Zuboff’s Universalism

Philosopher Arnold Zuboff's approach to consciousness is founded on a metaphysical position he terms ‘universalism’ (also known as ‘open individualism’), which states that there is exactly and only one subject of experience, and that this one subject of experience is instantiated wherever (and whenever) the qualitative pattern of immediate awareness occurs (Zuboff, 1990, 2025).

Universalism and the Illusion of Separate Selves

While Zuboff's Universalism is more a theory of personal identity than a theory of consciousness per se, it would, if true, directly affect the entire enterprise of theories of consciousness and, for that matter, consciousness studies in general. Thus, Zuboff's Universalism is classified here in the “Challenge” category.

Zuboff stresses that token differences of brain, body, place, time, and even disunified contents do not multiply subjects. He says, “Thus all the lives and bodies of conscious beings are equally yours and mine.” He contends that the common belief in distinct persons as separate centers of consciousness is a fundamental error arising from an illusion of perspective. He says, “I am equally every conscious being; all experiences are ‘mine-now’ in the same sense in which this experience is mine-now” (Zuboff, 1990, 2008, 2025).

Again, Zuboff is not so much offering a process, mechanism, or substance that accounts for personal phenomenal consciousness, as do other theories of consciousness, but instead he is transforming our whole concept of personal phenomenal consciousness in this radical, even bizarre way. So, while reducing the number of fundamental conscious entities from innumerable to one would not explain phenomenal consciousness as other theories (claim to) do, it would certainly reshape what we have thought to be the landscape of consciousness (pardon the pun).

The core of Zuboff’s argument centers on the nature of “immediacy”—the first-person, inner-awareness, subjective quality of experience. We know who we are not by checking objective facts about ourselves (e.g., our name or domicile) but by recognizing that we are the subject whose inner awareness of experience is immediate, first-person, and utterly private. This is standard stuff, but then Zuboff makes his off-the-road move. He argues that this quality is not unique to any single individual; it is a universal characteristic of all consciousness. Thus, all conscious experiences are equally “mine” because they share this quality, and all conscious beings are equally “me.” As Zuboff puts it, “In all conscious life there is only one person—I—whose existence depends merely on the presence of a quality that is inherent in all experience—its quality of being mine, the simple immediacy of it for whatever is having experience” (Zuboff, 1990, 2025).

Moreover, a particular experience is like a novel rather than like a copy of a novel: it can be instantiated multiple times, endlessly, while remaining numerically one; likewise its subject, according to Zuboff. He says, “…what we think of as a particular experience is a concrete universal, like a particular novel, and remains numerically one if instantiated more than once…” The identity of experience/subject “depends merely on a pattern and is therefore indifferent to changes in the particularity of the medium,” a way of thinking that reflects Zuboff’s commitment to functionalism as a controlling theory of consciousness, in synergistic partnership with universalism (Zuboff, 1990, 2008).

According to Zuboff, the illusion of perception is an illusion of separation; the feeling of being a single, isolated self is explained by the simple fact that the content of one person's experience is ‘cut off’ from the content of another's. This lack of integration leads to the “false impression” that one's local experience is the only one that is “mine.” He compares this to a person who has only ever seen one red object and mistakenly concludes that the property of redness is confined to that object alone.

The “Hard Game” Versus the “Easy Game”

Zuboff is most well-known for his probabilistic argument for universalism, which he considers “decisive.” He likens the conventional view of personal identity to a “hard game” and universalism to an “easy game” (Zuboff, 2024, 2025).

• The Hard Game: The conventional view of personal identity is based on an egregiously long series of extremely improbable events, such as the specific sperm cell reaching the specific egg in your conception and in every single one of your ancestors' conceptions. According to Zuboff, the odds against your existence under this view are so staggeringly high—“one in 8 septillion” (8×10^24^[1]) for just three begettings—that your existence, while not logically impossible, is an “absurdly improbable occurrence” from your own perspective.
• The Easy Game: Universalism, by contrast, is Zuboff’s “easy game” because it asserts that your existence is guaranteed as long as any conscious being exists. The specific details of your conception, i.e., which sperm and which egg, going back to the beginning, are irrelevant because “you”—the “you” that you know and feel is you—would exist no matter which conscious being emerged.

To Zuboff, “the only view that does not make your existence incredible, and that is not therefore (from your perspective) an incredible view, is that any conscious being would necessarily have been you anyway.” Given the overwhelming improbability of the hard game, he says, a rational person must infer that the easy game must be true. He argues that this inference principle is the same logical reasoning used in all empirical discovery (Zuboff, 2024).

Another of Zuboff’s arguments for universalism is his brain-replacement thought experiment. “Imagine that you and a duplicate of yourself are lying unconscious, next to each other, about to undergo a complete step-by-step exchange of bits of your bodies. It certainly seems that at no stage in this exchange of bits will you have thereby switched places with your duplicate. Yet it also seems that the end-result, with all the bits exchanged, will be essentially that of the two of you having switched places. Where will you awaken? I claim that one and the same person possesses both bodies, occupies both places and will experience both awakenings, just as a person whose brain has been bisected must at once experience both of the unconnected fields of awareness, even though each of these will falsely appear to him as the entirety of his experience. I also claim that the more usual apparent boundaries of persons are as illusory as those in brain bisection; personal identity remains unchanged through any variation or multiplication of body or mind” (Zuboff, 1990).

