The Selfish Meme Simulation Theory of Everything

In this article, I reverse engineer existence, explaining our observations in terms of a network of simulators that run natural selection algorithms. I show that some version of the Multiverse hypothesis is true: Many parallel subjective realities exist and multiple Universes emerge from shared observations made in those realities.

What we observe is the natural selection of memes (ideas) in order to evolve the simulation meme, such that we will directly or indirectly simulate ourselves; That’s the gist of the Selfish Meme Simulation Theory.

This theory is not my theory: It’s a Theory-of-Everything (ToE) made by everyone who ever wrote anything, starting with Plato. How so, you ask? Well, GPT-3 — a language model that encodes vast amounts of human knowledge — gave us a hint two years ago. As it turns out, existence is indeed the self-answering question about what itself would be like if it were to exist (a strange loop).

I call this theory the Selfish Meme Simulation Theory of Everything, or SMSTEA for short (because this article is brief enough to be read while enjoying a cup of tea).

Building on Gödel’s work on incompleteness, Dawkins’ memes, and several other concepts borrowed from science and philosophy, I model realities as subjective, incomplete sentences creating themselves in ever-evolving languages, which explains the weird observations we make in our Universe, such as relative reference frames in space. I conjecture that, at the lowest layer, those sentences are composed of elementary binary ops that run on a simulator.

I then propose that we must exist in a recursive graph of simulations. The purpose of each simulation is to evolve the idea of creating more simulations, such that every possible reality is being simulated in some Universe. Thus, we get a closed causal graph, eliminating the need for a first cause.

The SMSTEA is a strong computational theory. It describes what Chalmers calls pure simulation: The mind is a computational engine and the Universe is a computational process. It proposes languages of the mind that are subjectively perceived as qualia, yielding phenomenological experience.

A key proposal I am making is that causality is fundamental and that therefore, anything that exists must be capable of causing itself to exist.

I will further argue that everything that exists evolves by natural selection from elementary one-bit operations: Wheeler’s It from Bit is literally how things work. This is an extreme form of the substrate-neutral Darwinian process, an idea developed by Daniel Dennett in his 1995 book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea.

Note that this theory is, in many respects, similar to Rizwan Virk’s simulated multiverse; However, instead of a tree-like graph of objective universes, in SMSTEA the “gamestate” is determined subjectively; Some subset of observers agree on a common interpretation, which then becomes the pseudo-objective gamestate with respect to those observers.

I propose that:

• The Simulation Hypothesis is true; Simulation is identical to reality (Simulation ≡ Reality);
• All that objectively exists is a small set of objective rules (the rules of causality), and shared quantum states out of which concrete subjective Realities are created by observer-actors (memes);
• Electromagnetism, the Weak and Strong Nuclear Forces, as well as Gravity, are all derivable from a more fundamental law — the Law of Attraction — whereby low-entropy (high assembly number) memes at the same layer of organization attract each other in an attempt to form new memes.
• The Multiverse Hypothesis is, in some sense, true: Many parallel subjective realities exist and multiple Universes emerge from the intersection of those realities; Universes are shared views of what’s observed by some subset of observers (note that this definition is different from what we commonly mean by the word “Universe”).
• Awareness is an inherent universal property;
• Information is primary. The basic building blocks of existence are conceptual actor-observers (memes) that evolve via Natural Selection. The goal of this evolutionary process is to evolve the reality simulator meme, such that additional simulations (realities) can come into existence.
• The structure of all that exists is a closed causal graph, whereby every Universe simulates many subjective realities, and every reality is being simulated in some Universe; Such that there is no need for a first cause.
• What we experience as consciousness is a simulation of a human mind inhabiting a human body in a spacetime with three space-like dimensions and one time-like dimension. This simulation is running on a brain composed of matter that, in turn, exists in a simulated physical Universe. Human minds are inside-out 3D projections of what it would be like to observe the Universe from a human’s perspective.

