The Swap of Perspective
I have a thought experiment for you. Imagine if the next time you go to sleep you wakeup in someone else’s body-mind. And they wake up in yours. A full swap. What would that be like?
If your first reaction to that was, “Oh I would be surprised”, or “It would be so weird”, I have to caution you and clarify the setup. You inherit not just their body, but also their mind.
So your old thoughts and feelings and memories are left behind for them to pick up, and you start off from where they left their mental state. “Aha” you say. “That means I won’t be surprised, it would be like any other day I wake up.. or wait they wake up.. Ummm I’m confused”. Yes, exactly!
If we swap only the first-person experiencer between two body-minds, we end up with something that is impossible to tell apart. Not just for an outsider, but even for the two people that are swapped. It would be a normal day for both of them.
Someone with a scientific or physicalist bent of mind might object here. What do we even mean by a first-person experiencer? And if swapping them around makes no difference to the universe, why are we even talking about it? What proof do we have that such a thing exists to even hypothetically talk about exchanging it between two people?
But to that, my counter objection is very simple. Notice your own experience right now. You are reading this sentence. Is there a first-person experiencer, to whom this sentence is visible, to whom the mind is narrating it in the inner voice, the one who is comprehending these words? Is there a seer behind the eye, a hearer behind the ear? Is there a screen on which the movie of the five senses, and the mental fluctuations of thoughts and feelings are playing seamlessly?
Yes, that one. It’s what you most closely identify yourself with. Your body has changed since you were born. Your mind is fickle too, changing constantly. But this underlying first-person experiencer has seen it all, it was there when you were a kid, and is here right now too. It is there every night you go to sleep, and it is there in your dreams.
So, what if that “you” swapped out to some other body-mind? Nobody, not even that “you” will notice when it happens. Everything will continue as-is. You experience a new body-mind, which keeps functioning like it did before. It’s like the watchers of two different movies swapped their theatres. Or even better, the screens on which the movies were playing were swapped.
You might have a very important objection to all of this. “I get the thought experiment, but it’s a stretch to say that I am the other person, because I certainly feel like I’ve been stuck in this person since forever”.
But where does that certain feeling of being stuck reside? Isn’t that in the mind? If while reading that sentence you swapped out with a person driving down a road, you would be riding down a road, with not a care in the world. But that person would suddenly be here, feeling stuck in this mind since forever. The mind you think you’re stuck in.
If you’ve done some high-school physics, you might realize that this is very much like the theory of relativity. The universe doesn’t care which frame-of-reference you use to solve the equations. It will always give the same answers, even if the calculations seem much simpler, or much more complicated, depending upon the frame you choose.
So which frame-of-reference is the correct one? Are you really you, or are you an illusion? Are you all people simultaneously? Why stop at people, you can do this thought experiment with any living sentient creature.
If a swap of the subject really is undetectable, then it stands to reason that there is no localized subject at all, right? It’s just one of the possible frames. The universe doesn’t privilege one over another. The feeling of subjectivity, the first-person experience, is both empty and whole. It ties together everything, and yet completely eludes a physical definition. And you are that.
You are not stuck in what you think your body or your mind is. You never were. You never came into this body. Nor will you go anywhere when this body dies. You are free. Always were. You are the ground of reality itself. So rejoice.