A Glass Tunnel

Saturday, August 31

Good morning.

Continuing with yesterday’s theme, today’s text also deals with mortality.

It comes from the latter half of Reasons and Persons, after author Derek Parfit presents an argument that there is no “deep truth” to individual identity that persists over time — in other words, no unitary soul that stretches across every moment of our life, connecting the various discrete slices of experience, witnessing them all.

Put another way, there is some sense in which the past versions of ourselves are already dead. The consciousness that we naively think of as “me,” experiencing this current moment, will not live to experience life in the future. Instead, it’ll be replaced by a new person, who just so happens to be psychologically continuous with us: connected by an unbroken string of events, and sharing a set of memories, attitudes, and beliefs that mostly overlap with our own.

Parfit reflects:

Is the truth depressing? Some may find it so. But I find it liberating, and consoling. When I believed that my existence was a further fact, I seemed imprisoned in myself. My life seemed like a glass tunnel, through which I was moving faster every year, and at the end of which there was darkness. When I changed my view, the walls of my glass tunnel disappeared. I now live in the open air. There is still a difference between my life and the lives of other people. But the difference is less. I am less concerned about the rest of my own life, and more concerned about the lives of others.

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There are multiple good reasons to be suspicious of our instincts toward individualism, and to increase our identification with the people, and the world, around us.

One benefit is that death — or, at least, our own death — becomes a less important fact about the world.

When we stop seeing ourselves as individuals who temporarily exist within a universe, and instead as a universe that temporarily manifests itself as individuals, we might lose a certain sense of security. But like Parfit, I think we gain a deeper one — one that is more consoling, and which better reflects the ultimate truth about our world.