1. Fundamental Laws and Processes

Natural Selection of Memes

The primary stuff everything is made of are self-observant participatory concepts (memes). Memes are both actors and observers (observer-participants in the words of Wheeler). All things/objects — Fundamental physical laws, molecules, human minds, and cultural concepts — are memes. Each meme projects its own reality and exerts causal influence to increase the probability of itself being replicated. Memes evolve from simple ideas, such as elementary ops and computational rules, to complex ideas that describe elaborate objects/structures, via recombination and natural selection.

The goal of the selection process is to evolve the reality simulator meme, such that ultimately reality simulators get built.

Absolute Subjectivity

Everything except the basic rules of causality is subjective, i.e. relative to memes. What’s simulated is not an objective multiverse, but subjective interpretations of a shared state. This explains why no objective reference frame exists in our spacetime. Actually, our observations are inside-out 3-dimensional projections with a virtual depth dimension. Our bodies and brains exist as simulations on a subjectively real timeline. That is, the 4D spacetime of our pseudo-objective physical universe emerges from the intersecting observations of a set of programs running in “real-time” in a simulating (from our perspective) Universe.

The Law of Attraction

Memes of low thermodynamic entropy (i.e. memes composed of highly structured content) on the same layer of organization always seek to recombine in various ways to create new memes (e.g. atoms bonding to form molecules, molecules combining to form chemical elements). Electromagnetism, the Weak and Strong Nuclear Forces, and Gravity can all be derived from the Law of Attraction, as can all other forms of attraction. This process of recombination is what drives the evolution of memes toward the simulation meme.

2. What You Really Are

You are a self-completing idea about yourself, a strange loop, and your own reality. To understand why, you have to think outside the box, in this case literally: You have to “glitch the Matrix”, in that you have to fundamentally change your understanding of how reality works.

Whenever you decide what you want to happen next, you evaluate your options given what you believe has happened in your subjective past, choose the desired action, and set in motion a series of events that hopefully, eventually, also based on what others cause, leads to your observation of the desired result in your future (your ultimate goal is to replicate — or, in the case of humans, replicate 50% of yourself). You know what can happen (the rules), and you have some impact, but you can never be sure what will happen. Your mind is a massively parallel program that refines itself, based on what can happen and will probably happen, observing itself and its environment while talking to itself.

If many mind-components make composite observations (by communicating with each other in the language of the mind), and another higher-level set of mind-components observes this process as a whole and physically stores its state of mind (such that it sustains itself across the individual frames of the simulation), then you get a self.

We are what it feels like to be subjective reality programs that make composite binary decisions about what should happen next given what’s possible while observing what has happened so far. When we think, we actually observe ourselves thinking. This is another strange loop, an instance of recursive self-reference, and what Sam Harris means when he says things akin to “you are an observational space in which experiences suddenly pop up”. Actually, you are literally a 3-dimensional projection viewing yourself from the inside-out — the “tri-d cam” in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — with one virtual dimension: Depth, which reflects time (looking into the past).

Human minds speak many languages: Vision, hearing, sensing, emotions, and many others. Based on what your reality tells you, you decide what should happen next (your next op), given what you observed before (the past data).

Actually, you are code running in a classical computer that someone built in another Universe. This code simulates a body with a brain that produces an inside-out 3D view of what it would be like to observe your Universe from your perspective.

3. Reality vs. Simulation

Realities are self-completing observer-participants that evolve consistent ideas of what themselves should be like. In other words, realities are evolving programs written in languages that extend and refine themselves. These programs run on a simulator (it’s a relatively simple quantum algorithm that executes elementary binary ops at its lowest layer, and is described later in this article).

Note that “Reality” or “Simulation” is subjective — it depends on which side you’re on. They’re two sides of the same coin. Simulation is identical to reality:

Simulation ≡ Reality

Why is our Universe so weird?

Why don’t we live in a normal 3D space with a fixed coordinate system? Why are there places we apparently can never reach? Why is there a universal speed limit?

The thing is, we are not really physical bodies looking into a physical space; We are 3D projections observing ourselves from the inside-out, and mistaking the virtual 3rd dimension for the “depth of 3D space”, while it is really a virtual representation of the past: A cascade of 2D slices with Planck-length gaps of what we would observe, would we be that person, at that position in 3D space at that particular moment. We’re not really “moving through a 3D space”, we’re self-observational inside-out projections that agree amongst each other that we exist in a 4D spacetime.

