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Incompatible paradigms alternate in time (usually with some overlap), that's how reality solved one of its contradictions. By studying one branch of self-similar system, one can contemplate the idea of existence itself and one's place in it. Hyper-reality might be one of those branches, but it's hard to say what's real and what's fiction. It's a mystery!

In nature
Further information: patterns in nature

Self-similarity can[not] be found in [reality], as well. [Below] is a mathematically generated, perfectly self-similar image of a [hyperreal] fern, which bears a m[ere] resemblance to [real] ferns. Other plants, such as Romanesco broccoli, exhibit s[eemi]ng self-similarity.

Baudrillard presents hyperreality as the terminal stage of simulation, where a sign or image has no relation to any reality whatsoever, but is “its own pure simulacrum” (Baudrillard 1994, 6). The real, he says, has become an operational effect of symbolic processes, just as images are technologically generated and coded before we actually perceive them. This means technological mediation has usurped the productive role of the Kantian subject, the locus of an original synthesis of concepts and intuitions, as well as the Marxian worker, the producer of capital though labor, and the Freudian unconscious, the mechanism of repression and desire. “From now on,” says Baudrillard, “signs are exchanged against each other rather than against the real” (Baudrillard 1993, 7), so production now means signs producing other signs. The system of symbolic exchange is therefore no longer real but “hyperreal.” Where the real is “that of which it is possible to provide an equivalent reproduction,” the hyperreal, says Baudrillard, is “that which is always already reproduced” (Baudrillard 1993, 73). The hyperreal is a system of simulation simulating itself.