A “psychological criterion” Closed Individualist and an Open Individualist go into a bar.

The bartender is an Empty Individualist.

Bartender: “Hello, gentlemen, how can the personal time-slices of my (illusory) future self be of use for you two this evening? Should they arrange themselves in a movie-like sequence of this bartender serving gin and tonic to the two recently arrived customers?”

Open Individualist: “Yes, that’s fine with me. Thank you.”

Closed Individualist of the psychological criterion type: “Well, that would be very nice indeed. I must ask, though, before I commit my entire existence to having to deal with an embarrassing episode: What is the reputation of gin and tonic?”

Bartender: “Gin and tonic can make you more aware of who you are: The here and now, my friend. Sadly, the more we talk, the more time-slices get stuck in the interstice of a conversation, and the fewer time slices are peacefully drunk in the here-and-now. Better hurry my drink-making!”

Closed Individualist: “Alright, that sounds good enough. After all, I am trying to forget myself. I am here with my friend -who suffers from delusions of grandeur, you see?- trying to cheer me up. I messed up, I messed up badly. I ruined a birthday surprise. I forgot to bring candles to a friend’s party, and she couldn’t have the experience of blowing over the candles. You know, the candles that give you a sense of the time you have lived, the time you have left. And they all have this symbolism about the impermanence of time, and the beauty of the finite threads we each get to live.”

Bartender: “Ah, yes, the wonderful illusion of interconnectedness! It is a grand mirrage.”

Open Individualist: “Ah, my dear closed, stop this melodramatic scene with one sharp lightning bolt of awakened awareness. And you bartender, I like your straightforward approach, but for the time being you need to let us alone. We are still trying to figure out something. We didn’t define away our problems, sir. So if you let us…

“Closed, look, forgetting a friend’s birthday candles, thus missing out on an opportunity for contemplating the impermanent nature of all phenomena is in some sense ironic, isn’t it? Why do you cry the tears of missing out on an impermanent experience that didn’t happen, whose main metaphorical message would have been that all phenomena is impermanent?  This, of course, including impermanent metaphors about the impermanent just as well. Why feel sad for a reality that wasn’t?”

Closed: “Well, when you put it that way… but I am connected to the people I interact with. Their own conception of self, their views about how time works, and the meaning of death, even that. I am connected to all of that. So when you speak as if looking from above (you’ll have to excuse me, that’s how you come across), I can’t quite relate, because I think of my friend who didn’t blow the candles, and I get stuck. It’s an empathy entanglement: she didn’t get to experience the metaphor of impermanence that she needed. I don’t know why you like to call the awareness of impermanence ‘liberation’ but from my point of view, reflection upon impermanence is the deepest way to form connections with other beings. And that is beautiful… how reality is made of countless beings coming together to connect with one another. Perhaps all of the actions and phenomena are impermanent. But the learning we achieve by being connected to one another is beautiful and much more long-lasting than the phenomena themselves. It is as if by being a tiny impermanent little human, you help those around you and contribute to the collective accumulation of knowledge and discovery. Perhaps death is real and is coming everyday. But perhaps there is also a way of beating it: To make of the time we have something profound.”

“Also… if you truly think of all phenomena in the way you say you do… how come you always come begging me to give you big ass [parental discretion advised] bong rips? If you are enlightened, how come you have this dependence to altered states of consciousness? Why can’t you profess the good news that we are all one and one with the stone without getting stoned and being a stone at the same time?”

Open: “Oh, that’s nothing of the sort! You use a little thread’s quirks and mistakes to judged the nature of the light that be!

“All phenomena are impermanent, yes. But look, this impermanence happens at the level of our experience. In reality, all of the karmic links that unite the web of life are a web of 4-dimensional qualia wavelets. I.e. pieces of self-existing qualia crystals from eternity interlinked in a way that minimizes the energy of the configuration.

“Of course, natural selection has recruited brains that allow the mutual coexistence of qualia crystals with competing alignments and often contradictory 4D unfolding that interfere badly with each other. If it weren’t for the interference of perfect forms with each other that are rendered possible by the quantum properties of the human brain and its oversoul connection, hedonic tone would always be positive. In fact, hedonic tone is just the awareness and surprise of existing. Except that such awareness and surprise gets distracted and therefore, ‘poorly unfolded’ when a person tries to think a beautiful thought.

“The possibility of interference between the perfect forms, though, is an opportunity for exploring systematically the state-space of possible recursive phenomenal binding operations. Via considering all of the local constraints at once, your mind has its horizon of conceivability amplified, and a larger range of…”

Closed: “Where are you going with this again?” -interrupted- “I didn’t ask you to explain to me the nature of life, the universe and everything else, did I?”

Open: “Sorry, please beeaaarrrr… with me. It seems to me clear that there is no way out of the labyrinth of mirrors that confuse you (and the bartender!) that does not, at some point, use a sustained intent to thoroughly self-discover…”

Bartender: “Here you have, gentlemen. Gin and tonic to tone down consciousness. Oh, and before I forget, the past time-slice with whom I am ontologically disconnected, you know, the one who took your orders? He was a good chap. Well, apparently that one is no more, you understand? So please give me your condolences. I am trying to move on now, and never look back to the past. But it’s hard, you know? It’s hard to remember that each moment is the only moment in which I actually exist…”

Open: “THANK YOU… now” -looking at Closed, ignoring the bartender, whose speech was utterly predictable … those empties and their constant funerals – “look, I am trying to say that even though there is the apparent passage of time, in reality all of your building blocks are themselves self-existing eternal jewels stored in a higher dimension. I wouldn’t say this if it weren’t already a verified fact: If you do the right consciousness transformations in your heart, you will see that there is a valve that connects you to the rest of the network of life. Opioids dull that connection, whereas psychedelics revive it. Got it?”

