Is this a good answer to the question "why am I me and not someone else?", and the possibility of infinite creation

[Hedge90]

I've run accross this question in the analyticidealism subreddit, and engaged in a conversation. In the end, instead of theoretical descriptions, I provided a simile:

"Let's assume you imagine up two fictional characters. One character is a guy named Joe, the other is a girl named Lucy. Now, also assume that you can imagine these characters so vividly that you can also imagine all their experiences and perceptions and thoughts, including the feeling of being separate beings from each other.

Now, does it make sense for this imagined Joe to ask, "why am I experiencing being Joe, and not Lucy?" Well, simply because Joe doesn't really experience Joe. In truth it is only you, the imaginer, who experiences anything, but this knowledge is hidden from the idea that is Joe, because his very idea contains the illusion of being separated from Lucy."

To be honest I have never conceptuated it in this manner to myself either, and I wanted to ask for your thoughts. Because what this essentially means is that the act of creation can in theory be infinite in depth. MAL - if it even makes sense to postulate a fundamental MAL - imagines itself to be different beings. These different beings evolve in their imagined reality. After a while they evolve into beings with such an advanced consciousness that they themselves can imagine up within their own - already imagined - mind a next level of separate beings. And so on and so on.
Existence would then become an infinite fractal with every level of being imagining up the next level after a certain point of consciousness development.

[Cleric K]

I've run accross this question in the analyticidealism subreddit, and engaged in a conversation. In the end, instead of theoretical descriptions, I provided a simile:

"Let's assume you imagine up two fictional characters. One character is a guy named Joe, the other is a girl named Lucy. Now, also assume that you can imagine these characters so vividly that you can also imagine all their experiences and perceptions and thoughts, including the feeling of being separate beings from each other.

Now, does it make sense for this imagined Joe to ask, "why am I experiencing being Joe, and not Lucy?" Well, simply because Joe doesn't really experience Joe. In truth it is only you, the imaginer, who experiences anything, but this knowledge is hidden from the idea that is Joe, because his very idea contains the illusion of being separated from Lucy."

To be honest I have never conceptuated it in this manner to myself either, and I wanted to ask for your thoughts. Because what this essentially means is that the act of creation can in theory be infinite in depth. MAL - if it even makes sense to postulate a fundamental MAL - imagines itself to be different beings. These different beings evolve in their imagined reality. After a while they evolve into beings with such an advanced consciousness that they themselves can imagine up within their own - already imagined - mind a next level of separate beings. And so on and so on.
Existence would then become an infinite fractal with every level of being imagining up the next level after a certain point of consciousness development.

The fundamental difficulty with these topics is that the identity is imagined to be some fundamental element of reality. This causes one to speak of bubbles of consciousness, dissociative boundaries, etc. It's strange that even though most non-dual teachings reject the reality of identities, yet still try to conceive of the One transpersonal identity (called consciousness, awareness, MAL, etc.) which becomes 'confused' to believe that it is some other (potentially illusionary) identity.

It all becomes so much clear if we cease thinking in terms of identities creating other identities but instead of something more like a phase space. The fractal you mention can be imagined not as made of identities but instead, each element of the fractal is a state of being. Something akin to a 'frame' of spiritual experience. There's no some separate experiencer, knower, secret pure identity which misidentifies with something else. There's no entity which bounds regions in phase space and makes them feel as belonging to the identity of that entity. There's a first person spiritual experience of flux of states of being.

So where does the feeling of identity comes from? Our current state of being is in fractal relations to the states of being of our life so far. Thus our current state doesn't look like isolated 'frame' of existence but it feels as if there's a whole stream of states (which we call memory) which somehow 'explain' our current. Seen in this way, our identity is not some additional metaphysical entity which preserves our identity. The feeling of identity results from the way past states fractally reverberate in our current state. In this sense, MAL (the absolute) can be thought of as a state in phase space from which the whole infinite potential of possible states are experienced as something immediately known (as first-person memory).

Identity in this sense is only the current picture of metamorphosis through phase space. The metamorphosis of the butterfly being a classical example. We can also see in this way evolution as awakenings of consciousness within points in phase space that seek their way through the labyrinth towards states within which more and more of phase space (not only of the personal history) nests constructively.

To understand these things we need living experience of thinking (in the sense of the TCOTCT vowels exercise). When we think abstractly, we polarize in the hysteresis process and our perspective from nowhere, which thinks from the blind spot, gives us the feeling of overarching identity, from where all difficulties begin. We need to experience the pure flux of states of being in the thinking process without trying to polarize and imagine ourselves as pure awareness, as some Cosmic identity container for phenomena.

