Comparative Introduction to Nested Realities
Perception = Reality
My image (related to the worldbuilding) presenting the nested interfaces
A) the frame that is aimed to display digitally the embedded contents
B) shows a control room to evoke the environment of the advanced sci-fi beings that control the constructed virtual realities of C and D
C) the fantasy playground, where incarnated consciousness agents immerse themselves in recursive memento mori experience
D) hi-reality where the actors rest, plan, observe and interact (perhaps against the rules) with the playground or even the control room
Cosmic magician's trick: that’s a quick summary of Maya [wiki; māyā]. It's the ancient idea that what we see and experience isn't the whole story. Looking at a movie screen and getting so absorbed that you forget you're watching projected light. That’s the idea.
This concept shows up in various points across our history and throughout the whole world: famous Plato’s allegory of the cave [wiki], in old Gnostic [wiki] texts that viewed the physical world with suspicion, in Hermetic [wiki] teachings that saw consciousness woven into the fabric of everything, or Zhuangzi's Butterfly Dream [wiki].
Even today's scientists like Donald Hoffman [wiki] say our brains evolved to keep us alive, not to show us truth. Smartphone interface and icons hide all the complex code underneath, not bothering us with needless technicalities. And that code itself is running through electronic hardware; all that is perceived in a simple and abstract way rather than picturing how it all really operates in our brain.
In this article, we’ll focus on the scientific connection. But first, we shall browse through just a few mental (or religious as a matter of fact) models from the past. And perhaps we shall conclude that it is not such a stretch to imagine reality as much stranger and deeper than how it appears…
Maya
In Hindu philosophy, it's the force that makes the one ultimate reality appear as many separate things. It’s like wearing tinted glasses without realizing it. Or imagine if you could only see the world through a kaleidoscope – everything would look fragmented and multiplied, even though there's really just one source of light creating all the patterns.
Maya isn't exactly an illusion in the sense of being "fake". Think of it as a filter or interface. Take the difference between the desktop icons on your computer and the actual complex programming running underneath. The icons aren't lies, but they're simplified representations that help you navigate without getting overwhelmed by the technical details. (Consider skipping the following sidebar.)
Advaita
Nondualism, or Advaita in Sanskrit, literally means "not two". It's the philosophical position that everything that exists is actually one unified reality appearing as many different things. Picture a wave thinking it's separate from the ocean. From the wave's perspective, it seems individual, but it's really just the ocean expressing itself in wave-form.
According to this view, your individual consciousness (called Atman) and the universal consciousness (Brahman) are like drops of water and the ocean: seemingly separate but fundamentally the same substance. The goal isn't to become one with the divine, but to realize you never weren't one with it.
Gnostic Perspective
The Gnostics were rebels of mysticism who saw the material world as a cosmic prison. They believed that human souls were trapped in physical matter by a lesser, misguided creator deity. For them, salvation came through secret knowledge (gnosis) that would help the soul escape back to the true spiritual realm.
While Hindu Maya suggests the physical world is a play or expression of the divine, Gnostics saw it more like a mistake or trap that needed to be escaped from. It's the difference between seeing a movie as entertainment versus seeing it and be aware that you cannot go outside the cinema.
Hermetic Understanding
"As Above, So Below" is the famous Hermetic axiom which suggests that patterns repeat at every level of reality. Like a fractal. If you zoom into any part, you'll find the same patterns repeating. The Hermeticists believed consciousness wasn't just a phenomenon specific to humans, but something woven into the very fabric of the universe.
Unlike the Gnostics, Hermeticists embraced the physical world as a reflection of spiritual truths. They saw magic and science as different ways of working with the same underlying principles that govern both mind and matter. They generally seek to understand the hidden rules in order to achieve various goals and transcendence. I will write more on that topic and the poetic connection to Sufism [wiki] later. (Consider also skipping the following sidebar.)
7 principles of Hermeticism
Mentalism
Reality is fundamentally mental, like a grand thought. Everything arises within a vast universal mind. Shift the mind and you reshape the world.
“The All is Mind”.Correspondence
Patterns echo from the micro to the macro and vice-versa. What happens in one layer mirrors another. Knowing a single level unlocks insight into all.
“As Above, so Below. As Without, so Within.Vibration
Nothing rests, everything moves in waves. Different rates of motion create every form and state. Mastery lies in tuning to the desired frequency.Polarity
Opposites are two ends of the same spectrum. Hot and cold, light and dark differ only by degree. Moving along the scale turns one into the other.Rhythm
Life flows in beats and cycles. Every rise meets a fall, every inward tide an outward one. Riding the swing keeps you balanced.Cause and Effect
Every action seeds a consequence. Chance is simply an unseen chain of causes. Become the cause, not the passive effect.Gender
Creative force divides into active and receptive currents. Both run through all things, regardless of form. Harmonizing them sparks creation and growth.
