Individuality and Reality

Your Individuality is far more than a little peculiarity. It is a view that nothing and nobody has except you. Otherwise it/he/she would be you.  Also you will have changed your perspective – yourself – in the next moment and you cannot turn back time.

For convenience, we come to an agreement on "common" objects, which allegedly everyone perceives, although everyone views from his own standpoint. If you see me rolling a pen across the table to you, you may think it is the same pen I see. However, I see something completely different than you do. There is not the slightest match between my perception and yours. Because otherwise I would sit in your place, have your thoughts, memories and feelings and link with them a form rolling towards me.

If we both can speak of a single pen, it is because we have already agreed as children on what we wanted to consider approximately as a common object and more precisely as a pen. We did the same for ourselves before, changing our own perspective and noticing the relative permanence of certain shapes. Should you now realize that "someone" is rolling such an approximated object across the table, you have again briefly changed the point of view, that is, you have put yourself approximately into his perspective and have returned to your own. So you can conclude there is rolling a common object, which is seen "only" from different sides. Actually, however, you have merged two indivisible perceptions over several steps into one unit, which emphasizes a "part" of your own perception (pen) and in addition a "part" of the perception of the other, which you have just "spied out" (pen). 

The unique perspectives thus create, by mutual exchange, an approximate commonality, a so-called real pen.

The widespread assumption of a pen independent of perspectives, in contrast, leads into the void if one keeps asking on "what it consists of": of molecules, these of atoms, these of elementary particles, these of fields, and these of laws of change. But change of what? It is an endless loop.

However, no concept so far is able to explain why a rolling pencil can be quite stable: Neither does it break nor does it change direction when I just think it. I have to touch it. And then it changes immediately for both of us (under the condition that we both look "there").

In the Perspective Exchange Concept, we must therefore assume still largely unknown processes stabilizing our perception.  Their effect must be in accordance with proven physical regularities. Both conclusions are consistent.

The concept of an independent reality, on the other hand, is a crutch that is used to project stability into objects that are not really understood, thus largely hiding individual perceptions within them. This is not consistent.

I do not question macro- and microphysics. They describe what they are looking for, mainly processes of "common" objects. But one must also say: If physics is not fundamental, but everything basically remains individual, it must still be explained in other ways, and physics does not become superfluous, but subordinate. Psychological connections will play an important role, but they too are not fundamental enough. Rather the most abstract and simple structures of consciousness are to be considered first. 

This text is an excerpt from the book
Alternating Consciousness. From Perception to Infinities and Back to Free Will

Original version in German here