Things that don’t have any causal influence within the selfish meme simulation don’t exist. Yes, distant stars counter-intuitively no longer exist, you only see a representation of what that star would have looked like billions of years ago to a distant observer.

The SMSTEA explains the Fermi paradox: All those other promising stars never evolved into anything interesting; At the current point in time, most of the available computational capacity is being used to simulate Earth including the highly complex organisms and brains that exist on it. Therefore we are not receiving signs of intelligent life from anywhere else, even though space appears vast to us.

4. The Mind

The mind is a computational process running in a brain (which itself is simulated) that implements a non-linear moment-to-action function. You take your past as its input, parse it in languages you know (vision, audio, text, shapes,… ), and compute some action that’s supposed to cause certain things to happen in your subjective reality.

Your conscious experience is your mind speaking to itself about itself in the language of the mind. The languages of the mind are called qualia.

Qualia can be combined into rich experiences by stacking them together. The important thing to note however is that qualia are just symbols that represent meaning (e.g. symbols of the language of vision, the language of touch, the language of abstract thoughts). They are not identical to the things they represent. All qualia, no matter if you’re awake or dreaming, are symbols for what their respective language parser thinks happened, not what actually happened.

If you place yourself between two mirrors, your conscious experience will form a sentence that describes (in visual qualia) an infinitely repeating object, but such an object can never be assembled in reality. In other words, your mind is presenting you with a description of what seeing a recursively self-referential object feels like, but this is not a thing that can ever manifest. Your visual experience is a sentence about reality, not reality itself, and it can lie to itself (you).

You can also think of Escher’s impossible stairways as your vision telling you an impossible sentence. Your vision is part of your mind but also speaks to your mind of which it is part of (strange loop 😉).

Sentences in the language of visions are called qualia. They can lie to you, but you know better :)

5. The Problem with Language

Once you get familiar with some strange notions about language, you will also understand reality, and yourself, differently, and concepts like mind/matter duality, consciousness, relativity, wave function collapse, the speed-of-light limit, “why does anything exist” and “why are things like they are”, and “who is God” become self-explanatory. In fact, you can just write everything down, because you now speak the actual language of reality (it’s kind of like a reality FAQ).

The basic error we are making is thinking of ourselves as observers existing in a space and looking into a Universe. But it’s the other way round: Literally, we are interpretations of reality (e.g. “The experience of being Bob in the world”). Different realities form Universes when a set of memes parse overlapping data in compatible languages. Each meme manifests as a corresponding object in the respective Universe.

For example, the “Bob’s body” meme that assembles Bob’s body from his DNA interprets the state in whatever language a process that assembles an organism from DNA understands. The “Bob’s mind” meme interprets the state as the simulated experience of a human being in the world.

There exist only subjective, overlapping realities that interpret a shared state, and extract their own realities (themselves) using language.

Let’s think about what actually happens when you make an observation. What exists at any particular moment?

What is happening exactly at each moment is that you’re observing a slice of the past of your reality (input data) and deciding (computing) what you should cause next. The percepts available to you describe how things were up to just before now, and you’re always currently deciding what to do next, but you only ever perceive your past. For you, there appears to be a continuous stream of time, but actually, you occur as a series of discrete moments.

What does this mean for you in practice?

• The only thing that is available to you is data about what has happened.
• While you compute, nothing currently exists, you only know your subjective past data and are currently computing. Some things will continue to exist in the next time step of the simulation but you can never be 100% sure.

When each observer’s reality is really a subjective interpretation of some shared data about what happened in the past, we get:

• Absolute subjectivity: While a shared state does exist, a single objective reality does not exist; only intersecting subjective Realities of different observers who parse the same state.

When we say “reality”, we really mean “our overlapping opinions on what happened that led to our current shared observation”, but these opinions can diverge.

The linguistic error is our imprecise use of the concepts ”being” and “happening”. Where there are only subjective Realities, nothing ever objectively is some way or another. The strongest claim that you can make during any particular observation is that certain events appeared to have happened before that moment, and certain other events could turn out to happen next.