Survival Interface
Donald Hoffman's “interface theory” [uci.edu pdf] fundamentally disrupts our assumptions about perception by proposing that evolution has sculpted our senses not as truth detectors, but as sophisticated survival tools. Our perceptual apparatus constructs a user-friendly interface that masks the deeper reality beneath what we experience as solid objects and flowing time. This evolutionary sleight-of-hand serves a crucial purpose: keeping us alive rather than to overwhelm us by the incomprehensible complexity of actual reality.
The Fitness-Beats-Truth Theorem
Hoffman's most startling contribution lies in his mathematical formalization of why natural selection systematically eliminates organisms that perceive reality accurately. "Fitness-Beats-Truth" theorem demonstrates that perceptual strategies optimized purely for survival outcomes consistently outcompete those tuned for objective truth.
Stylized pixelart of the jewel beetle with a bottle; encoded hangeul message included
For example the Australian jewel beetle [wiki; depicted above] perfectly illustrates FBT theorem in action. For millions of years, male beetles evolved a simple but effective mating strategy: pursue anything shiny, dimpled, and brown – the telltale signs of a female's wing case. This "good enough" approach worked brilliantly because it focused on what mattered for reproduction while ignoring irrelevant details. When humans accidentally created beer bottles that matched these exact visual triggers, the beetles' ancient programming kicked in with tragic results.
But here's the key insight: the beetles aren't victims of broken perception. They're demonstrating how evolution deliberately trades accuracy for efficiency. Their perceptual system was never meant to distinguish between every brown, shiny object in existence; it was designed as a streamlined interface that prioritized mating success over comprehensive truth. The beer bottle tragedy reveals an inevitable consequence of encountering artificial stimuli that hijack millions of years of adaptive specialization, perfectly proving that natural selection favors fitness-relevant shortcuts over objective reality.
The Network of Awareness Beyond Spacetime
Hoffman's complementary theory of "conscious realism" proposes that objective reality consists entirely of conscious agents existing outside the spacetime framework we inhabit. Rather than consciousness emerging from complex arrangements of matter, Hoffman reverses the relationship: conscious agents are the fundamental building blocks from which apparent physical reality is constructed. These agents form vast networks of interaction, where individual consciousnesses can combine to create new unified minds. As demonstrated by split-brain studies showing how severing the corpus callosum [wiki; thick nerve tract part of a brain] reveals two separate consciousnesses that previously appeared as one. In this framework, what we call "physical" objects like brains and quarks are actually “icons” in consciousness, having no independent causal powers but serving as simplified representations within our species-specific interface.
Echoes of Maya and beyond
Hoffman's interface theory resonates remarkably with ancient philosophical traditions that questioned the primacy of sensory experience. Like the Hindu concept of Maya, which describes reality as a cosmic veil obscuring the underlying unity of Brahman, Hoffman's desktop metaphor suggests our perception hides the deeper nature of existence.
The Gnostic insight that the material world represents a kind of prison or deception finds scientific expression in Hoffman's claim that spacetime itself is merely a data structure for tracking evolutionary fitness rather than fundamental reality.
Most intriguingly, the Hermetic principle of mentalism, "The All is Mind", anticipates Hoffman's conscious realism, where consciousness rather than matter serves as the foundational substance of existence. Yet unlike the Gnostics' pessimistic view of material existence as fundamentally corrupt, Hoffman's interface serves an adaptive function, enabling conscious agents to navigate their environment effectively while remaining necessarily ignorant of the underlying conscious network that constitutes true reality.
We’ll now tie it with one more modern theory before we get back on track with this very experiment. This worldbuilding is very much about the deconstruction, nominalism, virtuality, representations and vectors and gradients. We’ll get there.
Consciousness First
Think of reality as the ultimate multiplayer game, but instead of running on computers it operates on consciousness itself.
Another interesting scientist, Thomas Campbell [encyclopedia.pub] , introduces “My Big TOE” (Theory Of Everything) which views the cosmos as a vast simulation managed by a “Larger Consciousness System,” (any Phillip K. Dick fans? *) a kind of cosmic super-server made of pure awareness. We log in as individual “avatars” to learn and evolve, and the scoreboard isn’t about gold coins or high scores but about reduction of entropy: every loving, cooperative act lowers disorder and upgrades the whole system.
