Or rather:

Everything is everything else.

My friends and I have read your comments with interest. I especially loved the metaphor of a dog crashing into its own reflection.

Be sure to join the facebook group that I made, following this post:

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=299406397622

An infinitely thin, infinitely long straight line in this universe is a strange loop; it is a series of strange loops within strange loops, forever. No matter how far you travel along it for however long, you will always arrive at a point identical to where you left because it is totally uniform. This is partly true for everything we do in our macro world; our destinations (whether they are spacial, temporal, ideological) always have a connection to our departations because they happen, for example, in the same universe, in the same timeline, in the same existence to the same person et cetera. The strange line thought experiment idea is the antithesis to that.

My dear old boxer dog Max, now long gone from this world, used to charge at mirrors upon seeing his reflection, thinking it was another dog to play with. After colliding head-on with the mirror, he simply got back up rather woozily and trotted off. I have often used this scenario as an analogy to our own situation, to the possibility that everyone is everyone else despite our natural inclination to think that who we see in front of us are completely separate people, like dogs and mirrors. This mindset has played a part during my more solipsistic moments, where I thought to myself that instead of a mirror, I, perhaps the only person in existence, am just reflecting and reverberating back off the limits of my self-contained existence, echoes that manifest themselves as other things and other people. But this developed into thinking, what if this is true for everyone and everything? Am I the echo of another who was an echo of me? This would cause never-ending feedback like that in my opening text, but does that necessarily mean it’s not true? We would do well to think like that; it s one step up from “treat others as you wish to be treated yourself”. It is a great incentive for compassion. On the other hand, compassion should first and foremost be given because it is good and nice, not just because we may be one another in my opinion.

“An impossible echo chamber, full of sounds reflecting off the walls. There was never a sound source, there has always been reverberations. Each echo will always be the sound source for the next reflection, and it has always been that way.”

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=299406397622&ref=ts

Though my conception, which is scarier, is that you play every role in that universe simultaneously.

To put it another way, I believe there are individual “universes” in a “multiverse”. Each contain just one conscious being.

So all other entities in my reality are just parts of my consciousness. I’m one in an infinitude of conscious beings subjectively experiencing themselves in their own reality. From my vantage point, if I’m actually in a reality with multiple observers, I couldn’t tell the difference!

If I understood you correctly, you may be a solipsist. Solipsism is not disprovable, though it seems unlikely from my vantage point… though if I am just an NPC in your lucid dream, then that would explain my inability to see this.

I realize a lot of people consider this “quack”. But many people in history and modern time have made this point. Google “Max Tegmark’s Everything Theory”, or “Boltzmann brain” and “quantum immortality”. They all echo my viewpoint. If you more of a technical type, there are much more extensive reasons I believe what I do.

BTW Ed, Eliezer Yudkowsky put a bullet in the head of the p-zombie argument. (I never believed in a p-zombies view anyway)