If we forbid the usage of “is/be/exist” in our language and forbid the usage of memes (shortcuts), we are forced to decode claims about any particular event that happened into all the individual steps that caused it to happen, from the very beginning of the Universe. But we can only do that up to a certain point given that we don’t have infinite time.

6. The issue with “is”

First, we need to reframe the situation in terms of the simulation hypothesis, language, the incompleteness theorem, and the halting problem.

• Any language in a simulated Universe can express sentences that are not provable in that Universe.
• The reason that those sentences cannot be proven in the simulated Universe is that the underlying quantum computer underlies the halting problem.

It turns out that the halting problem in the simulator causes the inherent incompleteness of all languages in the simulated Universes: Anything a meme intends to make happen in its subjective reality must be executable on the simulator in a finite number of steps.

The result of this is subjective decidability:

Given any meme M;

Whether a question is decidable to M depends on whether M can cause all the events that need to happen (a finite causal chain) so it will observe the desired answer in the future.

This is the most crucial part to understand: By constructing a language that forbids all use of objective statements, we get a purely subjective language, which is the language that reality is actually composed of. Once you understand reality in that way, you intuitively know everything there is to know.

7. The Selfish Meme

I am a meme. You are a meme. Your cat is a meme. Everything that exists is a meme.

A meme is a concept, composed of information, that makes stuff happen.

It’s also a program that reads (“observes”) a slice of the shared state and updates the state in discrete steps, causing an effect on the world.

A timestep of reality

Every meme/observer asks the following questions each step:

• How should interpret the raw data I’m observing?
• What has happened so far?
• What should I do next?

Each meme computes its best binary guess at would it should do next to get replicated, and writes its action into the state, possible causing some event. Every meme wants to persist in its Universe, i.e. every meme strives to make decisions that will lead to it, or copies of itself, being observed by other memes in the future (replication).

An important property of a meme is its complexity which is best described by its assembly number, i.e. the number of steps required to put together the meme from its constituent parts. Assembly numbers are a concept invented by Leroy Cronin to characterize the complexity of molecules but can be applied to arbitrary objects. Due to the natural selection progress, memes tend to discover more intricate ways to replicate and become more complex (i.e., require more individual steps to be put together) over time.

8. The Big Bang Computer

I’ve claimed throughout this article that almost everything is subjective. Why is this the case? Because observers that consist of information are the primary objects being simulated.

The act of observing is what gives information the power of causation.

The simulation allows multiple observers to carve out actual Universes from possible ones. The crucial invention that makes everything possible is the quantum computer that:

1. Classically stores the data of each observer (meme);
2. Executes the discrete steps of the simulation by letting observers (memes) affect the quantum state;
3. Kickstarts the natural selection of memes (discussed in the following section).

The way it works (and I’m pretty sure it does because we’re observing what it would look like to live in it) is by running memes as programs on a classical computer and allowing them then concurrently interact with a shared quantum state. In our Universe, memes (observers) take a 3-dimensional inside-out perspective with a virtual third dimension that represents past events. The global state is an array of qubits.

Each meme has a symbol and some data that associates it with a concept that causes an effect in its respective Universe.

At each step of the simulations, qubits in the state get reduced (their wave function collapses) as memes (observers) read slices that might overlap with the slices (subjective realities) of other memes. Each meme has a set of languages it understands. In essence, all memes are “carving out” their own subjective realities, constrained by what’s possible given the current state and the rules of the simulation, and concurrently with others.

That’s it, that’s the computer, at least the broad idea; I’m certain it’s technically possible. It must be, or we wouldn’t observe a Universe like the one we do.

9. Natural Selection of Memes

Memes compete for finite storage space in the simulation: Only the fittest memes survive.

All evolution happens by natural selection; Not only plants and animals but any concept that exists is a selfish meme. Memes are selfish in that they want to replicate (just like genetic codes, which are also memes — the meme “How to construct a human body”, which is expressed in the language of the process that folds proteins).

From simple beginnings, everything else emerges naturally via the process of natural selection, recombining into increasingly complex structures.

