Why we live in the Computational Universe

Abstract

To better understand the deep significance of our best physical theories it could be interesting to compare our Universe with its models. It may happen that the differences between the model and reality can be made indistinguishable, to the point that it may seem acceptable to consider reality as a gigantic program, a 'mother computation' running in a Universal Computer. The computational interpretation of reality is here adopted for introducing concepts that are common in computer science, they may offer a new insight. For instance, code and memory usage optimization techniques are common in computer science because they improve the performances at a reduced hardware cost. According to the concepts discussed in this paper, the possibility of recognizing the effects of optimization rules in a physical reality will allow us to discriminate if our reality is fundamental or the result of a large computation. Conversely, code and memory optimization has side effects, if it is present in our Universe it can produce many interesting phenomena, some seem readily recognizable, others only wait to be discovered.