Benj Hellie's vertiginous question asks why, of all the subjects of experience out there, this one—the one corresponding to the human being referred to as Benj Hellie—is the one whose experiences are live? (The reader is supposed to substitute their own case for Hellie's.)[1] In other words: Why am I me and not someone else?
A simple response is that this question reduces to "Why are Hellie's experiences live from Hellie's perspective," which is trivial to answer. However Hellie argues, through a parable, that this response leaves something out. His parable describes two situations, one reflecting a broad global constellation view of the world and everyone's phenomenal features, and one describing an embedded view from the perspective of a single subject. The former seems to align better with the simple response above, but the latter seems a better description of consciousness.
Hellie's argument is closely related to Caspar Hare's theories of egocentric presentism and perspectival realism, of which several other philosophers have written reviews.[2] [3] Similar questions are also asked repeatedly by J. J. Valberg in justifying his horizonal view of the self.[4] Tim S. Roberts refers to the question of why a particular organism out of all the organisms that happen to exist happens to be you as the "Even Harder Problem of Consciousness".[5]
Thomas Nagel has extensively discussed the question of personal identity in The View from Nowhere. It contrasts passive and active points of view in how humanity interacts with the world, relying either on a subjective perspective that reflects a point of view or an objective perspective that takes a more detached perspective.[6] Nagel describes the objective perspective as the "view from nowhere", one where the only valuable ideas are ones derived independently.[7]
Open individualism is a philosophy of personal identity that denies the existence of any inherent self, and argues that the sense of self is illusory.[8] The answer to the vertiginous question according to open individualism is that all experiences are "live”, but the illusion of separateness caused by the physical brain and memories causes it to feel like, from each person's psychological perspective, that their experiences are the only ones live. It is closely related to the concept of anattā in Buddhist philosophy.