A little introduction on how Thomas Campbell’s TOE got conceptualized. Curt Jaimungal has a full 3+ hours session with him here.
In Campbell’s terms, physical reality is the user interface of the Larger Consciousness System: a rule-bound playground built to teach. Donald Hoffman’s interface theory explains why we never glimpse the raw code of this game. Evolution hands us a sleek, icon-filled desktop that hides the dizzying quantum circuitry underneath. The snake you spot on the trail is just a bright red “danger” icon, not the full molecular creature from your viewpoint.
Both thinkers flip the usual script that puts matter first and mind second. For them, consciousness is more like the internet itself: the underlying network. Brains are just terminals on that grid. Campbell’s cosmic server echoes the ancient idea of Brahman and Hoffman’s “conscious agents” resemble PCs and NPCs in a broader system. These agents can behave a certain way, guided by various incentives derived from evolutionary needs. In my personal view, that is the point where it gets interesting:
Can these incentives be bent from outside of the system? What does it mean to get a glimpse into the realm of the hidden code? And these ideas lead quite directly into the realm of psychedelic, the realm of machine elves, genii locorum and spiritual experience. We’ll focus on these topics in the following articles.
These ideas have down-to-earth consequences. Campbell says every courageous, compassionate choice literally patches the software of reality, steering the whole simulation toward greater harmony. Hoffman hints that spiritual awakening is simply debugging our interface so we stop mistaking icons for the deeper conscious web. The aim isn’t to smash the headset or quit the game, but to master its controls, appreciate its artistry, and play in a way that helps the entire system level up.
Does the 1st image at the beginning of the article make more sense now?
Back to the worldbuilding experiment and how these issues come together.
Map vs. Territory
The concept of Maya illuminates the ontology behind Leccos worldbuilding project, particularly in how it navigates the ancient problem of nominalism versus realism. Modern philosophers call it the map-territory relationship [wiki] . In Leccos, the nested system of realities** embodies precisely the tension between representation and reality that Maya addresses. The sixteen cultures of the Peninsula, each defined by a Thoth Tarot archetype [esotericmeanings.com], are devised as sophisticated "maps" and interfaces through which conscious agents interact with layers of existence that they can reach (see also the 1st image of the article).
Like Korzybski's [wiki] famous dictum "the map is not the territory", Maya reminds us that our conceptual frameworks are not identical to what they represent. Yet in Leccos, as in Hoffman's interface theory, these maps are useful tools for navigation. Blueprint for all the cultures is one or another tarot court card that defines their inclination and a role they play in the broader ecosystem. As observers and worldbuilders, it helps us to understand and simulate the represented beings. The skeletal avians of Piir-Bakka or the amphibian sorcerers of Kalameghi kingdom are then misperceiving reality through their own evolved cultural frameworks optimized for their particular mode of existence as imagined by that virtual connection. A hidden rule from their perspective, but an important one from our end.
Where Leccos transcends conventional worldbuilding is in its recognition that these interfaces themselves constitute a kind of reality. We can play with that. The reincarnation mechanism in Leccos, allowing souls to travel between realities, mirrors the Vedantic understanding that consciousness precedes and transcends its manifestations. Leccos acknowledges the presence of an agent within each conscious body (and perhaps even beyond that). Instead of Hero's Journey [wiki], we have an ever-present assumption that each individual embodiment is on a psychopomp-driven [wiki] mission between lives.***
Next articles will delve deeper into the topics of awareness of the immersed characters and how it plays out in our experiment. Remember: the main goal here is to PROVOKE THE EMERGENT NOVELTY.
Scroll to the bottom to leave a comment and read some additional notes for (*), (**) and (***).
See the previous articles for more context, if intrigued:
*
“...now I think I understand what I was sensing was the manifold of partially actualized realities lying tangent to what evidently is the most actualized one. The one which the majority of us by consensus gentium agree on...”
**
Realms of the Peninsula under the Overtree
Hi-reality of higher selves that enter the games in the Realms through guided reincarnation system
Prog-reality, where hyperdimensional spiders and mantids encode operating structure with rules and regulations
***
This concept will be thoroughly examined in the stories within the Leccos worldbuilding. One of the main goals of the broader project is to avoid biases and clichés of standard medium’s limitations [see the full explanation of that issue on tvtropes.org]. Non-linearity and happenstance is crucial for real immersion and combined with continuity through the “conscious agents”, we can devise previously unseen, novel storytelling ideas emerge.
