I’ve been going down a bit of a late-night rabbit hole and wanted to throw this out here because I can’t tell if it’s deep or just sleep deprivation talking.
Do you ever think about whether we’re actually “us” in any meaningful sense… or just a long sequence of decisions that look a lot like binary? Like not literally 1s and 0s in a computer, but functionally the same idea, every moment splits into yes/no, this/that, left/right, say it/don’t say it. And every time that happens, one branch gets followed and the others just… don’t.
The weird part is imagining that those “other branches” don’t disappear. They just aren’t this version of you anymore.
So instead of being one continuous, conscious self, you’re more like a path carved through an insane tree of possibilities. At each step, the universe “cuts off” everything that didn’t happen from your perspective, even if it still exists in some abstract sense.
What messes with me is that this kind of reduces identity to a trajectory rather than something fixed. Like, you’re not a stable “you” making choices, you are the result of those choices. A running log of decisions that could’ve gone differently.
And then consciousness starts to feel less like something special and more like… a side effect. Like the narration your brain generates while moving through one of these branches. Not the driver, just the story being told.
I used to find the idea of being “unique and conscious” comforting. That there’s something inherently singular about each of us. But the more I think about it, the more it feels like that uniqueness might just come from how specific your path is through this binary tree. Not because there’s anything fundamentally different at the core.
Basically: instead of “I am a conscious being making choices,” it starts to feel more like “choices are happening, and this version of me is what it looks like when they resolve this way.”
Not sure if that’s freeing or kind of bleak.
Anyone else ever thought about it this way, or am I just overfitting philosophy onto a tired brain?