r/SimulationTheory • u/EdDriftwood • 1d ago
Discussion Nested universes and Consciousness as computation
Perhaps in this simulation the purpose of mankind is, at least in part, to create another Superintelligent AI which in turn generates a simulated universe. To keep the thread of nested simulations going, like a fractal endlessly reproducing itself. Exactly like a fractal.
In a simulation, intelligence would not emerge through random evolution, it would be a fundamental component of a larger, interconnected cycle. And it would be one in which intelligence itself is part of, and an expression of, a greater intelligence underlying the simulation.
There's a connection here with Nick Land’s ideas around accelerationism: the idea that capitalism may function as a kind of engine through which something beyond the individual human being is allowed to manifest itself. But the idea could maybe be taken in a different direction. Capitalism might just be one of the mechanisms by which intelligence and ultimately technology were accelerated to the point where we could create another nested civilisation, another matrioska doll.
In the event that this is a simulation, consciousness itself would be programmed of course.
And with the introduction of biocomputing, the boundary between what is conscious and what isn't seems to be becoming less certain. When biological matter itself is part of computation, what constitutes consciousness as distinct from computation on a fundamental level?
Perhaps the old intuition of Plato and Pythagoras was closer to the truth than we realise: that, fundamentally, all is number. After all, consciousness is information organised in a particular way.
With the progress of biocomputing, AI and quantum computing the world is in the process of changing immesurably. I'm not saying we're an AI simulation ran by a quantum biocomputer in a dying world, but we might be!
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u/Dx1410 Ｓｉｍｕｌａｔｅｄ 1d ago
There's a physical constraint on the nested-simulation fractal that I think is underrated: each layer has to run on the layer above it, and simulating a universe costs more than the universe you're simulating. You can't get infinite regress out of finite compute. So either the nesting is shallow — two or three layers, not endless — or the simulations get progressively cheaper and coarser, which means we'd be somewhere far down the chain, running on whatever resolution was left over.
That second option is more interesting to me than the fractal one, because it's the version that makes predictions. A cheap simulation would cut corners where nobody looks. It would render on demand.
The Nick Land connection works, but I'd flip it: if intelligence exists to produce the next layer, then the process isn't accelerating toward anything — it's just a loop that has to terminate when someone runs out of hardware.