Holographic Parasitism: Why a Universe Can't Fully Contain Itself (and What That Implies About Reality)

I want to isolate one idea and drive it until it either breaks or starts making predictions.

Not "can we simulate stuff inside stuff," because of course we can. We already do. A Game Boy emulator runs on a phone. Minecraft runs inside Minecraft. A language model writes code that instantiates another language model call. This is not the interesting part.

The interesting part is the claim people smuggle in without noticing. They say "a simulation inside a simulation" and they picture a clean stack. Like Russian dolls. Like each level is a sealed box inside the bigger box, and the smaller box contains a world that is, for all intents and purposes, just as real as the one above it.

That mental image has a hidden assumption:

The inner world is fully contained as information inside the outer world, at roughly comparable fidelity.

That is the precise moment physics gets to say "no."

Or more accurately, physics says: "Sure. But only if you pay in fidelity, speed, or size. If you refuse to pay, then the only route left is cheating." And the "cheating" is the core of my hypothesis.

Here it is.

The hypothesis: Holographic Parasitism

If a world W tries to instantiate an equivalent world W' within itself, and W' is supposed to have comparable microscopic richness and open-ended causal complexity, then W' cannot be fully contained as an independent internal state of W.

Instead, any convincing W' must be one of these:

1. A compressed approximation (lower fidelity, bounded novelty, frozen microstates, precomputed shortcuts).
2. A slowed process (it runs, but at a smaller fraction of real time).
3. A smaller world (fewer degrees of freedom, fewer "true" variables).
4. A parasitic world that shares degrees of freedom with W via an alternative encoding, meaning W' is not a sealed doll inside W at all. It is a different description of the same underlying substrate.

Option 4 is the spicy one. That's the "holographic" move. It says nested reality that feels equal is not "inside," it is "across." It is not containment, it is duality.

A parasite does not bring its own entire ecosystem. It latches onto an ecosystem that already exists and rides it.

If you want to simulate a universe inside a universe at equal richness, you don't build a second universe in your basement. You relabel your basement.

That's the intuition. Now I'll compress it into a simple inequality, then expand it back into something you can test with thought experiments.

The one inequality that ruins the Russian doll fantasy

Let's pretend a "world" is just an information budget. Not because reality is "only bits," but because any physical computation has to allocate state somewhere.

Call the maximum information available to a region at level n: $I_n$ bits.

If level n wants to run level n+1 as a contained simulation, it has to store at least:

• The state of the inner world: $I_{n+1}$
• Plus overhead: interpreter, bookkeeping, error correction, addressing, synchronization, boundary conditions, logging, whatever. Call that overhead $O_{n+1}$.

Containment requires:

$$I_{n+1}+O_{n+1}\le I_n$$

Now the only honest move is to admit overhead is not zero. If you want to be conservative, assume overhead is proportional to what you simulate:

$$O_{n+1}\ge \beta I_{n+1}\text{for some }\beta >0$$

Then:

$$(1+\beta )I_{n+1}\le I_n$$

So:

$$I_{n+1}\le \frac{I_n}{1+\beta }$$

And after k nestings:

$$I_k\le \frac{I_0}{(1+\beta {)}^k}$$

That's the first hammer.

Even without invoking any deep physics, this already says: unless overhead is magically zero, each nested level must shrink exponentially in information capacity.

So where do people get the confidence that you can nest equal universes? They're implicitly assuming $\beta =0$. That's not a harmless assumption. It's basically assuming you can run a perfect interpreter for free. That's like assuming you can build a second engine inside an engine with no friction.

Fine. Now let's add the second hammer, the one that turns this from "engineering limitation" into "cosmic limitation."

The boundary budget: why the universe keeps yelling "area"

There's a recurring theme in gravity and thermodynamics: if you try to pack too much information into a region, the region stops being a region and becomes a black hole. And black holes do something extremely annoying to our naive expectations: their entropy scales with area, not volume.

You can debate interpretations all day, but the practical punch is:

There is a maximum number of bits that can be physically represented in a finite causal region.

Call this the "boundary budget." It's the idea that reality has a kind of global memory ceiling per boundary.

