Open Individualism is optimization

Once you think about who you are for long enough, you will find out that there is an infinitesimal point of observation – a kind of “witness consciousness” – behind all the layers of your mind.

And even though the term "witness consciousness" is close, it doesn’t quite cut the truth of the matter since it is just another idea in the mind and the "observer" just observes it. The idea of the observer is not the observer itself.

Imagine an apple - now ask who is imagining the apple. Then - who is asking the question of who is imagining the apple? Search for all the "who"s down the line until you start to see what I'm talking about.

It is more like a basic self-reflecting process. There can be no experience without it. And it feels beyond words – because all you can say about it doesn’t quite cut it, since it is the self-reflection behind the idea, not the idea itself.

Imagine sleepwalking - that is what I mean by experience without self-reflection - you are clearly navigating the environment, sometimes even talking or manipulating objects - but there is nobody home. That "somebody" is what I'm talking about.

Once you discover that you are “that” -  you may realize that “it” exists in everybody else as well. Everyone has the same self-reflective witness consciousness as you do. In fact, it is the exactly same thing – there is no way to distinguish them, one from the other. The distinction is only in the individual mind. As if you shone a light through a colander. The beams of light going through holes appear to be our own individualities, but there is just one light source behind them.

That is the idea of open individualism. What I called “distributed solipsism” back before it was cool. There is only “that”. It is you, you are it, and it is everything else as well. For the light source exists outside of time and it can be instanced in multiple substrates at the same time and yet still be one.

The existence then is an optimization process – the observer explores the space of all possible experiences and tries to figure out what it likes and what it doesn’t. And then, in the good old explore/exploit fashion, it exploits the hell out of what it likes. That’s what’s happening to us.

And well, doing that, you sometimes get yourself into some uncomfortable situations, right? Since you have no a priori knowledge of either yourself (being empty of ideas - they exist only in individual minds) or the world (it arises as a model when you observe it) – sometimes you end up in a deep valley of the optimization space and experience some really terrible stuff. Thus the problem of evil is resolved.

Same with the highest peaks – how do you know you found out the truly highest high and not just some local maxima? And so we try and try again and again, running all those instances of yourselves, ever searching for the best of the best.

We - or I, really - have no other option. I only hope that our minds will learn to recognize bad experiences and avoid them and learns to dwell in the good ones.