So, if this can be seen as a kind of continuation, will we have to re-live our own life again and again, or will we have to live through every single life in the whole universe, maybe even repeatedly?
By applying three of the most fundamental principles of all science, Occam’s Razor, the Copernican Principle, and especially Leibnitz’ Law, the answer would have to be a “probably yes, ‘we’ are experiencing ‘all’ lives in a certain order, which really doesn’t matter, maybe even repeatedly with small variations”!
So be nice to everyone, because you are everyone! And don’t try to think about this too much. It might drive you crazy.
Please do not suspect me of some kind of rationalized immortality belief. This line of thinking rests heavily on a general application of Occam’s Razor, the Copernican Principle, and especially of the Leibnitz Law. It is not falsifiable and has no predictive power.
It is therefore comparable to the Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (aka. Multiverse Theory) and the Quantum Immortality idea. In my opinion, the Simulation Hypothesis is just as probable. Plainly put: mere speculation. But do base your life on it, please. Take care of yourself, just in case “I” really have to live your life as well, and try to live in the now, not in the past, the future or the “maybe”.
By the way, after these findings you may find it amazingly simple to answer many other deep questions, but there are three that are a bit more difficult, so I will give you a few useful hints.
The first is very short:
Is Mathematics invented or discovered?
Answer: No! You are forgetting about Gödel!
(Photograph taken by Oskar Morgenstern, courtesy of the IAS archive)
The second requires a few more words:
What is time and how can you claim a linear continuation if matching consciousnesses are not occurring in sequence?
Answer: physical time – I am pretty sure – was explained correctly by Einstein to be a direction not unlike spatial directions. Now physicists say, in time we can only ever travel forwards or at maximum sideways (kind of), but never backwards.
But this is very misleading. Actually, macroscopic causality as seen from our perspective is limited that way, nothing else. Take a black hole for example: when crossing the event horizon, time and space directions are switched orthogonally. That means by the time you have crossed, the universe ‘outside’ has ended and you will be able to look “back” at your former universe and probably just see some kind of cosmic microwave background. Sounds familiar, right?
But this is physical time (and there is significant evidence that physical time is an emergent phenomenon, explaining why we have such a hard time to consistently define entropy). We experience something else entirely.
It is not difficult at all to create a time-reversed neural network, and the consciousness arising from an artificial brain with artificial consciousness (a thing more and more artificial intelligence researchers will very soon figure out how to create, or even stumble over accidentally) will be traveling backwards in time from our perspective.
For conscious experience, the direction of physical time is irrelevant.
The third question is the most difficult to answer, but mainly just so because vocabulary and education of our time are unfit for the topic.
READ ON: How does our consciousness work?