If you accept a boundary budget at all, then the containment fantasy becomes a specific impossibility claim:

To fully contain an equivalent universe inside itself, the host must store:

• the host universe state (already saturating or near saturating its own budget),
• plus the inner universe state,
• plus overhead.

You can't fit "everything plus itself plus overhead" inside "everything," if the thing has any meaningful finite cap. It's like trying to compress a hard drive image onto the same drive while the drive is already full.

So containment can happen only if you give something up. And humans hate giving things up, so we invent loopholes.

Here's the loophole my hypothesis elevates from a loophole into the only plausible route for equal-feeling nested worlds.

The loophole: you don't contain, you dual-encode

If I hand you a novel, you can represent it in ASCII. You can represent it as compressed bytes. You can represent it as a hash plus a network pointer. You can represent it as a function that regenerates it given a seed.

Those are not "contained novels" in the same sense.

Two descriptions can be equivalent to an observer in a constrained context, while being radically different as physical storage.

That's where the holographic flavor shows up: the world you think is "inside" can be the boundary description of what you thought was "outside." Or vice versa.

Now I'm going to say the heresy plainly:

A nested world that feels equal cannot be a second full copy. It must be a reinterpretation of the same degrees of freedom.

That's Holographic Parasitism.

The simulation "inside" does not carry a complete independent microstate. It borrows the host microstate, then offers an alternate mapping that makes agents inside the mapping experience it as their entire reality.

This is not just a clever story. It has teeth.

What "parasitic" really means here

When people imagine nested simulations, they imagine extra stuff added to the host. Like more computation layered on top.

I'm suggesting the opposite. I'm suggesting the only way to get an equal-feeling nested world under hard information ceilings is to avoid adding "more stuff." You reuse existing stuff.

That means:

• The host cannot freely observe every micro-detail of the inner world without collapsing it, because those micro-details are not stored separately. They're the same degrees of freedom the host would be poking.
• The "inner" world's apparent randomness and novelty is not created ex nihilo. It is the host's irreducible complexity seen through a lossy mapping.
• If the inner world produces a convincing history, it might be doing so via coarse-graining and deferred resolution, not via a fully specified micro-trajectory.

If you've ever worked on rendering engines, you already understand this emotionally. Games do not render the entire universe. They render what the camera sees, at the resolution the camera needs, with just enough physics to keep it from looking fake. The deeper you go, the more tricks you find.

But here's the important distinction:

A game engine is a choice. A physical universe might be a necessity.

If reality is bounded by a boundary budget, then "render only what is measured" stops being a clever optimization and becomes a structural constraint. A feature of existence, not a hack.

A weird consequence: equal realism implies shared substrate

This is where the hypothesis becomes a clean fork.

If you demand:

• equal microscopic richness,
• equal causal openness,
• equal time rate,

then containment fails under finite budgets.

So either:

1. Nested equal worlds are impossible, and all simulated worlds are necessarily coarser, slower, or smaller.
2. Nested equal worlds are possible only if they are not contained copies, but dual-encodings that share the substrate.

Option 2 is the more interesting one. It means the phrase "simulation inside simulation" is misleading.

It would be more accurate to say:

Multiple consistent realities can be different coordinate systems on the same underlying information.

That is a holographic-flavored claim, but I'm not leaning on authority here. I'm leaning on the arithmetic of budgets plus overhead. If you cannot afford a second full copy, you either accept shrinkage or you accept reinterpretation.

Humans usually accept neither, so they float in a kind of metaphysical mush. I prefer the brutal choice.

Where information theory meets "fractalized holography"

Let's talk about the "fractal" part, because it's tempting and dangerous.

People hear "holography" and they picture a magical plate that contains the whole image. Then they hear "fractal" and they picture infinite self-similarity. Then they combine them and imagine the universe as a recursive hologram that contains itself forever.

That's poetic. It's also too cheap.

If you want recursion, you need a rule that makes recursion possible under finite budgets. Otherwise you're just chanting.

Here's the rule I think actually matters:

Self-similarity can exist in the mapping, not in the stored microstate.

Meaning: you can get a fractal-like experience if the encoding function maps different scales of the same substrate to similar macroscopic observables. The same underlying degrees of freedom can be sliced into descriptions that look recursively similar.