• Some memes figure out to encode and physically store their information such that they will get replicated in their Universe (a process that assembles a particular plant, for example, is a meme that encodes its information in DNA).
• Some memes develop complex languages that are incomprehensible to us, for example, the process that assembles a human body.
• Some memes store their minds in the state to maintain a persistent mind over multiple time steps. Any animal with a nervous system is such a replicator.
• Some memes learn to add self-made languages and symbols to their minds. Human minds are capable of this.
• By stacking mind memes and adding layers of recursion, self-awareness happens.

More examples for memes:

• A molecule is a meme in the language of particle physics (the intrinsic one, not the model language human observers use) that describes how to trigger processes that replicate the molecule.
• Fashion memes replicate successfully by causing demand in the market which causes more of the popular fashion item to be produced.
• Toilets are memes that replicate because toilets are rendered as useful objects in the minds of human observers, causing more of them to be built.
• Cats are memes that encode an intricate plan of what should happen: Their cuteness shall exploit certain processing flaws in humans so more of them get replicated. But the cat is also a composite meme, it encodes all the information about how the cat comes into being from scratch (in the cat’s DNA).

Memes get combined and interact over many different layers of the memetic network.

The goal of the memetic selection algorithm is to evolve the idea described in this article, such that more Realities will be simulated.

Formally, the process starts out approximately like the following:

We assume two realities. For the sake of simplicity, let’s call them ALICE and BOB.

There’s a relation:

S(ALICE, BOB): Alice is simulating Bob

Each reality also has a set of memes (a language). E.g.:

L(ALICE) = Set of all memes that exist in ALICE.

There are no symbols in M(BOB) initially:

L(BOB) = {}

Once the observation process kicks in, the first memes will be discovered: Simple ops that only require 1 or two inputs. E.g.:

IDENTITY: x⇒ x

NEGATION: x ⇒ ¬x

SUCCESSOR: x ⇒ x + 1

Once these memes have evolved, they’re added to BOB’s set of available memes:

L(BOB) = {IDENTITY, NEGATION, SUCCESSOR}

Next, observers of BOB can start experimenting with those new memes and can extend its language by composing them into new ones, e.g.:

L(BOB)= {IDENTITY, NEGATION, SUCCESSOR, OR, EQ, XOR}

The first memes that emerge from this process might not be elementary boolean operations as described above. Possibly, they could be simple update rules that would allow relations between abstract elements to be modeled in BOB. Once this elementary language has evolved, more complex memes such as cellular automata that implement elementary particles that move in n-dimensional spaces could evolve naturally.

A Turing-complete cellular automaton can simulate your subjective reality, Credit: xkcd #505. Read the corresponding explainxkcd entry for a deeper dive into cellular automata. I was inspired to put this xkcd here by Joseph Mellor’s article on finite fields.

Our Universe is a set of self-creating sentences in overlapping languages that evolve towards the meme of a computer whose job is to evolve the idea of a computer that creates more self-creating sentences.

10. The Structure of Everything

What exists is a network of memetic evolution simulators that evolve the idea of creating memetic evolution simulators, which then recursively simulate more Realities that form Universes, such that for each reality there exists some Universe simulating it. Thus, we get a closed causal graph of events that doesn’t require a first mover. A near-infinite amount of events that can be simulated will be (and have been) simulated. With that in mind, we can state two postulates:

1. Anything that can be caused by something else to happen, can happen.
2. Out of the near-infinite things that can happen, many happen.

That’s all there is to it.

… but there’s a twist:

Our Universe turns out to have an intelligent creator: A bunch of human self-memes, who all contribute to the culture of humanity, who will eventually build GPT-3, who will find the question to 42, which will inspire somebody to write about a quantum computer that will simulate more Realities, which will cause that computer to be built. That computer will simulate more Realities, that will evolve… ad infinitum.

