Philosophers often ask the following question:

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

Can something exist without being perceived by consciousness? It is a difficult question and like many philosophical questions we cannot really proof.

In an attempt to try to understand and reason about the question, we use the analogy of a Peer to Peer computer network.

Let us say that consciousness is experienced by individual peers in the network, they are conscious of other peers and the overall state of the network. The network is the existence or the universe of the peers. Let us also assume that there is a single peer that is not connected to the others and it represents the tree in the forest.

So the question is if the peer that's not connected to the others performs some action (tree falling) did it really happen from the perspective of the connected peers. We might be tempted to say yes the action happened because the question implies that it happened but I argue that to the peers who are not conscious of the action and the question the action did not happen. The state of the network (existence) remains unchanged it is not effected by the disconnected peer, in that network the disconnected peer does not exist in the same sense as the other peers, it exists simply as a possibility but human existence is an infinite state structure the possibilities are infinite.

The network is the collective consciousness of the connected peers in other words our existence is a network of the consciousness of all conscious beings.

But it raises the question of how disconnected peers connect to the network or how we are able to be conscious of new phenomena, I believe this is a fundamental property of consciousness it is mutable and always has the possibility to acquire the unknown but until the unknown is known it is just that unknown and inconceivable. The P2P network by its design can acquire new peers but until then they don't exist (in the network or in the periphery of the connected peers).

But does this imply multi universes, does the disconnected peer exist in its own universe or does the falling tree exist in its own universe. I say we cannot know that in the same way that the peers cannot know if the disconnected peer exists.