Are we torturing our sleeping selves? The moral rights of of dreaming innies

By Uri Bram

The Effects of Chloroform on the Human Body, by Richard Tennant Cooper, (ca. 1912) Public Domain

Stop me if you've heard this one: imagine a world where people's consciousness is split in two.

Twice each day, they cross the invisible chasm between their parts, living first as one part (let's call it their "Outie") and then as the other part (shall we say, an "Innie").

The Outie exists in the regular outside world, while the Innie lives in a constrained reality that they can't really escape from.

In the moment of switching the perspective suddenly jolts, and neither half can remember what the other one experienced.

Obviously I'm describing the insanely popular TV show Severance, but I want to argue that for many of us this also applies to our waking and sleeping selves. And I semi-seriously think we should wonder: is it possible that we're torturing our Innies?

Think about a person who can never remember their dreams. They know that for the last eight hours they have been in some state, and had some experiences. But they don't know what those experiences are. They tell themselves that their dream-self was probably happy, was probably having good dreams and interesting experiences. Still, every so often they wake up with a feeling of strange foreboding, as if something bad just happened but they can't remember what it was.

The relationship between our waking selves and our dreaming selves is something like the relationship between Severance's Outies and Innies.

There is some parallelism — neither half can fully remember the experiences of the other, but there is some bleeding of mood across the boundaries.

And of course, there is some power imbalance between the two halves: it was the Outie who decided to undergo the consciousness-splitting procedure in the first place, while the Innie just has to live with the consequences.

I'm not actually sure what we can do to give our sleeping selves better experiences. But I feel certain that there are tradeoffs between my Outie and my Innie's wellbeing. For example, if I take on a stressful but high-paying job, my Outie gets to enjoy more money and resources, but my Innie merely gets the stress with no benefits of his own.

It would be hard to quit a stressful job merely because of the possibility that it is causing my dream-self unfair unhappiness. But what if I knew for sure that my dream self (innie) was suffering for something that only benefited my outie? Would I be able to cause myself harm for the benefit of a dream-self I never actually see?

One cornerstone of moral philosophy is that there are tradeoffs a person may make within herself — accepting some harm for some compensating good — while it wouldn't be moral to impose the same harms on an unconsenting stranger in order to claim benefits for oneself.

For example, it's perfectly moral for me to do a workout that feels like getting punched in the face, because the health benefits are worth it to me; it's not moral for me to punch random strangers in the face, although that's also probably going to help me stay in shape.

There are tough moral questions whenever it's ambiguous whether two entities are or aren't separate moral agents in the relevant sense:

• Some people and cultures treat children and parents as separate moral agents, such that a parent can't cause their child harm in order to benefit themselves, while others treat the family as a single moral unit

• Many people's intuitions around crime and punishment are partly around whether personal identity changes enough over time that we're wrongly punishing someone who is not "the same person" who committed the wrong in the first place. As Red says in Shawshank redemption: "That kid's long gone and this old man is all that's left"

• A lot of people struggle with how to treat other people's behavior under the influence of drugs or alcohol: there is both a sense in which we have to hold people responsible for things they did while blackout drunk, and another sense in which we hold that drugs or drink can make someone "a different person." (Also, a third sense in which the moral responsibility changes if the person did not meaningfully choose to become drunk or drugged, e.g. if their drink was spiked).

To this list, I'd like to add "the moral rights of our dreaming selves;" my attempt at a literature review found 0 examples of anyone talking about this, but the expanding circle of moral consideration has ever further to go.

While I can't find anyone discussing dreamers' rights, the psychologist Paul Bloom has apparently posed a similar question about undergoing anaesthesia.

As I understand it, the medical understanding of anaesthesia is that the patient feels no pain and lays down no memories. But Bloom asks, philosophically: what if some patients (in their Innie, anaesthesetized states) are feeling an extraordinary amount of pain, and then having those memories wiped as they zoom back out into awake consciousness?

In some sense, if this were true, it would be better to do a surgery without anaesthetic: at least then the person suffering would be the person benefitting. Currently there is a separate person who briefly comes into existence, gets tortured, then snaps out of existence again. And perhaps this is also true of our dreaming selves, though it's not clear what we can do about it.

This essay original appeared in Atoms vs Bits