There’s an assumption quietly baked into most philosophy.
That humans are individual minds interacting with other individual minds.
It sounds obvious. Almost too obvious to question. But sometimes i suspect something stranger might be happening.
Consider a different hypothesis.
Not that humans are separate minds communicating.. but that humanity is one distributed consciousness, temporarily fragmented into billions of walking viewpoints.
Let's call it the Prisma Hypothesis.
Light passes through a prism and splits into many colors. Each color looks separate, moves at a slightly different angle.
But the colors were never independent things. They were simply one beam experiencing itself in pieces.
Now apply that idea to consciousness.
Instead of billions of isolated awarenesses attempting to understand each other, imagine one enormous awareness experiencing reality through billions of temporary observation windows.
Each person would function like a lens. Different upbringing, culture, traumas, joys. Each lens bends the same underlying awareness into a unique perspective. Which would explain a few strange human phenomena.
Why people across cultures invent similar myths without ever meeting. Why certain ideas appear in different parts of the world at the same time. Why empathy exists at all.. the ability to feel echoes of another person’s internal state.
In the prisma hypothesis, empathy isn’t mysterious. It’s simply light recognizing itself through another angle of glass.
This also reframes conflict. If two people argue, it would not be two independent beings clashing. It would be one consciousness temporarily disagreeing with itself through two differently shaped lenses.
I notice something else when looking at the world through this lens.. humanity seems obsessed with sharing experiences.. music, stories, photography.
Art.
It’s as if each lens keeps saying the same thing: "Look through here for a second"
Which suggests a possibility.
Maybe the deepest human drive is not survival, status, or power. Maybe the deepest drive is perspective exchange.. A vast awareness trying to see reality from as many angles as possible before the lights go out. If the hypothesis were true, it would mean something quietly radical. No human interaction would be meaningless.
Every conversation would be consciousness cross referencing its own observations.
And somewhere in the background of the universe, the original beam of light would be slowly reconstructing the full picture of itself through the millions of viewpoints it temporarily scattered across a small blue planet.
