importance? And perhaps the spread of this knowledge among the intelligent beings that are you can help you to stop yourself from hurting yourself because you mistake yourself for another.