Suppose there is a boat. As the boat goes on many voyages, its pieces wear out one by one and are replaced. Eventually, there are no original materials left. But the pieces are saved, and they are all put together into a second boat. Which of these two boats is the original, the one that continued to voyage, or the one made out of all the original materials?
This thought experiment is called the Ship of Theseus, and it goes back to Ancient Greece. Its answer, as we talked about in our discussion of reductionism and holism, it that which ship is the original is completely arbitrary, we decide. Objective reality has nothing at all to say on the matter.
That’s fine for inanimate objects, but it can be a lot harder to swallow when we try out the same idea on human beings, particularly ourselves. Every few years, the atoms and molecules that make up our bodies are cycled out and replaced, even in our neurons and other cells that stick around. Imagine if all of the atoms from you of ten years ago were reassembled into a new person, whose consciousness picked up as if waking up after going to bed ten years earlier. Which of these two people is the real you? If we want to be consistent with the Ship of Theseus, the answer is completely subjective. Both versions of you have equal claim to be the original, as was discussed in my YouTube video on the subject.
This feels like nonsense. After all, you know that you are you. This other person is clearly someone else, a new person with false memories. But this concept of a continuing self which is distinct from all others is an illusion. To demonstrate this, let’s ask what a self is supposed to be.
If the self is not found in the matter that makes up our bodies, maybe it is in our soul, a self-contained essence of identity that remains with us, unchanging, from the moment our lives begin until we die. However, as science continues to develop better tools to look into the body and the brain, we understand better and better how the mind works, but there is still no sign of a soul to be found. So it appears that souls are a relic from mythology and folk wisdom, and unless souls are a metaphor or an abstraction of something else, we have no reason to believe they exist.
Perhaps what the soul is an abstraction of is the continually evolving process of consciousness over time. Except our consciousness is not continuous. It turns off when we are asleep, and turns on again when we dream or wake. And we have lapses in consciousness now and then even when we are awake. To top it off, the experience we think of as “this present moment” is actually the result of the brain ordering and constructing an experience based on sensory information it received a fraction of a second ago over a period of a few milliseconds.
With some meditation practice and an open mind, we can discover that our conscious experience is not a homunculus, an internal receiver of perceptions and generator of thoughts and will. Instead, our conscious experience is the perceptions, thoughts, and will, which arise, exist for a moment, and then disappear again. Thus, the consciousness we have now is different from the consciousness we had ten years ago, or even ten minutes ago.
Furthermore, rare phenomena show that our consciousness is not necessarily bound within our bodies. I’m not talking about out-of-body experiences or anything like that; I mean things like connecting brains together to make a collective consciousness. Right now, we have very few examples of joined or split consciousnesses. We would hope so, because performing experiments in this area would be the ultimate personal violation.
Nevertheless, we do have a few points of data. Patients of split-brain surgery who have the two halves of their brain separated can develop two distinct personalities, one in each half of their brain. In terms of joining consciousness together, we have cranially conjoined twins whose brains are connected, and, to a degree, these twins share consciousness.
Science fiction goes crazy on these ideas with thought experiments of collectives, groups of people—perhaps hundreds, thousands, or even millions—who link their minds together and become one giant person. Famous examples include the Borg in Star Trek and the Formics in Ender’s Game.
In these stories, it is sometimes possible for an individual body to disconnect from the collective and become an individual person. But if that person has been in the collective for long enough, they are not the same person they were before they joined. Rather, they are a small version of the collective who now only has access to body and one set of senses.
Thus, it would appear that consciousness is not made up of distinct units, “selves,” that can link together and separate, but it is more like a liquid, which can join, mix, and separate like droplets and bodies of water. This analogy especially makes sense when thinking about the distant future when the vast majority of conscious life will live within an immense virtual reality network.
Coming back to us, here, today, we may see ourselves in a new light. Now, this model we’ve always taken for granted of distinct individuals, of you, me, that person, and the other person, does not seem so set in stone. We don’t all have our own unique, fundamentally separate existences from one another. Rather, it’s almost as if we are a collective already. All living things, lakes of consciousness. One, but for the space between us.
In this view, it can be said that there is life after death. Not an afterlife, nor is it quite reincarnation; it’s all the people and animals who are still alive. I am you, and you are me. We are the universe, and when one droplet of consciousness evaporates, there are still an ocean’s worth remaining.
I realize that a lot of what I said here sounds pretty weird, and I admit it does stray quite a bit beyond the realm of well-grounded science. But it’s not just something I thought up out of nowhere, nor am I repeating something I heard someone else say. I did take some liberties with narrative interpretation—it’s entirely subjective whether we consider everyone today to be a collective or individuals—but the liquid-like interpretation of consciousness is the most logically consistent analogy I can think of given my knowledge of current science and philosophy.
