If I get a parking ticket, there is always a parallel universe where I didn't. On the other hand, there is yet another universe where my car was stol… - Max Tegmark

This implication of the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis is pretty radical, so please pause (…) take it in and think about it. What you’re aware of right at this moment feels not like a photo but like a movie clip. This movie isn’t reality—it exists only in your head, as part of your brain’s reality model. It contains lots of information about the actual external physical reality—as long as you aren’t dreaming or hallucinating—but still constitutes only a very heavily edited version of reality, akin to the evening news on TV, mainly featuring certain highlights of patterns nearby in space and time that your brain thinks are useful for you to be aware of.

A great way for a particle arrangement to further this goal is to make copies of itself, to produce more energy absorbers. There are many known examples of such emergent self-replication: for example, vortices in turbulent fluids can make copies of themselves, and clusters of microspheres can coax nearby spheres into forming identical clusters. At some point, a particular arrangement of particles got so good at copying itself that it could do so almost indefinitely by extracting energy and raw materials from its environment. We call such a particle arrangement life.

We discussed the spatial part of this paradox in Chapter 9, and concluded that your consciousness is actually observing not the outside world, but rather an elaborate reality model contained in your brain which is continually updated via input from your sensory organs to track what's actually taking place in the outside world.