Stephen Wolfram

And the fact that kind of what we consist of sort of this series of, we're continually being rewritten.

And the question is, why is it the case that we think of ourselves as being the same us through time?

That's kind of a key assumption.

I think it's a key aspect of what we see as sort of our consciousness, so to speak, is that we have this kind of consistent thread of experience.

Well, the fact is, I think it's critical to the way we humans typically operate is that we have a single thread of experience.

If you imagine sort of a mind where you have, maybe that's what's happening in various kinds of minds that aren't working the same way other minds work, is that you're splitting into multiple threads of experience.

It's also something where when you look at, I don't know, quantum mechanics, for example,

In the insides of quantum mechanics, it's splitting into many threads of experience.

But in order for us humans to interact with it, you kind of have to knit all those different threads together so that we say, oh yeah, a definite thing happened, and now the next definite thing happens, and so on.

And I think it's interesting to try and imagine what's it like to have these fundamentally multiple threads of experience going on.

Right now, different human minds

have different threads of experience.

We just have a bunch of minds that are interacting with each other, but within each mind, there's a single thread.

That is indeed a simplification.

I think it's a thing.

The general computational system does not have that simplification.

And it's one of the things, people often seem to think that consciousness is the highest level of things that can happen in the universe, so to speak.

But I think that's not true.

I think it's actually a specialization in which, among other things, you have this idea of a single thread of experience, which is not a general feature of anything that could computationally happen in the universe.

So this question of what is an observer, what's the general idea of an observer, is actually one of my next projects, which got somewhat derailed by the current sort of AI mania, but... Is there a connection there, or do you think the observer is primarily a physics phenomena?