“Why do I exist?”  This question has been around since dandelions were invented, and it seems to pop up about as frequently. The question spills perennially from philosophy departments in somber halls of academia out onto our comic pages—Peanuts, Bloom County, Arlo and Janis, Hagar the Horrible—and into almost every other media avenue of note.  Can yet another book shed any additional light on the age-old conundrum?

Well, perhaps this one does, and what is even better, the reader gets to have a little fun in the process.

There is always the theistic answer to the existence problem: “God put me here!” But this is a secular book, and it begins with a hard-nosed premise: No deities or “watchmakers” are allowed responsibility for my existence. All right, so move to the evolutionary answer: Homo sapiens possesses consciousness because the trait plays a major role in our survival. It permits modeling and tentative “run-throughs” of situational responses: “What’s the best way to trap a mammoth?” or more pertinent today, “What’s the game plan for convincing Susan to go out with me?” Because it allows us to predict the behavior of others, consciousness is obviously of high reproductive value. But the selective value of the "I" only explains generic consciousness for the species, not why my particular “I” is here, in this brain, at this time.

After a three chapter skirmish with the so-called origin view—the popular belief that I am here because my parents provided a unique set of genes that specified “me”, the book sets aside that notion as egregiously inadequate to explain specific first-person views. The author concludes that “irreducibly random chance” is the only possible answer as to why my “I” is in this brain as opposed to someone else. Well, so what?  I have been touted as a cosmic accident many times—perhaps with less conviction and less supporting evidence—but I read in this genre a lot, and this is not the first time in my short history that I have been labeled a “child of chance.”

Apparently, the adverb “irreducibly” does make it a big deal.  If my particular subjectivity is here for irreducibly random reasons, then I am logically permitted to ask some interesting metaphysical questions. For example, “Why can’t I appear again (in the future) the same way I appeared this time?” The author claims that I can—with a few, intractable probabilistic qualifications. These qualifications, and the reasons behind them, make up the remaining five chapters of the book.

Presented light-heartedly and early-on as “a Christmas present for atheists” and then seriously as a scholarly examination of where determinism and chance interact in our personal existence, the book first examines in detail what scientific and philosophical literature exists on the origin of individual self-awareness. As the author notes, the shelves are not overflowing.

A systematic study of the resources that are on the shelves suggests that subjective direction can only be dealt with probabilistically—possession of first-person view is what is called a “stochastic” event. The author then proceeds to search the discipline of probability for what this might mean regarding the future re-existence of a first-person view that exists now, like yours or mine. In other words, is it possible—if our ownership of a first-person view is attributable to irreducibly random chance alone—that you or I could appear again in the same way we appeared this time?

Remarkably, with no deities, no mysticism, no supernatural handholding, and no New-Age distortions of reality, the author finally presents a strictly secular, reality-based path for what one might call “probabilistic immortality.” It is not the best of all immortalities; it is a bare bones, stripped-down, version, and it only operates intermittently. But it is an intriguing hypothesis. By “stripped-down,” the author means that only essential subjectivity and subjective direction can periodically reappear. These are the author’s labels for what other writers might call primary consciousness combined with a first-person view, the basic mental duo common to all self-aware beings. Primary or essential consciousness is what is left when traditional long-term memory is subtracted from the brain, including those engrams that underlie personality traits. This restriction, of course, makes any essential consciousness identical to any other. Except for the specific first-person view, your basic awareness of being is like mine; mine is like Julius Caesar’s; Ceasar’s was like Socrates’, and so on, ad infinitum—or almost ad infinitum, anyway.

The author argues that because we all experience quintessential being in the same way; essential consciousness is “symmetrical” across self-aware populations, here and now, future and past. The suggested hypothesis is that as a future self-awareness initializes in an organism capable of hosting conscious- ness, there is a finite chance that the subjective direction (first-person view) acquired by that developing consciousness can be “congruent” with your or my current subjective direction—after we are no longer around, of course. Wait—you say the directional correspondence of incipient first-person views is too abstract a concept for you to deal with? It turns out we don’t have to deal with it. The author notes that “irreducibly” random chance has sole dominion here, not to make congruence have to happen, but to provide the pathway through which it can happen. The pair of abstractions, irreducibly random initialization of subjective directions and potential directional congruence (over an infinity of possible first-person views), can duke it out by themselves, so to speak.

At least once, irreducibly random chance swung the directional vector in your direction. (You are here, aren’t you?)  If the  probabilistically guided vector favors your subjective view again, the essential consciousness of the brain hosting the (re)initializing "you" will first instantiate a first-person view congruent to your old view, then play its normative role in the construction of a new, rationally derived self-awareness and off "you" go again.

The text travels an irregular path as it weaves a web to support this argument. Topics discussed include: what is consciousness?; the “symmetry” of primary consciousness; theories of the mind-body problem; exploration of the “I” envelope, an innovative and systematic way to evaluate “survival of self” thought experiments; and others—a virtual college textbook of things to ponder. By the time Chapter 8 is reached, however, the path traversed appears in retrospect to be a logical one—one that had to be traversed academically to justify our use of probability theory. The last chapter demonstrates how one can use the standard tools of probability to analyze a randomly appearing “I”.

The author is careful to point out that there is no certainty that ones first-person view will reappear as time marches on, just that the phenomenon can occur and that such a recurrence would mesh smoothly with all known facts of physical reality, including how your first-person view initialized this time. The book notes that “irreducible” also implies that nothing can diminish the odds of a first-person view being “you” in the future. (They are the same odds that you would appear this time.) Conversely, nothing can enhance the odds that you will reappear.

This is a challenging yet fascinating treatise. It employs unexpected humor and uniquely-original meta- phor to make a difficult question in philosophy accessible to the intelligent layman. Rhetoric aside, it serves as an excellent introduction to the subject of survival of self, and it single-handedly creates a new, nongenetic field of probabilistic being. Maybe the book is a Christmas present for non-theists—I’m still thinking about it. But it if I have to battle dandelions again, is contemplating the odds of re-existence something I really want to do?... Perhaps—but promise me that I’ll have no memory of previous bouts.