Closed: “But I’m afraid. I’m afraid to listen to you more. Because there are views that I have that I doubt anyone else does. I have unique points of view. My particular life path is irreplaceable, and the special insights I’ve obtained cannot be understood but by me alone.”

Open: “Look, let’s get real. When you think about a point of view that you feel like you alone have, what makes you suspect that such feeling is accurate? With what information do you actually conclude that you have a unique point of view?”

Closed: “Usually because I realize that I have a piece of information that others couldn’t have gotten, for historical, personality or even happenstance reasons. In other words, if in a big discussion I’m completely out of synch with everyone else, and they all have opinions different than mine, I can usually pin-point the source: My incredible brilliance assembled what they know with what I know and made a new model altogether.”

Open: “Alright, so when you obtained that unique point of view, how did you do it? Once you had the pieces of information on the table and you simply had to ‘connect the dots’, how did you do that part?”

Closed: “I just did, spontaneously. I don’t know… Maybe that’s where my personality hides. Where I can’t see it. What makes me do what I do with the ‘style’ with which I do it. My mind went through the possibilities and I got a feeling of things fitting in their appropriate place, no more no less.”

Open: “At that point in time, controlling for all the information available, then, who were you? If someone else with the same information in mind had tried to think what you thought, would she have been able to?”

Closed: “Probably, I mean, I can’t really be sure. I’m don’t know if I really have some kind of original style for thinking, or for working ‘in the dark’ when it comes to the unconscious.”

Open: “Who was there, once you control for the information? Who made the ‘observation’ that makes you special? Who is responsible for making you special? Who made the ‘move’ that somehow put you on a special place within reality?”

Closed: “Well, the universe. I think…”

Open: “You are the boundary of your world. You are the entirety of the universe ‘acting’ -which amounts to managing qualia forces- in the precise time and place that you inhabit.” – Open was standing on the chair, with a finger pointing towards the sky. Well, the ceiling, which wasn’t very clean, since the bartender didn’t want to create time-slices-beings whose sole purpose was that of cleaning a dirty ceiling. He was, clearly, fanatical. Conjuring Wish Substance out of the air.

Closed: “But why do I feel like it is me, and not the universe, the one who acts?”

Bartender: “Why does it feel like what?” -interrupted the Bartender, while ignoring the fanaticism of Open- ” On my side I only feel the present moment. I only fear the present moment. I only act in the present moment. In fact, the present moment is the one that is doing all of the acting!”

Open: “Did we call you into the conversation?”

Bartender: “No, sorry. Here is your check.”

Open: “Thanks. Anyway, what I am trying to get at, is that Closed individualists are trapped in a consciousness manifold of their own making. Because they only know of closed topological boundaries, and have no experience with building blocks well known to open individualists: The Open Source Open Individualist WikiConsciousness collective philosophical fantasy Toolkit! It has strange loops, awakened barriers that notice the differences without compressing judgements, non-judgment sensing, hemispherical neglect, feeling of normalcy “salvia normal” with neglect of the bizarre, and the technique of “noticing the global phenomenal binding non-barrier” that was invented in the rainbow tribes of the West. Thus, what is easy and intuitive for an Open Individualist, specially one well trained and with years of Open Individualist Strategy videogame playing, can be *inconceivable* to a Closed Individualist. It is far, far outside of the horizon of conceivability for lost Closed ones.”

Closed: “True, I have no idea what those alternative barriers look like. Personally, I am constantly terrified about barriers. I’m the only one in my whole family that is a psychological criterion closed individualist. I just now felt the existential crisis once again. Look, if the psychological criterion is a matter-of-fact, a brute state of affairs, then who are we to decide who we are? I could drink a little bit too much” -Bartender re-fills the gin and tonic of Closed- “and then out of the Blue, simply, disappear. I mean, stop existing.”

Open: “Of course people in that case wouldn’t notice any change, right? You would have crossed your personal identity barrier, by moving sufficiently far from the centroid of your psychological attributes. Then you would stop existing. Functionally, though, the transition would not be detectable. Do you realize you just endorsed the personal identity version of epiphenomenalism? Is that a boundary you are willing to cross?”

Closed: “In general, boundaries are there for a reason. I generally don’t cross them. Talking about boundries, wasn’t this a joke? Doesn’t it have an ending? It certainly had all of the looks of it at the start. Something about two persons going into a bar. Should we close it?”

Open: “Well, if I finish this joke, it would technically be an Open-ended joke, right?”

Closed: “But if I am the one who ends it, I would deliver a punchline, and make it Closed-ended.”

Bartender: “After feeling ignored for a while, I have decided to use this last here-and-now to finalize the plot. Why? Because all of your talk was empty and it looked like fluff.”

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Inspired by: David Pearce, Daniel Kolak, Derek Parfit, Buddha, and Krishna. Peace be upon the emptiness.