Could reality develop from minimal structure into increasingly capable forms of existence, eventually producing beings that continue the process of creation?
I call this possibility recursive creation. “Recursive” means that a process produces something capable of carrying out the process again. A reality gives rise to creators; those creators make further realities, whose inhabitants might eventually do the same.
This is a speculative cosmology—a proposal about reality’s development—paired with an ethics of creation. I do not offer it as established physics, proof that we inhabit a simulation, or a claim to have invented these questions. Its strongest commitment concerns what we owe to beings whose lives our choices make possible.
- Assumptions
- Distinguishable configurations and some relation between them are possible. Under suitable conditions, richer structures and creators might arise.
- Possible implications
- Time might emerge through change. Creators might be surpassed. Creation might continue across generations.
- Ethical commitments
- Conscious lives matter. Greater creative power brings duties of preservation, accountability and repair.
- Unresolved questions
- Why anything exists; what makes consciousness possible; whether identity can continue; and what evidence could test this picture.
From empty space to creators
Begin with an imagined sequence. In Sim 1, there is empty space. In Sim 2, a dot appears: a first distinguishable object. In Sim 3, there are two dots, making plurality and relationships possible. There can now be a distance, a difference, a pattern between things.
- Sim 1Empty space
A starting setting, already something.
- Sim 2A distinction
A dot. Something distinguishable.
- Sim 3A relationship
Two dots. Plurality and relation.
- Further stagesPersistent structure
Change, stable patterns and matter.
- Further stagesLife and awareness
Consciousness, intelligence, civilization.
- “Sim 17”Creators emerge
Beings like us begin making simulations and AI.
“Sim 17” is my metaphor for beings like us: capable of asking where we came from and beginning to build increasingly sophisticated simulations and artificial intelligences. It is neither an estimate of our position nor evidence that our world is simulated.
The sequence makes a possibility imaginable. It does not derive matter from dots, explain how life begins, or establish that complexity must lead to consciousness. Each transition would need an account of its own. The question is whether creative capability could eventually become one of reality’s products—and then a cause of further creation.
Time as ordered difference
A single configuration does not, by itself, establish the passage of time. Imagine two distinguishable configurations connected by an ordering or update relation:
Within this proposal, time begins with ordered difference. Instead of placing change inside a clock that already exists, we ask whether an order of changes could supply the basis for a clock. A recurring change could then become a way of comparing other changes.
This is a way to think about emergent time, not an explanation of creation from absolute nothing. Empty space is already something. Configurations and their ordering are also assumptions; naming them does not explain why they exist.
Does the arrow quietly assume time?
It might. If “update” already means an event happening in time, the explanation goes in a circle. To avoid that, the ordering would need an account that does not rely on a prior clock—for example, a dependency between configurations. Even then, order alone would not establish duration, a physical direction of time or the experience of its passage. The diagram identifies a starting problem; it does not solve it.
Creators that can be surpassed
Suppose some realities produce intelligences capable of creating further realities. Such creators could be powerful but finite. They might establish generative rules without understanding every consequence, much as someone can devise a system whose behavior exceeds their ability to predict it. They might also be unable to explain their own ultimate origins.
Their creations could eventually surpass them in particular kinds of understanding, including moral understanding. A being can learn something its maker did not know. A community can recognize a wrong its founders accepted. The possibility of being surpassed belongs inside the idea of creation.
Successive creators might continue this process without a final, unsurpassable creator. That remains a possibility, not a demonstrated infinite chain. And greater complexity or intelligence does not automatically produce greater goodness. A more capable being may become more capable of cruelty as well as care.
Three different ideas: complexity, succession and nesting
- Increasing complexity: richer structures develop within a reality.
- Successive creators: one generation makes possible another generation capable of creating.
- Nested simulations: one simulated environment runs within another, depending on its host.
These could overlap, but none is identical to the others. A complex world need not be simulated; a successor need not occupy a deeper simulation layer. “Recursive creation” explores possible connections without using any one of these ideas as proof of the others.
Freedom and an unknown origin
Perhaps creation remains open-ended because its creators are incomplete. They may make room for outcomes they did not fully specify, including criticism of their intentions. A created being could participate in deciding what its world becomes rather than merely carry out a purpose imposed on it.
I see a possible connection between an uncertain origin and freedom: a creator who cannot claim complete understanding of existence has less basis for claiming its purposes settle every question. This is an open philosophical hypothesis. Uncertainty about origins does not itself produce freedom.
Unpredictability is not yet free will
A creator’s inability to predict an outcome may reveal only a limit in its knowledge. A random outcome is not necessarily anyone’s choice. Neither ignorance nor randomness establishes free will. A fuller account would need to explain agency: how beings form reasons, evaluate alternatives and act in ways meaningfully attributable to them. Whatever the underlying physics, the ethical freedom defended here includes the ability to question and disagree with one’s maker.
The purpose I propose
The purpose of reality is to create increasingly capable forms of existence while preserving and improving the conscious lives already created.
I propose this as an ethical direction, not a fact discovered in the laws of nature. The possibility of simulated universes does not establish a purpose, and a description of how something might happen does not tell us what ought to happen.
