Comment by lioeters
7 hours ago
A twist on this theory: One-Observer Universe.
It is the hypothesis that all observers are actually manifestations of a single observer experiencing all of time, space, and every point of view. All world lines across spacetime are parts of one single line "like a huge tangled knot" traced out by the one observer.
I'd go further and say this isn't just a hypothesis, it's the actual nature of reality. Any subjective experience is always mine and now for all observers, for all times. No subject has ever experienced or will experience reality any other way. The screen is the same no matter what movie is playing on it.
Arnold Zuboff makes a case for this in "One Self: The Logic of Experience" (Inquiry, 1990) [0]. He calls it universalism: there has only ever been one subject of experience.
One of his thought experiments: imagine a meteorite is about to wipe out all life around you right now, instantly. If this exact experience - being you, here, thinking this - is instantiated anywhere else in the universe, it will continue there without any gaps.
Hindu mystics were already exploring and articulating these non-dual concepts in great detail thousands of years ago, in the Upanishads. As Robert Jastrow would say:
"For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance, he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries."
[0] https://gwern.net/doc/philosophy/mind/1990-zuboff.pdf
I experienced that after smoking salvia
If you subscribe the the many worlds interpretation, you can basically look at observers as existing within the space of eigenvalues of operators acting on the massively entangled wave function of their respective universe.
I think some branches of Buddhism derived this too.
Originally derived from Hinduism thousands of years before Buddha (see Advaita for a modern view and Upanishads or Gita/Vedas for source)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahman
Christianity (Catholicism) derived this as well. John Scotus Eriugena in the 800s.
Apocatastasis
The thesis goes something like: God is timeless. Time is necessary for change. In order to experience change, God creates universes that have time and descends into these lower states of existence. This gives rise to conscious beings - they’re literally small disconnected slices of God that descended to our state of existence. When you die, you “roll up” back into God taking your lived experience with you.
He was posthumously condemned in 1225 with an order for his books to be burned.
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Yep you can take this one pretty far
It's easy to imagine making all the exact same decisions as someone else, if you were born into their body and lived their experiences.
A decision is a reaction from an observer: and it requires information and feedback. Is the thing that decides special? Is it the same thing as everyone else's?
If you can imagine it, does it make it more likely? Only time tells.
Wow, dammit! That syndrome of "something you always wondered or thought only you thought already having a name" strikes again!
My intuition for all sentience between "fragments" of a single consciousness from outside the universe was that, if Free Will™ is real, then true randomness can only come from outside a system..
https://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html