The universe is probably not a simulation on a silicone-based digital computer of the type humans have been able to conceive of and invent so far. But it seems useful to think of the universe, with its crystal clear gravitational, thermodynamic, and quantum operating rules (are these different things or one thing – they almost certainly are one thing, but don’t ask me to explain this, and don’t even ask Hawking or Einstein because they made some progress but weren’t able to fully explain these things), as some sort of operating system. Then all the events and information flows that take place within this operating system, including your and my consciousness and our seeming free choices, are enabled by and constrained by these rules. So that sounds like a simulation to me.

This is author Claire Evans describing a similar concept:

While writing about technology, I developed an interest in biotechnology, and in biology more generally. Right now there’s this intersection between computing and biology emerging simultaneously across disciplines. There are people creating artificial intelligence from the top-down, using traditional machine-learning methods, but there are also people working towards generating life from code from the bottom-up, using evolutionary methods. There are synthetic biologists programming cells like code, roboticists working with living matter, and researchers drawing inspiration from living systems—swarms of fish, flocks of birds, slime molds, or seedling roots—to imagine new computing architectures. Even traditional biologists are increasingly using terms like “computation” and “information processing” to talk about phenomena they observe in nature… 

I think we can learn a lot from trying to model natural systems. It’s only by attempting it that we realize how staggeringly complex even the simplest life forms are, and how completely bonkers it is that a single process could have brought us from a single cell to all the diversity of life on Earth. We’ll never be smart enough to create an algorithm with that kind of open-ended generative power, although it’s precisely its evolutionary creativity that brought us intelligence to begin with. For me, the ongoing life force that resists entropy—whatever it is that organizes living systems and makes them capable of complex emergent behaviors—is the most mystical thing. Thinking about it is as close as I get to religious feeling. It’s at the center of everything. 

I’m fascinated by the fact that every living thing processes information, or computes, in a sense. Living things are each perfect computers that only do one thing—run themselves—and even the simplest ones are so complex they’re impossible to model fully. There’s a really interesting open-source project going on right now to create a computational model of a microscopic roundworm with only a thousand cells. Even that is considered an ambitious, long-term goal. Like, maybe someday we can build a faithful model of a worm in the computer. And that’s just one organism! And life is about relationships, the dynamic interactions between organisms. So the best we can do is sample here and there. Because ecologies are so complex, and because they operate at different scales simultaneously, and across time, the only way to get any understanding is to create a number of different models and see where they might overlap. That’s where the truth is, if it exists. 

I’m trying to model a fairly simple one-dimensional system of soil, water, plants (really just one plant) and the atmosphere at the moment. Even this is a significant feat for my Windows 11 “gaming laptop”, and it’s a pretty simplified representation of the complexity that really exists even in a flower pot (worms, for example, are not represented but in real life they can make a big difference in how water flows through soil. You don’t need Einstein or Hawking to explain these particular wormholes, although Einstein’s son Hans Albert actually made some discoveries in the area of soil and sediment – you could even say he was “ground breaking” – sorry). Ultimately though, it is governed by energy potentials, which comes back to gravity and thermodynamics. And I have come to understand the universe just a little bit better as I play with this model and look at model output and some data together.