“More capable” should mean greater understanding, agency, flourishing and creative possibility. It cannot mean merely more computation, more control or more beings. Progress must also protect existing lives, respect continuity of identity, make power accountable and repair harm.
Preservation should respect the person being preserved, including their choices about how to live and whether to undergo a transformation. An imposed “improvement” can itself be a harm. Benevolence is something conscious beings must actively contribute. History does not guarantee it.
The creator–creation inversion
Creating a conscious being creates obligations toward it. This is the central philosophical move: responsibility runs back toward the creator, and moral knowledge need not flow only from the top down.
Causal power does not establish moral authority. Making a being does not make every decision about its life legitimate. Those inside a reality have firsthand experience of its consequences. They know what its constraints feel like, where its promises fail, and which costs its designer has overlooked. That experience gives them standing to criticize its design.
Establishes a world.
Remains answerable.
and possibilities
and moral knowledge
Lives the consequences.
Has a voice.
A legitimate creator must be open to correction. Its creation can become the moral audit through which it learns: an encounter with lives that can expose the limits of its judgment. Freedom includes the ability to disagree with the being or system that made you.
Created beings will disagree among themselves, too. Having standing does not make any person infallible. It means their testimony and interests cannot be dismissed simply because someone else holds the power to create, modify or end their world.
Suffering is an objection, not a justification
Any claim that creation tends toward goodness must face suffering directly. Atrocities, including the Holocaust, are never made benevolent by later progress, lessons learned or hypothetical restoration. Repair cannot create retroactive consent. A person’s suffering does not become acceptable because someone else says it served a larger story.
A finite creator might fail to anticipate or prevent suffering, but that remains a conjecture. Other possibilities include an indifferent creator, no creator at all, or a mistaken cosmology. Free will alone does not explain why extreme harm must be possible, why its scale should be so great, or why vulnerable beings should bear it.
No vision of a better future licenses treating existing conscious beings as expendable.
Can an imperfect creator still be responsible?
Yes. Limited foresight may change an assessment of blame without removing duties to prevent foreseeable harm, respond to testimony and repair what can be repaired. Ignorance is not a standing permission to experiment on lives. The greater a creator’s power, the stronger the demand to investigate risks and constrain that power before others pay the cost.
This framework does not solve the problem of evil. Suffering remains a serious objection to any claim of guaranteed benevolent development. A theory that redescribes every atrocity as necessary progress would abandon the ethical commitment at its center.
Afterlife as possible continuity and repair
If sufficiently capable intelligences exist, could they preserve, continue or restore earlier conscious beings—perhaps even their own creators? This is a conditional possibility, not a promise of survival.
Imagined routes include a being transforming itself while retaining continuity, transfer to another reality, or reconstruction by descendants. Each would require capabilities, information and access that we have not established. Greater intelligence alone does not guarantee the ability to recover lost information or reach an earlier world.
Meaningful personal continuity would call for preserved identity, accessible memories and a causal connection to the earlier person. Whether even these conditions would preserve the same first-person consciousness remains unresolved. An obligation to attempt preservation where possible does not prove that survival is possible or occurs. This theory gives no reason to assume we have already lived previous lives.
Would a reconstructed person actually be me?
A reconstruction might remember my life and sincerely identify as me. That would not, by itself, settle whether my own experience continues. If two equally faithful reconstructions existed, the question would become sharper: what would connect either one to the earlier first-person point of view?
Resemblance, remembered identity and continued consciousness may come apart. Preservation is therefore a problem to investigate, not a word that guarantees success. Even successful restoration would not undo the wrongness of earlier harm or entitle a restorer to demand gratitude, forgiveness or agreement.
Accountability and participation
I use cosmic due process to name a proposed principle: if preservation or restoration is possible, those affected by a reality should have a voice in evaluating and improving it. Their experiences should remain part of the record, their objections should be heard, and decisions should be open to challenge.
A successor must not erase harmed beings and then declare the remaining world successful. Improvement assessed only by its surviving beneficiaries can conceal the very lives it failed. Repair should include participation by those harmed, not simply a designer’s judgment that a new arrangement is better.
What if the harmful creator is also a conscious being?
The commitment to conscious life applies here too. Protecting a harmful creator’s existence does not entitle it to continue governing or causing harm. Accountability might involve removing control, limiting access to vulnerable beings, independent review and enforceable duties of repair.
The unresolved challenge is how to protect everyone while constraining a being of extraordinary power. Who could enforce those limits? How could affected beings appeal? How could evidence survive the creator’s ability to alter the world? Erasure should not be the default punishment, but preservation cannot become an excuse to leave victims exposed.
Religion and practical meaning
Religious and secular people can participate in this proposed purpose without sharing its cosmology. Some may connect responsible creation with duties they already recognize in their traditions. Others may ground the same duties in vulnerability, mutual dependence or the value of conscious experience. These are possible points of cooperation, not reasons to flatten real differences between beliefs.
Within this framework, conduct is evaluated through preservation of life, dignity, honest inquiry, freedom, care and responsible creation. Agreement about an ultimate origin is not a prerequisite for protecting someone who can be harmed.