That's not mystical. That's compression theory.

In compression, self-similarity is the gold. Repetition is what compresses. If your world has repeating structure, you can describe it with fewer bits. If your world has scale-invariant structure, you can describe wide ranges of it with a single rule.

So if the universe is bounded, one path for it to still generate immense variety is:

• use rule-based generation where possible,
• allocate explicit microstate only where irreducibility forces it,
• reuse structure across scales when it won't be caught.

That's how you get "fractal flavor" without infinite storage.

So when someone says "fractal holography," I translate it into something actionable:

Scale-invariant regularities are how a finite boundary budget pretends to be infinite.

Now connect that back to nested simulations:

If inner worlds must be cheaper than their container unless they share substrate, then the only way to get deep nesting without collapsing into toy worlds is to progressively increase compression. That naturally favors structures that are self-similar in the descriptive sense.

Not because the universe is a literal infinite fractal, but because recursion is a compression strategy.

That is the bridge between information theory and the aesthetic people keep reaching for.

The "Containment vs Description" distinction that people miss

Here's the cleanest conceptual separation I know:

• Containment: the inner world exists as an additional independent state inside the host. More bits, more ops, more entropy.
• Description: the inner world exists as a reinterpretation or projection of the host state. Same bits, different semantics.

Containment is expensive. Description is cheap.

If physics is enforcing budgets, description wins.

Holographic Parasitism is simply the claim that any "deep" nesting that feels real must be description-like, not containment-like.

If that's true, then simulation arguments shift dramatically. The question stops being "are we in a simulation?" and becomes:

Are we in a description layer of a deeper substrate that could be equivalently described in a radically different way?

That's less Silicon Valley and more "dualities all the way down." But again, I'm not invoking that as a credential. I'm invoking it as the structurally cheap thing budgets allow.

An engineering analogy that maps

Imagine a giant distributed system with strict resource quotas. You cannot spawn a full copy of production inside production. If you try, you take the system down.

What do you do instead?

You create:

• namespaces,
• virtualization layers,
• views,
• shadow traffic,
• sampling,
• synthetic traces,
• delayed materialization,
• memoization,
• caches.

You create realities that look complete to the user but are not physically duplicated.

And if you go far enough, you get something that feels spooky: multiple "worlds" living on the same metal, sharing the same RAM, contending for the same CPU, and yet each tenant experiences a coherent environment.

That is a parasitic nesting.

Now translate that to cosmology. If the universe has a maximum entropy per region, then a contained full-fidelity copy is a denial of quotas. It's you trying to run prod inside prod.

So the only path left is tenancy, slicing, views, lazy evaluation, and dual descriptions.

Holographic Parasitism is "multitenancy is not a choice, it's forced."

A concrete prediction: the overhead leak

Any hypothesis worth keeping has to risk embarrassment. Here's mine.

If nested equal-feeling worlds exist as dual-encodings on the same substrate, then there should be a signature I'll call an overhead leak:

When you try to extract microstate beyond what your effective description needs, you should encounter correlated constraints that look like fundamental noise, randomness, or observer-dependent limits.

Not "noise" like a broken sensor. Noise like a law.

This is not a claim about any specific experiment. It's a structural prediction:

• If your world is a view optimized for internal observers, it will allocate detail preferentially along observable channels.
• If you push on the channels that would require the substrate to instantiate extra independent detail, you won't get it for free.
• Instead, you'll get hard ceilings: uncertainty-like behavior, maximum entropy bounds, and resource-like tradeoffs between what can be jointly known.

That's the general shape. The universe already seems to have a lot of "you can know this, or that, but not both" character.

My hypothesis doesn't claim quantum mechanics is "because simulation." It claims something subtler:

Any budget-constrained reality that supports internal observers will evolve limits that look like observer-linked constraints on information extraction.

That's true whether the substrate is "computer" or "quantum gravity" or something we don't even have language for yet.

So the overhead leak is a category of phenomena, not a single measurement.

