This seems a topic way out of my league, but bear with me. Recently Thad Roberts published an amazing book about the 44 derangements, where he explains that if you take the minimal persistent ‘flow’ of an assumed quantum liquid, which is a hyperbolic figure eight knot, you end up with nearly all constants of nature including partical masses etc. Truely mind blowing and Noble Prize wothy imho.
What this means is that our world consists of undulations of flow in a ‘fluid’ which create all the phenomena we observe. All of them. The liquid itself is still a mystery, but what it has to be, Stephen Wolfram thinks its a graph of some kind, a network with simple rules. Thad’s calculations strongly suggests it consists of spheres, but that may be an artifact of the connecting ‘edges’ having whole number multiple lengths. ‘Energy’ is stored in the compressing of those edges (I wrote about this before), where they can overlap, but will un-overlap as soon as the surrounding forces allow it to. If this is true you are left with a network of vertexes and edges where the edges redistribute according to simple rules. But this level of reality is anything but mathematical. It is computational.
The impulse to say computational stems from our inability to understand action without an actor. We don’t get that the universe can be a network that reconfigures itself at incredible speed (Planck time) and scale with no resistance whatsoever. For us everything requires effort, anything that happens has to have a cause and an effect. This is because of the rules that govern the behavior of the edges and vertexes. If edges could be compressed and then lost, we’d see energy disappear from our universe, and the universe would stop existing really quick. Its really tantalizing to think about this substrate, which expanded after the big bang (according to some).
All the same but a liquid, rapidly reconfiguring network who’s properties we can barely assess does not allow any mathematical reduction. It requires iteration, the evolution of every vertex and edge towards a new configuration. You could claim this to be a function, but how would you define the location of the vertexes without spatial coordinates (the location has to play a role)? What if it really is just a liquid of rigid spheres that repulse each other. We calculate liquid dynamics as flow and density for volume ‘pixels’ but then you always end up with an average. Would be fun to calculate the computational requirement to simulate a piece of simplified universe (repellent liquid) on a computer. Alternative one can build a universe computer.
The universe computer tries to mimic the quantum fluid using some means. I’m trying to work out what it would have to look like.