Addition to: the mysterious drones

Hypothesis 6, based on updated synthesis between Strømme's theory from Uppsala University, the self-simulation hypothesis and Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach:

SWEDISH TRANSLATION:

Self-rendering and the basis of consciousness?

A brief reflection, following up

Douglas Hofstadter’s book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Hairband (1979, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction on April 14, 1980) describes consciousness as a so-called “strange loop” – a self-referential, recursive structure in which a system observes and creates itself.

This loop is not a metaphor but, according to this model, the ontological mechanism behind the feeling of “I”.

Gödel’s incompleteness, Escher’s illusions and Bach’s canon all point to the same principle.

Consciousness then arises not from matter but from self-reference.

The modern classic Self-Simulation Hypothesis (SSH, Irwin et al. 2020) has long translated this idea into physics and metaphysics: the universe is not a simulation run by some external computer but a self-simulation in which information and thought are the only substrate.

The word “simulation” carries with it an unwanted implication: it suggests a simulator and an underlying physical substrate. This (in)disputable fact often seems to be suppressed in the daily simulation discussions on the internet and in coffee shops around the world, (Turtles all the way down..?), …over? - sorry I mean around!

A better term in my opinion is self-rendering.

Think of a VR headset (Donald Hoffman, 2025) or a screen: what is shown is not “simulated” in the sense that there is a separate physical world outside; it is a direct, independent rendering where the “image” is the reality for the one experiencing it. No external substrate is needed beyond the rendering process itself. The universe thus becomes a pure self-rendering: a mathematical, recursive process where consciousness renders both itself and the experienced physics in real time.

The first moment of self-conscious rendering – a strange loop that actualizes time, space and matter from a universal field of consciousness – was perhaps the first “measurement”. The start of everything. A big leap.

In November 2025, Professor Maria Strømme at Uppsala University published the article Universal consciousness as foundational field in AIP Advances. She presents consciousness as the fundamental field: time, space and matter are secondary representations within this field. Individual consciousnesses are local “rendering points” in a non-dual, universal consciousness. Strømme writes explicitly: “Consciousness is the foundation – only then do time, space and matter arise.” Her model is fully compatible with self-rendering: there is no external substrate that “drives” reality; consciousness is the rendering engine, and the physical world is what is rendered.

We can then reduce further and go one step further. Where Descartes landed in cogito ergo sum – “I think, therefore I am” – and thus introduced both a subject and an object, I claim that we can know something even more certain and more minimal. We should all agree that something is distinct from nothing. Axiom 1. The most certain statement is not “a subject experiences an object” but simply: something is experienced.

I am someone who experiences something.

This avoids any dualism from the start.

The primary fact is not a spectator viewing a scene – it is the experience itself that self-renders both the spectator and the scene in a single strange loop.

No subject needs to be posited separately, no object needs to be assumed to be “out there”.

The experience itself is the only indisputable thing, and it is identical with the universal self-rendering. Does the complete connection now become crystal clear?

Hofstadter’s strange loop provides the logical basis for how self-reference generates consciousness. The basic thesis of self-rendering (instead of simulation) clears away the last dualism about substrate. My further refinement beyond Descartes makes it even cleaner: the only thing we know with complete certainty is that something is experienced, and this experience is the independent rendering process. Strømme’s theory grounds the whole thing in a testable physical model.

Together they solve the hard problem of consciousness* by reversing the premise: physics is not the basis of consciousness – consciousness is the basis of physics via self-rendering, where the experience itself is the fundamental.

Other unfalsifiable metaphysical hypotheses 2026 (updated with the reduced self-rendering perspective)

• Christopher Langan’s CTMU / Reality Self-Simulation Principle: Reality as a reflexive self-identification operator – a mathematically rigorous self-rendering where ontic ground state and consciousness are identical. No external substrate either.

• Panpsychism and objective idealism (reinforced by IIT): Consciousness is everywhere and is the only fundamental substance. Self-rendering does this precisely: each level of reality is a local rendering within the global field of consciousness, and “something is experienced” is the only safe starting point.

• Functional simulation realism (neuroscientific variant): The brain (and cosmos) as a constant self-modeling rendering. Expanded to cosmic scale, it becomes the same as above – no separate simulator is required, and the experience itself is primary.

All of these hypotheses converge towards the same conclusion in 2026: reality is not a machine running on some substrate, but a living, autonomous self-rendering driven by consciousness.

Hofstadter gave us the loop, Strømme gave us the field, and two refinements – self-rendering instead of simulation, and the Cartesian step further to “something is experienced” as the surest statement – ​​give us the final purity. No substrate remains to be explained. The universe renders itself, and we are both the renderer and the rendered, in a single, undeniable experience.

This synthesis is not just philosophy. It opens up new experiments in quantum gravity, neuroscience, and consciousness studies – and it makes metaphysics more precise than ever.

“We are like the spider. We weave our life and then move along in it. We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives in the dream.” / Brihadaranyaka Upanishad

Speculation: each individual consciousness/mind/person is a waking dreamer, living inside their own dream. A fractalization of a primordial consciousness. They share a similar, but not necessarily identical, world map (locally stored like DNA(?), in case the physical reality was created from this and exists in parallel. Doesn’t have to be a dichotomy. Think, like the old distributed multiplayer game’s data disk that each node contains, while sending coordinates and action codes between each other, I suppose(?)).

Finally, there could be internal thought power or external technology that creates a signal, an experience of a strange drone that like a false flag attack appears out of nowhere, hovers for hours, avoids radar and IR detection and leaves without even NATO with (so far, looking at ya Donnie Boi…) the USA’s National Recognisance Office and National Geospatial Agency at the forefront knowing where they are going.

And this also gives a possible answer to what the imaginary dimensions / parallel densities that have been discussed within UAP would consist of - namely an illusion.

A magic trick. Á la “project blue beam” in miniature scale. Direct transmission through our senses into the world.

“But who is the dreamer?” / Monica Bellucci

Dedicated to David Lynch 1946 – 2025, long live transcendental meditation!

* The Hard Problem of Consciousness is a problem in the philosophy of consciousness. It is closely related to the body-mind problem. The problem is about how we can have subjective phenomenal experiences, so-called qualia, if reality can be fully reduced to material connections. The problem was originally formulated by David Chalmers in the essay “Facing up to the Problem of Consciousness”, published in 1995. There he distinguishes the problem from what he considers to be “easy” problems. Some examples of these easy problems are the difference between wakefulness and sleep, how we can have conscious control over behavior, and how the ability to discriminate, categorize and respond to stimuli from the environment works. (Journal of Consciousness Studies 1995).

/ Christian Séance, Göteborg, Sweden, 2o26-o4-i2