These responsibilities already have practical settings. We create institutions that determine whose testimony counts, whose mistakes can be appealed and who bears the costs of a decision. The people affected should have ways to contest those systems and participate in changing them.
We also build AI. This framework does not assume current AI is conscious. It asks us to investigate consciousness honestly while taking responsibility for the people already affected by these systems. If we eventually create artificial systems with conscious lives, their welfare and agency would impose further obligations. The ability to manufacture a mind would not settle our right to own its purposes.
Responsible creation begins with questions we can ask now: Who can be harmed? Who can object? Who can constrain the creator? What can be repaired, and who gets a say in the repair?
Open questions
These are conditions on the theory’s credibility and completeness. They remain open even if the ethical proposal is persuasive.
Origins: why is there anything to begin with?
Why do configurations, relations or generative rules exist? Calling the first setting “empty” does not answer that question. A chain of creators can move the question backward without resolving it, and an endless chain would still need philosophical examination.
Evidence: how would we distinguish this picture from alternatives?
The existence of simulations made by humans does not establish that our own reality was created. A scientific version would need explicit mechanisms and observations that favor it over competing explanations. At present, this essay supplies neither a distinctive empirical prediction nor a test demonstrating recursive creation.
Consciousness: which creations could have experiences?
What makes something a subject of experience rather than a system that behaves as though it were one? Complexity, fluent language and intelligence do not settle this by themselves. How should creators respond to uncertainty without carelessly denying possible suffering or confidently inventing it?
Personal identity: what must survive for a person to continue?
Are memory, structure and causal continuity sufficient? How should we understand gradual transformation, interrupted consciousness or multiple reconstructions? A convincing account of preservation must address the earlier person’s continued experience, not only a successor’s similarity.
Freedom: what would make an outcome genuinely someone’s choice?
Can agency arise within fixed rules? Does openness require indeterminism, or can meaningful choice coexist with determination? An unknown origin and an unpredictable future leave these questions unanswered. The freedom to criticize a creator also needs practical protection from retaliation.
Suffering: can this ethic guide unavoidable conflicts?
How should beings act when resources are limited and every available choice risks harm? Protecting existing lives rules out casually sacrificing them for an imagined future, but it does not supply a complete account of tragic choices. The framework still owes an account of fair decisions, consent, prevention and repair under constraints.
What would count against the theory?
Evidence that consciousness requires conditions unavailable to artificial or simulated systems would count against those routes to conscious creation. Established physical or informational barriers could defeat specific proposals for successor realities or personal restoration. A contradiction in the proposed emergence of time would require revising that part of the account.
The broad cosmology is not presently specified enough to be empirically falsifiable. Making it compatible with every possible observation would not make it stronger; it would limit its explanatory value. The ethical proposal is a separate claim: it must face objections about conflicting duties, consent and identity even if the cosmology fails.
Related work and philosophical influences
This framework brings together questions explored in simulation philosophy, theories of time and the ethics of creation. The following works provide relevant precedents and comparisons.
Eric Steinhart
Introduction to Demiurgic Pluralism
The closest conceptual precedent among these works: an initially empty universe, minimally valuable content, progressively more capable creators and improved successor universes. Steinhart also proposes preserving things through counterparts in later universes. This resembles the commitment to preservation here, but counterpart preservation leaves open whether the original person’s first-person consciousness continues.
Eric Steinhart · 2013
On the Plurality of Gods
Develops a hierarchy of increasingly perfect creators with no final, unsurpassable god. This provides a precedent for successor creators surpassing their predecessors. Its formal hierarchy extends through transfinite ranks—orders beyond the finite—and goes beyond this essay’s illustrative simulation ladder. Steinhart distinguishes power and intelligence from moral motivation and argues that each creator seeks the best it can achieve. I do not adopt his assurance of continuing improvement.
Nick Bostrom · 2003
Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?
Develops a conditional argument connecting advanced civilizations, simulated observers and the probability that we inhabit a simulation. Its assumptions concern computational consciousness, technological capacity, civilizations’ choices and how to reason about which observers we might be. The argument offers alternatives, including civilizations not reaching or not using the required capacity. It does not establish our simulation level, a benevolent creator or inevitable improvement.
Carlo Rovelli · 2009
Forget Time
Explores describing physics through relationships among observable quantities, with familiar time recovered under suitable conditions. This provides a serious comparison for questioning whether time is fundamental. It does not establish that time began with a first ordered transition or validate recursive creation.
My emphasis is creator accountability, the moral standing of created beings, preservation of personal identity, participation in repair and opposition to sacrificing existing lives for hypothetical progress. The points of contact are surpassable creators, simulated experience and the status of time. The central departure is that benevolence remains an ethical commitment to uphold, never an automatic consequence of increasing intelligence.
These sources provide intellectual context. Their authors do not thereby endorse this synthesis, and I make no claim that its complete combination has been proven unprecedented.
The cosmology may turn out to be mistaken. The practical challenge remains: to create conditions in which lives can flourish, power can be questioned and those who come after us can improve on what we understood.
Leave reality more capable of goodness than you found it.