The Recursive Reality Hypothesis: Mechanisms for Layered Spacetime, Consciousness, and Emergent Intelligence

The Recursive Reality Hypothesis (RRH) proposes that physical reality and consciousness are not separate substances but mutually embedded layers within a single recursive informational structure. From quantum processes to neural activity and self-awareness, each level of existence mirrors the same fundamental logic: systems that encode and interpret their own states. RRH integrates insights from physics, neuroscience, and information theory—drawing on concepts such as teleodynamics (Deacon, 2011), the free-energy principle (Friston, 2019), and embodied cognition (Varela et al., 1991)—to suggest that consciousness emerges when recursion becomes self-referential. This framework reinterprets mind–matter relations not as dualistic but as self-reflective, uniting subjective experience and physical causality under a shared recursive architecture. The paper concludes with a quantitative falsification protocol designed to test top-down informational constraint using a global network of quantum random number generators. The model extends to artificial intelligence, proposing that machine consciousness could arise through nested feedback and self-modeling rather than computation alone. RRH ultimately envisions a cosmology in which the universe is self-observing and self-generating—a recursive intelligence evolving through biological, technological, and cosmic scales.