upvote
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

reply
I experienced that after smoking salvia
reply
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.
reply
I think some branches of Buddhism derived this too.
reply
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

reply
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.

reply
I'm no theologian but I don't really think this coheres with standard Catholic doctrine. Typically, we say that God is being itself, pure and uncaused. All things maintain their very existence through God. We know that God has intellect because the world we reside in is intelligible. God has no need to experience change or time because he actualizes their very existence, and in order to do so, must already have perfect knowledge of it. Humans, even our souls, are created beings and are not any more a part of God than anything else that exists. Jesus was unique in that he was a hypostatic union of human nature and divine nature, and even though he was an indivisible union, these natures nevertheless remained distinct.

Edit: I wrote this response before you added that this was specific to the theology of John Scotus Eriugena.

reply
Yes. He was posthumously condemned in 1225 with an order for his books to be burned. When his works resurfaced in the 1600s, he was added to the banned books index.

Edit: Ah, yeah, this was just one thinker. Early catholic thought is diverse and fascinating. A lot of work went into reconciling religion (and the rest of society really) with the “science” of the time. There is a lot of fun exploratory work trying to reconcile Catholicism with other philosophies, only some of which became cannon. It’s one of the reasons why the scientific revolution was so jarring for all of society - it threw thousands of years of convergent philosophy across society into a paradigm shift when we were forced to abandon things like the 4 element theory.

reply
I think most mysticism from all various religions eventually arise at a similar conclusion, this leads me to believe it must be the truth.
reply
Yep you can take this one pretty far
reply
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.

reply
deleted
reply
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..

reply