If you want to sharpen it, here's one way:

If you define a causal region available to an observer (a causal diamond), then the total extractable independent information in that region should be bounded. If you attempt to create an inner world that requires more independent information than that bound, the only way it works is by reusing degrees of freedom. Reuse implies correlations. Correlations imply limits on independent observables.

So:

Budget ceilings force correlations. Correlations show up as "laws."

That's the core mechanism.

The part people hate: this makes "simulation" less like a jail and more like a gauge choice

A lot of simulation talk is basically prison metaphysics. Who is running it? Can we escape? Can we hack the console?

Holographic Parasitism is colder. It says:

Even if there is a "base" substrate, your reality may not be a sandbox running inside it. It may be a coordinate chart on it.

If that's true, "escape" is not walking out of a server room. It's re-describing the same substrate with different variables. It's like switching from position space to momentum space, or from one gauge to another.

That's not comforting. It's also not cartoonish. It's the kind of thing budgets and dualities push you toward.

A harder edge: the recursion cannot be infinite at equal richness

Now I'll take a stance.

The endless Russian-doll recursion of equally rich worlds is not physically plausible under any theory that enforces finite information per region and nonzero interpreter overhead.

What you can get instead is:

• an exponential tapering of contained worlds (each level simpler),
• or a pile of interlocking descriptions (each level "as rich" but not independently stored).

So if you want "simulation within simulation within simulation" to go deep without turning into a toy, you basically have to accept that you are not stacking dolls, you are stacking lenses.

Each lens is a mapping. The substrate is one.

That is why I call it parasitism. The inner world is not a full new organism. It is a strategy for surviving inside a budget.

Where this becomes useful: re-reading the universe's weirdness as resource arbitration

I like hypotheses that take something philosophical and make it feel like an engineering problem.

If Holographic Parasitism is even directionally right, then lots of cosmic weirdness starts looking like resource arbitration:

• local realism breaks because local realism is an expensive storage format,
• global constraints show up because the boundary budget is global,
• irreducible randomness appears because the system refuses to allocate microstate where it can't be amortized,
• and the "area law" character of entropy is not a cute curiosity, it's the accounting ledger.

This doesn't prove anything. It gives you a spine that makes the weirdness feel less arbitrary.

It also dissolves a bunch of lazy simulation arguments.

If "simulation" means "contained copy," then deep nesting is expensive and quickly collapses into coarseness.

If "simulation" means "description," then "we are in a simulation" is not even a punchline. It's just "we are in some coordinate system." Which is true almost by definition, because any observer compresses.

The real question becomes: what is the substrate, and what are the invariants across descriptions?

The one sentence version

If you only keep one line from this whole piece, keep this:

A universe cannot fully contain an equivalent universe within itself; it can only approximate it, slow it, shrink it, or re-describe itself in a way that makes internal observers mistake a shared substrate for a contained world.

That's Holographic Parasitism.

If you want to attack it, here's how

I'd try to break this hypothesis in two ways.

1. Show a plausible model with finite budgets where full containment of an equivalent open-ended world is possible without substrate sharing.

   • Not a toy with precomputed tape.
   • Not a world with bounded novelty.
   • A genuinely open-ended inner physics that is independent.

2. Show that overhead can asymptotically go to zero for self-simulation in a physically realistic setting.

   • Not abstract CS.
   • Actual physics with energy, heat, error correction, and gravitational constraints.

If either of those works, my claim weakens.

If neither works, then the dominant possibility space is exactly what I'm pointing at: either tapering worlds or dual-described worlds.

And if the dual-described route is real, the phrase "inside" becomes an optical illusion.

Which would be a very universe thing to do.

Where I'd push next, if this is the axis

If I were writing the longer version of this, I'd expand along three veins:

• Formalization: define "equivalence" as an observer-relative class of invariants, then prove a nesting tapering theorem under explicit overhead assumptions.
• Physics mapping: connect the boundary budget to causal diamonds and show how correlation constraints emerge as the generic signature of substrate sharing.
• Philosophy that doesn't get mushy: treat consciousness and agency as compression processes that live inside those constraints, not as magical add-ons.

But the heart stays the same: containment is expensive, description is cheap, and budgets force you to be cheap.

That's not just a cute way to talk. It's the only way the arithmetic stops laughing at you.