The Reality Self-Simulation Principle: Reality is a Self-Simulation

Abstract

The Simulation Hypothesis is the widely discussed conjecture that we inhabit a directly experienced but nevertheless artificial reality which, while supporting human consciousness and perception, is produced and displayed by a host system occupying a higher-level reality unseen from below. Reality is thus implicitly defined to have at least two levels, the one in which we seem to exist, and another associated with the host system. As the term "reality" is undefined beyond this hypothetical relationship, the Simulation Hypothesis is indifferent to the details, e.g., where the host system is located, how the host system works, who or what created and/or controls the host system, and in what respects the simulation resembles the higher reality containing it. But in any case, there must be an ultimate all-inclusive reality or "ontic ground state" that contains and supports whatever reality-simulations may exist, and it is natural to ask whether some aspects of the simulation concept may apply to it. The Reality Self-Simulation Principle states that ultimate reality is itself a natural reflexive self-simulation in which all intelligible levels of reality must exist whether simulated or not. Where ultimate reality is a global self-identification operator configured as the CTMU Metaformal System (Langan, 2018), i.e., the identity-language of intelligible reality, the Reality Self-Simulation (RSS) can be identified with the Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe (CTMU; Langan, 2002), which thus describes reality as a self-simulating identity operator R*:RINT|REXT and details its structure and dynamics, showing that it possesses its own universal form of consciousness (coherent self -identification and self-modeling capacity), an unbreakable quantum ontology, and a new paradigm for self-organization and emergence.