[Eugene I.]

I don't think it's a good answer. Your subjective perspective of your space of experience is not imagined, it's a fact of experience. If we assume that Lucy has her own space of experience with experiences different from yours (and we need to assume it if we don't want to be solipsists), then that is another fact that her space of experience and subjective perspective is different from yours. No amount of philosophising can prove these facts wrong. Imagining that there is another unified perspective in which both Joe's and Lucy's perspectives are experienced in a unified way does not solve the problem of why in your perspective you are still experiencing only Joe's experience and not Lucy's. This problem is unresolvable and intractable in both materialism and idealism. It belongs to deep mysteries together with the question of "why there is something rather than nothing". And unfortunately the only metaphysics where it is fully resolved is solipsism (where there is no "someone else" so the problem does not even exist in the first place).

To the Cleric's answer: this problem has nothing to do with "identity" or imagined "separate experiencer" (which are indeed both illusions). I find that most people don't really understand what the problem is actually about.

All the answers to this problem that I've heard so far use a trick to imagine an abstract "scheme of things" in where the simple fact of the existence of subjective field of experience is disregarded or proclaimed "an illusion". Materialism does exactly that, but many idealist schemes are also trying the same trick. Unfortunately it does not solve the problem, but using that mind trick you can convince yourself that the problem does not exist (this is what many abstract metaphysical schemes are good for).

[Hedge90]

The fundamental difficulty with these topics is that the identity is imagined to be some fundamental element of reality. This causes one to speak of bubbles of consciousness, dissociative boundaries, etc. It's strange that even though most non-dual teachings reject the reality of identities, yet still try to conceive of the One transpersonal identity (called consciousness, awareness, MAL, etc.) which becomes 'confused' to believe that it is some other (potentially illusionary) identity.

It all becomes so much clear if we cease thinking in terms of identities creating other identities but instead of something more like a phase space. The fractal you mention can be imagined not as made of identities but instead, each element of the fractal is a state of being. Something akin to a 'frame' of spiritual experience. There's no some separate experiencer, knower, secret pure identity which misidentifies with something else. There's no entity which bounds regions in phase space and makes them feel as belonging to the identity of that entity. There's a first person spiritual experience of flux of states of being.

I didn't really posit that identity would be a fundamental element of reality. But it is a phenomenological element of reality. Even if ultimately, there are no bubbles of consciousness / dissociative boundaries etc., at the state we (or at least, I) am in, it feels like to be the case. And it has to be answered why I cannot, at the moment, access the qualia, or as you say, phase space of other beings. There is something that's blocking me from doing so, even if only phenomenologically, because I can't do it at will.

[Hedge90]

I don't think it's a good answer. Your subjective perspective of your space of experience is not imagined, it's a fact of experience. If we assume that Lucy has her own space of experience with experiences different from yours (and we need to assume it if we don't want to be solipsists), then that is another fact that her space of experience and subjective perspective is different from yours. No amount of philosophising can prove these facts wrong. Imagining that there is another unified perspective in which both Joe's and Lucy's perspectives are experienced in a unified way does not solve the problem of why in your perspective you are still experiencing only Joe's experience and not Lucy's. This problem is unresolvable and intractable in both materialism and idealism. It belongs to deep mysteries together with the question of "why there is something rather than nothing". And unfortunately the only metaphysics where it is fully resolved is solipsism (where there is no "someone else" so the problem does not even exist in the first place).

To the Cleric's answer: this problem has nothing to do with "identity" or imagined "separate experiencer" (which are indeed both illusions). I find that most people don't really understand what the problem is actually about.

Let me copy my next answer at reddit, which also explains why solipsism brings up more problems than it solves.

'This is only true if you assume that your [MAL's] attention is finite, and therefore you can only posit yourself in the point of view of one of them. And this is not logical, because if you couldn't maintain your attention at every level simultaneously (i.e. imagining yourself to be both Joe and Lucy, and also being aware of the level above), then as soon as you entered, for example, the POV of Joe, it would all crumble, since you'd forget to maintain the things "outside" Joe.

What I posit is that the attention of infinite consciousness is also infinite, so it is simultaneously looking out through the POV of every illusiory ego-me. Basically, it imagines not remembering what it really is, if you get my meaning. You are an idea that is imagined to feel like it is not just an idea.

