It’s highly intuitive that there must be a fundamental level with unsimulated reality. The alternative is reminiscent of the old story where an audience member tells the American philosopher William James that the earth stands on the back of a turtle that stands on another turtle in turn. When pressed on the details, she says “It’s turtles all the way down.” Still, the contemporary philosopher Jonathan Schaffer has argued that there need not be a fundamental level in nature: There could instead be a never-ending sequence of levels. If Schaffer is right, this opens up at least the theoretical
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