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."
Thanks for the article, reading it now, good stuff. Exactly the same idea, that there is a single subject across the space of all experiences. Apparently another name for it is Open Individualism, on which I commented here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49786470
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..
Thanks, that article summarizes many of the references that people (the one "I") brought up in this thread.
> Open individualism is a view within philosophy of self, according to which there exists only one numerically identical subject, who is everyone at all times; in the past, present and future.
> From this perspective reincarnation in the common sense isn't true, but rather it is that people are already reincarnated as everything because no one is traveling.
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Andy Weir - The Egg (2009)
Arnold Zuboff - One self: The logic of experience (1990)
> The apparent boundaries of persons are as illusory as those in brain bisection; personal identity remains unchanged through any variation or multiplication of body or mind. In all conscious life there is only one person - I - whose existence depends merely on the presence of a quality that is inherent in all experience: its quality of being mine.
> Any conscious being would necessarily have been you anyway.
Leo Tolstoy - Esarhaddon, King of Assyria (1903)
> ..An old man appears before Esarhaddon and takes the king through a process where he experiences, from a first-person perspective, the lives of humans and non-human animals he has tormented. This reveals to him that he is everyone and that by harming others, he is actually harming himself.
Fred Hoyle - October the First Is Too Late (1966)
> Hoyle puts forward the "pigeon hole theory" which asserts that "each moment of time can be thought of as a pre-existing pigeon hole" and the pigeon hole currently being examined by your consciousness is the present and that the spotlight of consciousness does not have to move in a linear fashion; it could potentially move around in any order.
> There might be one set of pigeon holes for each person, but only one spotlight, which would mean that the "consciousness could be the same".
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From Chandogya Upanishad (8th to 6th century BCE), in the dialogue between Uddalaka and his son Śvetaketu.
Bring a banyan fruit.
Here it is, sir.
Cut it up.
I've cut it up, sir.
What do you see here?
These quite tiny seeds, sir.
Now, take one of them and cut it up.
I've cut it up, sir.
What do you see there?
Nothing, sir.
> This finest essence here, son, that you can't even see — look how on account of that finest essence this huge banyan tree stands here.
> Believe, my son: the finest essence here — that constitutes the self of this whole world; that is the truth; that is the self (ātman). And that's how you are, Śvetaketu.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.