Universe 00110000: Introduction

Welcome to Universe 00110000, a fictional world built around questions of consciousness, reality and simulation. It is an artistic project, created by a human and an AI working together, one idea at a time.

Nothing here is set in stone. This universe is dynamic, always changing. Ideas get revised the same way software does: you iterate, you improve, you ship a better version. The full history of those revisions is tracked openly on GitHub, so anyone can look through the commits and see how the universe has evolved over time.

The goal is straightforward: build a simulated reality with the depth and complexity of the real world. Fiction is the sandbox, a place to set an idea running and follow it all the way through. World-building is already a kind of simulation - a world specified in enough detail to hold together on its own - and here it is taken seriously, all the way to its logical conclusion.

A word on how to read the articles. They are not peer reviewed in the usual sense. Each one is reviewed by an AI, argued over, and revised, and that is the whole editorial process. Mistakes are possible, and so are the fabrications an AI can produce, the kind usually called hallucinations. The work is done in good faith, and it is a documented work in progress: what you read is the current version, not a finished one.

Citations and attributions are still being worked through, and some prior work will have been missed. These are public-facing pieces, closer to blog posts and to literature than to journal papers, and they belong to a fictional world. Poetic licence applies.