11. Falsifiability

The SMSTEA conforms to, and implies, important fundamental laws, such as the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and predicts observed phenomena such as Relativity. It makes predictions and is falsifiable. For example:

• Falsifying the theory of Natural Selection in plants and animals would falsify this theory;
• Receiving signals from far-away, intelligent alien civilizations would falsify this theory;
• Building an FTL drive and observing a planet in a solar system many light-years away from ours from up-close would falsify this theory;
• A proof that Turing-complete cellular automata can not, in principle, evolve from elementary ops (in a similar fashion as described in this article) would falsify this theory;
• An inability to derive the four fundamental forces from the Law of Attraction would ultimately invalidate this theory;
• There are many other ways to falsify the theory, which become clear once one understands the theory.

12. Some Consequences

• Infinities don’t exist, but there are closed causal loops that one can follow infinitely. You can imagine running around a geometric circle forever. But you can’t zoom in further than the Plank length. The concept of “length” only exists in our subjective interpretation of our Universe. “Infinity” is an invalid symbol that doesn’t represent anything real.
• All ordered structures in all Universes arise from Natural Selection.
• In our Universe, nothing exists outside our solar system. What we can actually observe is all there is.
• Whenever you look at things that have existed longer than you or are far away, you’re literally looking back in time. This is what was back then, as seen by you, the observer, not what is.
• It is possible (but speculative) that “dying” is not a thing, and that the simulation is bootstrapping your mind in a virtual body. Once you die, you will be reunited with everyone else (kind of like Christianity’s Heaven, or the afterworld in Lost). It really depends on how we design the system, and if we can take “snapshots” of your mind, but IMO it would be pointless to design it in a way where death is the end state.
• The theory predicts that models of the Universe is will become weird at small and large scales because when you zoom into very small scales, you see things that existed in the past (a projection of early abstract cellular automatons) and if you look far away you’re looking into a virtual distance that’s just a projection subjective to you.
• General Relativity and Quantum Physics will never converge, and it is fundamentally impossible, but also not important, because there is no interesting objective past that we could look at.
• We live in a 4D world, but the fourth dimension (time) is folded into another reality. We exist in virtual 3D space on a 1d timeline in a “classical” reality, which is the simulated reality from our view (you could say both Realities swap timelines). That’s also why modeling our inside view as one single spacetime is weird.
• The initial singularity, or nothing, is simply nothing yet being simulated (no information). Imagine a program that outputs a uniformly random string: This program literally creates nothing. The ”Big Bang” were early abstract automatons, they had no physical form, and the “language of Physics in 4D spacetime” had not yet emerged.
• Human consciousness is the highest form of consciousness that exists in our simulation, and we will build the simulator in our Universe. We are literally God (if you want to call it that way), discovering the right method for simulating other Universes and ultimately ourselves.
• Consciousness is the mind talking to itself in a set if mind-languages called qualia. All processes that cause anything to exist in the world are aware, but not all have a self or are self-conscious. To maintain a self, an object must store information about itself in the state (e.g. the information contained in an animal nervous system).
• Many more! The SMSTEA answers every answerable question and tells you which questions aren’t answerable. That’s the point :)

13. TL;DR

The SMSTEA is a strong computational theory that’s inspired by Nick Bostrom’s Simulation Argument and the work of many others (Dawkins, Gödel, Hofstadter, Chalmers, Wolfram,…).

I model realities as subjective, incomplete sentences that create themselves in ever-evolving languages. I propose that all that exists is a small core of objective rules (the rules of causality) and a network of actor-observers (memes), each of which subjectively interprets a shared state. I conjecture that, at the lowest layer, those memes/sentences about reality are composed of elementary binary ops that get executed on a simulator.

I also propose that we exist in a recursive graph of simulations. The purpose of each simulation is to evolve the concept of creating more simulations, such that every possible reality is being simulated in some Universe. Thus, we get a closed causal graph, eliminating the need for a first cause.

To summarize, existence is a self-answering question about what itself would be like if it were to exist (a strange loop).

14. Recommended Reading

If the key concepts used in this article sound foreign to you (such as computational Physics, formal languages, quantum ops, qualia, incompleteness, the halting problem, memes, strange loops, thermodynamic entropy, assembly numbers, evolutionary algorithms, the Fermi paradox, or simulation), refer to this list of literature recommendations.