"regardless of how many levels of illusions we posit; the answer is still that it is axiomatic/indexical"

That's true. A number of things cannot be explained beyond noting them as facts. You can also not make a logical case for why there is existence instead of non-existence. You just experience something and it's a given that existence IS.'

So the fact that external reality is (or at least, acts as if it is) logical presumes that there is something that holds it together, whether it be laws of nature or an aware mind that maintains it.

[Cleric K]

I didn't really posit that identity would be a fundamental element of reality. But it is a phenomenological element of reality. Even if ultimately, there are no bubbles of consciousness / dissociative boundaries etc., at the state we (or at least, I) am in, it feels like to be the case. And it has to be answered why I cannot, at the moment, access the qualia, or as you say, phase space of other beings. There is something that's blocking me from doing so, even if only phenomenologically, because I can't do it at will.

You may take a look at this. It's the same topic. There I make analogy with the path integral that is instrumental in QM. We may as well imagine that all conceivable states of being are superimposed on our current one but the vast majority of them interfere destructively. The more we understand each other, the more we live in the same meaning, it is as if we move to states of being which within which more and more other states interfere constructively.

Seen in this way, the fact that you don't experience other perspectives at this moment, is no more mysterious than the fact that you don't currently experience your future states of being. It's really the same fundamental question.

[Eugene I.]

There is something that's blocking me from doing so, even if only phenomenologically, because I can't do it at will.

That's right, and the real problem is not why there is a "blocking" (well, it's a different problem). The problem of this topic can be formulated like this (where there is no reference to "identities", "experiencers" etc):
Suppose that two qualia A and B are both experienced, but they are experienced in a "blocked" way with each experience factually disconnected from the other (so they are not experienced in a unified field of experience, even though hypothetically another unified field of experience may still exist). Then why in "this" the particular experience "here and now" only A is experienced and B is never experienced, while in "that" particular experience the B is experienced and never A. There is unexplainable non-equality (non-symmetry) of "this" and "that" experience: "this" experience (of A) is experienced "here", and "that" experience of "B" is not "here". It is actually not the problem of "identity" but the problem of "here-ness". Why this particular "here" is where the experience of "A" belongs and not where the experience of "B" belongs"?

Seen in this way, the fact that you don't experience other perspectives at this moment, is no more mysterious than the fact that you don't currently experience your future states of being. It's really the same fundamental question.

No, it's a different question. The future state will still be experienced "here", while other future states will be experienced not "here". Cleric does not understand what the problem is about.

[Hedge90]

You may take a look at this. It's the same topic. There I make analogy with the path integral that is instrumental in QM. We may as well imagine that all conceivable states of being are superimposed on our current one but the vast majority of them interfere destructively. The more we understand each other, the more we live in the same meaning, it is as if we move to states of being which within which more and more other states interfere constructively.

Seen in this way, the fact that you don't experience other perspectives at this moment, is no more mysterious than the fact that you don't currently experience your future states of being. It's really the same fundamental question.

While I'd like to follow your line of thought, it's a bit confusing to me. Are you saying that by understanding another person in full, we's get to share the same consciousness? That doesn't seem possible at the level where we are situated at. I can't look through your eyes.
I'll read what you linked though, maybe it sheds some light on what I'm not getting.

[Eugene I.]

Here is a good paper on this problem, of course it does not give any answer, but has good points

[Hedge90]

There is something that's blocking me from doing so, even if only phenomenologically, because I can't do it at will.

That's right, and the real problem is not why there is a "blocking" (well, it's a different problem). The problem of this topic can be formulated like this (where there is no reference to "identities", "experiencers" etc):
Suppose that two qualia A and B are both experienced, but they are experienced in a "blocked" way with each experience factually disconnected from the other (so they are not experienced in a unified field of experience, even though hypothetically another unified field of experience may still exist). Then why in "this" the particular experience "here and now" only A is experienced and B is never experienced, while in "that" particular experience the B is experienced and never A. There is unexplainable non-equality (non-symmetry) of "this" and "that" experience: "this" experience (of A) is experienced "here", and "that" experience of "B" is not "here". It is actually not the problem of "identity" but the problem of "here-ness". Why this particular "here" is where the experience of "A" belongs and not where the experience of "B" belongs"?

That's what my original post was all about. Both perspective "A" and "B" are imagined perspectives. From perspective "A", it is impossible to experience perspective "B". In order to reach the fundamental subjectivity that is experiencing both, you have to leave behind "A". "A" will never experience "B". "I", however, is experiencing both "A" and "B".