PyramidHead
Contributor
Teleology has nothing to do with it. If you dismiss teleology, as you rightly should, there is a glaring problem in need of explanation: why, when it would have been immensely more probable for things to go differently than they did, did they in fact go the exact way they did in order to bring you into existence? It's like playing Russian roulette with 5 bullets in each gun, and winning thousands of times in a row. One small change, one instance of a different sperm from one of your ancestors making it to the egg first, and you would not be here at all--assuming the ordinary view is correct. From your perspective, that means something grossly improbable has occurred, and it is improbable for an improbable thing to occur.
From all the foregoing arguments and thought experiments, it should at least strike you as logically possible that you would have been any conscious being that was born in your place, even if conditions were different (and therefore you must be any conscious being right now). So, two explanations are on the table for your begetting: one that makes your existence a ridiculously improbable stroke of luck, and the other that makes it virtually inevitable. If I randomly drew a red bead from an urn containing a million beads, and asked you which of two hypothetical urns it was, one containing all red beads or one containing just one red beads while all the others were blue, you would have to answer that the former hypothesis is a million times more likely than the latter. In the same way, if universalism is possibly true, it must be trillions upon trillions of times more likely than the ordinary view, because there are many more than a million ways that your existence could have been prevented under that view. This statistical inference elevates universalism from merely being a plausible way of solving some thought experiments to a metaphysical near-necessity.
If we are to use an abstract model to represent this problem, I would put it like this. Suppose there is something I will call "bare consciousness" (or empty consciousness, i.e. consciousness without any content), and that this consciousness is instantiated by "actors" in search of a role to enact. So there are actors and there is something like the material world but with zombie humans in it. Zombie people would be things physically identical to the kind of beings we are but without consciousness. They have working brains, but nothing is having the subjective experience of being them. They're zombies. And then, actors randomly choose one of those humans to "haunt" them and thereby subjectively experience what it is like to being the human they have picked out. So, each actors is allowed to experience whatever is going on in a particular brain. At that's all the actor is able to experience. There's nothing else for the actor to experience. All the actor can remember is whatever this one particular human happens to remember. I don't see therefore how the actor wouldn't take whatever biographical data, perception data, memory data etc. he is made to experience, and take this set of data to entirely define its me-ness.
Accessorily, I don't see in this model where there would be any "probability" problem. Each actor picks out one human at random and that's it. The actor itself is identical to all other actors. Whatever is specific to his experience of haunting a human being comes from this human being. There's a one hundred percent probability of each actor picking out one human and this human is whatever it happens to be. And of course, each human can only produce the biographical data and thoughts that go with what it is. There's no lottery. Each drop of water is whatever it is. Fat chance. Well, 100% certainty.
Where we disagree here may be that you may still want to call each actor "me". As I seen it, each actor experiencing a human being will not think of himself as a me because actors don't think for themselves in this model. Instead, each actor will subjectively experience one human being thinking of himself as a "me". What matters here is not the actor subjectively experiencing the me-ness data created by the brain of the human being he is haunting, but it is the data itself in that it is specific to that human being and it is the mechanism giving rise to that sense of being me, mechanism which is probably best understood as a survival mechanism produced by evolution. So, all humans will have it and all actors haunting a human will subjectively experience the me-ness of the particular human they're haunting. Actors can even hop from one human to another every now and then, every millisecond if you wish, without any difference in the model.
In that model, I wouldn't see why it would be better to talk of "me" like you propose to do. It's completely irrelevant that we can conceive a thought -experiment where there would be strictly identical humans with identical biographical data and possibly identical perception and impressions etc. They will both create a sense of being me and these would be identical. So what? Each would still have the sense of being themselves without confusion and with the potential to diverge as soon as something different would come into the relative experience as it will always be possible.
EB
Your model does not solve the probability problem, because despite the stipulation that these actors are all identical, they are nonetheless not indistinguishable, i.e., not just one actor. There would still need to be some mechanism of determining which actor was YOU, and why THAT actor (identical though it was to all the others) was selected to inhabit the life of EB, rather than another actor which would not be you. Additionally, there is also the larger problem, not related to probability but perhaps to ontology, of why you are even among the bare consciousnesses that are available to inhabit human beings. What could possibly justify one way or another your presence among the potential bearers of conscious experience, if they are all distinct from one another numerically?
It also does not solve any of the problems of twins in the womb, brain bisection, teleportation, and so on. Parfit's example of splitting his brain temporarily, listening to a boring lecture in one ear and a radio concert in the other, and then restoring the connection, still leaves open the question of what kind of experience I will have, who will be having it, how many subjects of experience will there be, what happens to them when they multiply or fuse, and so on. The many-subjects model in any form, bare or not, just couches the problem in a supernatural context without actually changing anything substantive.
With one small tweak, your model can be rescued: there is just one actor. This actor plays all the roles simultaneously, though as you point out, from each perspective the actor only has access to the integrated contents of whatever it is "inhabiting". Note that this interpretation is purely figurative; there are actually no disembodied bare consciousnesses, singular or plural. Universalism is not committed to there being something like a "universal consciousness", a substance or entity that literally inhabits otherwise zombie-fied bodies. It is simply a way of showing that any conscious experience is equally mine, irrespective of the nature of consciousness or self. Even if there was no such thing as a persisting self, and all that could be spoken of were infinitesimal time-slices of isolated experience stitched together by brains to form the illusion of an enduring consciousness, all of those experiences would still be happening to me, would still be this and here and now.