Borders enclose and separate us. We assign to them super importance. alongside them we draw supposedly uncrossable limitations in which we think our person identities commence and finish, erecting the metaphysical dividing partitions that enclose each people into numerically exact, numerically distinctive, entities: people. Do the borders among us - actual, mental, neurological, causal, spatial, temporal, and so on. - benefit the metaphysical value mostly accorded them? The vital thesis of I Am You is that our borders don't represent limitations among folks. we're the entire similar individual. diversifications in this heretical subject matter were voiced periodically through the a while (the Upanishads, Averroës, Giordano Bruno, Josiah Royce, Schrödinger, Fred Hoyle, Freeman Dyson). In providing his arguments, the writer is determined by precise analyses of contemporary formal paintings on own id, particularly that of Derek Parfit, Sydney Shoemaker, Robert Nozick, David Wiggins, Daniel C. Dennett and Thomas Nagel, whereas incorporating the perspectives of Descartes, Leibniz, Wittgenstein, Schopenhauer, Kant, Husserl and Brouwer. His improvement of the implied ethical conception is electrified by way of, and attracts on, Rawls, Sidgwick, Kant and back Parfit. the normal, common-sense view that we're each one a separate individual numerically just like ourselves through the years, i.e., that personal identification is closed lower than recognized individuating and making a choice on borders - what the writer calls Closed Individualism - is proven to be incoherent. The demonstration that non-public id isn't really closed yet open issues jointly in a single of 2 new instructions: both there are not any always current, self-identical individuals over the years within the feel commonly understood - one of these view built by way of philosophers as diversified as Buddha, Hume and so much lately Derek Parfit, what the writer calls Empty Individualism - in any other case you're every body, i.e., own identification isn't really closed less than identified individuating and picking out borders, what the writer calls Open Individualism. In making his case, the writer:

- bargains a brand new rationalization either one of cognizance and of self-consciousness

- constructs a brand new conception of Self

- explains psychopathologies (e.g. a number of character ailment, schizophrenia)

- exhibits Open Individualism to be the simplest competing rationalization of who we're

- presents the metaphysical foundations for international ethics.

The e-book is meant for philosophers and the philosophically susceptible - physicists, mathematicians, psychiatrists, psychologists, linguists, desktop scientists, economists, and verbal exchange theorists. it really is obtainable to graduate scholars and complex undergraduates.