Dust Theory

Have you ever heard of Dust Theory?

According to the idea, which was explored in "Permutation City" by a Greg Egan back in 1994, as we're in a universe that cannot look at itself from the outside, there's nothing to deny that we're being implemented as data in a computer simulation.

The fact that we experience the states of the universe sequentially doesn't matter if the physical world along with consciousness just is a succession of states, as it'd all just appear as static data on a screen. I'm just getting started:

Imagine a big cloud of particles where if you look a certain way, you get a certain pattern of particles.
Imagine that you're in this big cloud and this perspective is the way you perceive things inside this cloud of particles.
That's us right now. But if someone from the outside were to look at this cloud from another perspective, another pattern would order itself up in front of them.
This could be an entirely different Universe, overlapping with ours.
This would mean that we have just as many universes as ways to perceive the dust cloud. However, not all of these universes are neccesarily real.
In the book, Egan decided that a universe that's in question must have a conscious mind within it to observe and solidify it.
"I think therefore I am". Meaning we still don't know if we happen to be the only universe in this cloud of particles.

Although it should be noted that the universe is more logical with its laws than Dust Theory demands, meaning something must still be going on that we're unaware of.

While totally dismissable, as there are no ways to predict or test it, it's interesting nonetheless, wouldn't you agree?



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TL;DR

the "universe" in truth, at the highest dimension is just like a cloud of scattered particles that are more or less identical.

there is exactly one pattern (imagine something like a connect the dots puzzle) that ends up giving you the universe that we live in. here we find chairs, reliable physics, life, more chairs.

this dust cloud can have billions of patterns applied to it. this would give you billions of universes. none of these really exist (only as possibilities) until consciousness gets involved.

in universes with conscious beings those conscious beings observe (in a quantum way- observing changes the outcome sortof) their universe which makes that pattern 'stick' and that universe continues to exist. it really helps a lot to have read the book to understand the finer points of egan's dust theory.

so this single dust cloud can be supporting multiple simultaneous universes. all of them are speculative except for those with consciousness already in them, which through being observed are physically existent.

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Regarding AI:

The novel revolves around the premise that if you run artificially intelligent consciousness inside a virtual reality environment for even a split second and then terminate the virtual reality you kill the AI.
But the book poses an interesting thought; from our perspective the AI just dies.
from the AI's perspective though, in a sortof survival instinct, the AI finds new pattern in the dust cloud, a new universe in which it's alive.
Not only that but the new universe is one in which the original VR environment and death is explained away as a deception.
Thus instead of being terminated, the AI just lives on, believing that they only thought that they were an AI who got terminated.
What's happening here, which you would be able to study from the furthest Cloud-level is that the AI shifts, almost dies in this universe but then finds a new pattern in the cloud, solidifying a new pattern/universe into a simultaneous existence.