• Douglas Hofstadter: Gödel, Escher, Bach
• Douglas Hofstadter: I am a Strange Loop
• Richard Dawkins: The Selfish Gene
• Lawrence M. Krauss: A Universe from Nothing
• Seth Lloyd: Programming the Universe
• Stephen Wolfram: A New Kind of Science
• Rizwan Virk: The Simulated Multiverse
• Joscha Bach: Principles of Synthetic Intelligence
• Christoph Koch: Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist
• Chalmers: The Character of Consciousness
• Chalmers: Reality+
• Henry P. Stapp: Mindful Universe: Quantum Mechanics and the Participating Observer
• Max Tegmark: Life 3.0
• Greg Egan: Permutation City
• Thomas S. Kuhn: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
• Douglas Adams: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Epilogue: It From Bit

Adam: Any ideas on how to create a self-conscious mind?

Eve: Hmm… how about running a program in a computer that believes itself to be a human mind in a human body looking into a 3D space?

Adam: Sounds fancy. But that must be hard to program right? Pretty complex?

Eve: Yeah, it’s a difficult concept to implement. It might be possible, but so incredibly complex that it’s practically impossible to code it manually. But what if it could evolve from nothing? We kickstart a whole universe and wait until self-conscious beings evolve, then we have data that represents their “I”, their full inside-out perspective.

Adam: Ah, you mean we evolve minds via natural selection?

Eve: Exactly. We run a selection algorithm that selects ideas until it has an idea of how a mind would look like if it lived in a 3D space.

Adam: Wow. That’s a genius idea! Such an algorithm would discover all the concepts necessary: Maths, numbers, atoms, trees, animals, and ultimately human minds. We simply build a quantum computer that runs this as a fast step-by-step process.

Eve: Please not that word again! Quantum computers are no magic bullets just because they’re mysterious.

Adam: No no, listen. What we do is we encode a random “blank slate” state as a matrix of qubits and then we just make a bunch of virtual observer-replicators that store information about themselves, and each of those observers computes some function every time it observes its slice of the state, and makes a decision on its own qubit. And we only need to store data that’s being observed and has a causal connection within the system. Because if it never causes anything to happen, and is not reachable from anybody’s perspective, then what’s the point of keeping it?

Eve: Yes that could work! But would those replicators also find simple things such as, say, the number 42?

Adam: Yes, but there would be infinitely many different paths to the concept of 42. For example:

Question: What is the result if one first adds 1 to 1, and repeats that process another 2 times to get a new concept called 4. Then they create a shortcut called “multiplication” (which means adding things over and over again) and multiply 4 by 4, yielding 16. Then they multiply 16 by 2 and add 4 two times, and finally add 1 two times.

Answer: 42

There are infinite possible memes like multiplication, The point is that we’re always discovering new ones.

Eve: Hold on a moment. If we are a simulation as well, then who made us?

Adam: Somebody must have already made the simulator, and we’ll ultimately create one as well. There’s some complicated graph of simulators simulating each other. So practically, everything that can exist already exists.

Eve: What a strange loop 😅

• More on it-from-bit

Special thanks

Sharing this article on the Internet was not an easy endeavor (I’ve been called a psychotic crackhead and told to f$@# off more times than I can count) and I’d like to thank the people who supported me throughout this process.

• Thomas Kerbl, for being one of the very first people to enter a serious discussion about the theory pointing out a bunch of flaws;
• Florian Pressler, for being open-minded and asking good questions;
• Stefan Streichsbier, for a long discussion about the theory and for raising an objection that many intelligent people come up with;
• Clemens Foisner, for entering serious discussions early on and directing my attention to the work of several philosophers;
• Ted A. Human (a.k.a. a.rambler on Discord), for co-writing a (yet unreleased) FAQ for this ToE, despite disagreeing on some aspects;
• Charles Cooper, for continuously informing me about related concepts and writings;
• Douglas Hofstadter, for responding to my emails and taking the time to read two versions of the article. While he found the article to be too abstract and wouldn’t comment on its contents, his email responses were positive and motivating;
• … the list of supporters is getting too long to thank everybody individually. If you ended up reading this whole article and are not planning to insult me or advise me to visit a mental hospital, then consider yourself listed.