>>11751113>>11751029She's actually explaining it pretty well but it's a horrendously complicated idea.
The idea is that consciousness, or being an "observer", is a particular kind of "computation" performed by the physics of the universe - similar to how running a piece of software is a computation performed by the physical logic gates in a CPU. One of the features of the consciousness / observer computation is that they have "continuity of experience", to them it feels like they're living a continuous stream of events even though thy're being calculated moment-by-moment. And they have this continuity even if there isn't continuity of computation (think pausing a running program, then unpausing it an hour later - the software would not experience the pause, because its own experiencing was also paused).
So it doesn't matter WHERE in the universe your next moment of consciousness is simulated (just like it doesn't matter which CPU register the software is computed on, it could swap moment to moment), and it doesn't WHEN in the universe your next moment of consciousness is calculated either (software can be paused and woken up), you will still have a continuity of experience between those two computations.
So for any given state of your consciousness, at some moment between the big bang and the heat death of the universe, somewhere 12,000 cubic gigaparsecs of the observable universe, a random arrangement of particles has interacted or will interact in such a way that exactly computes your current state of consciousness, and then somewhere and somewhen else, another bunch of particles will compute your next state. And you will experience continuity between those two.
Because of this, once started an observer computation can "find" their computations for free out there in the universe. That's why the simulation keeps running after the servers are turned off - it's like starting a wildfire, you need to provide the initial kickstart of processing power but then it will make its own fuel out of the surrounding environment.
Pretty cool idea that follows logically from believing consciousness is a computation, and that computation can self-evidently run on the physics of the universe.
The protagonist abruptly commits suicide after simulation launches, so that his biological body isn't computing his consciousness anymore, only his copy in the simulation is (using the random computations of the universe, called "dust theory"), so that the only versions of him that exist are living in Paradise. 