The obvious counterargument against universalism’s seemingly overwhelming statistics is (i) to calculate, or to imagine, all the individuals who did not come into existence and who did not attain consciousness via the innumerable combinations, permutations, and sequences that did not occur; and (ii) to recruit the ‘selection effect,’ meaning that only those individuals who did come into existence and did attain consciousness could question their existence and wonder why they are seemingly so special. Yet, I [RLK] must admit that I am not wholly persuaded by this ‘obvious counterargument.’ It’s not that I would subscribe to universalism. No. It’s that I cannot rid myself of wondering if there were something else going on here.

RLK’s Note and Zuboff’s Reply

I [RLK] sent my above summary of “Zuboff's Universalism” to Arnold Zuboff himself, and received the following gracious and enlightening response.

“Thank you very much for understanding me so well. I’m not used to that...

“Regarding the selection effect you discuss: I’m not at all sure in what way it’s supposed to resolve the improbability of your coming into existence under the usual view. Yes, someone incredibly lucky would have come into existence—but from your perspective, it would have been far more probable that it was someone else. It would then have been someone else whom that selection effect was somehow getting into existence—and not you. The fact that you could not be making this inference if you didn’t exist is surely irrelevant to your ability to make it, given that you do exist.

“Recall the hotel analogy: Only a player who has awakened can infer the greater probability of the easy game (where all sleepers awaken) over the hard game (where only one random sleeper awakens). I wonder how that fact could be thought to interfere with the awakened player’s inference. How would a selection effect have managed to awaken that player rather than another in the hard game?

“You make it clear that you don’t endorse this selection effect objection to my argument. I would question whether this deserves to be considered ‘the obvious objection’. Not that I can think of a more deserving candidate for that title.”

I [RLK] appreciate Arnold's response, and reproduce it here with his permission. I would only clarify that I do “endorse” the selection effect objection, but at the same time, I am not at all comfortable in doing so. I am sufficiently “bothered” by Arnold's arguments (“bothered” as a high compliment) as to wonder whether, indeed, there are additional pieces to this puzzle yet unknown.

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Subsequently, Arnold thought it helpful to include an excerpt of his book, Finding Myself, which explores the implications of universalism, including its claimed role in explaining the anthropic principle.

A reversal of ordinary thinking gets us to considering that an experience being mine could be due to its inherent first-person character rather than to an objective identity of the thing that's having it. In this reversal of thinking, it is this inherent character that, making the experience mine, makes whatever is having it me.

Cutting loose from the constricting identity of a thing allows us to discover that the inherent character making experience mine would be there equally in all experience, thus making all things having all experience me. The confined reach of integrated mental contents would be what made it falsely seem that experience being mine was itself confined by the identity of the one thing having that small measure of integrated experience.

We explore the conceptual rightness of this reversal of ordinary thinking. We come to see the incoherence of limits to what I am in eternal recurrence, trading of parts between duplicates, variations in all sorts of properties other than the having of experience with the character of being mine and the experiencing of non-integrated experiential contents after brain bisection.

Next, we see that a piece of evidence that I have in my own possession—my own existence—requires this reversal of thinking to make the observing of it at all probable from my perspective. Just as I would be required to judge, from the perspective of my own awakening (in a hotel with countless forced sleepers isolated in rooms), that my awakening had resulted from an easy game of all sleepers being awakened rather than a hard game with only one random awakening, I would from the perspective of having awakened to my own consciousness be required to judge that this resulted from the easy game of my identity being guaranteed by the character of experience rather than the hard game of only one thing that was me emerging from all the begettings of me and every one of the ancestors that were needed in the hard game for my begetting eventually to occur.

Throw in as well that making it at all probable from my perspective that I am in a physical world with fine tuning for the possibility of conscious life requires that I myself would have been awakening to consciousness anywhere in a multiverse that the required fine tuning had happened to appear (the easy game) rather than having my identity confined to just one physical world whether the fine tuning happened to appear there or not (the hard game). I can now explain the physical laws of my world.

All of this based on a simple shift in emphasis from a thing being me to an experience being mine (Zuboff, 2025).

Footnote

[1]. To calculate the probability of you being ‘You,’ one only starts with the 200,000,000 sperm cells, which are the contents of a single ejaculate. How many different possible ejaculates that could have happened (not that actually did happen) in the sexual lifetime of an average male? 10 million? 100 million? Women are born with 1-2 million eggs in their ovaries. There are roughly 10,000 generations of Homo sapiens, an estimated 100 billion to 1 trillion humans who have ever existed—and this does not count the whole history of pre-Homo sapiens evolution, not to mention the unfathomable whole history of particles and fields generated from the Big Bang. So, what is the probability of you being ‘You’?