If anyone is interested in reading about this idea, I recommend Stephen Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science" [0] and Max Tegmarks's "Our Mathematical Universe" [1].
I agree that this is really cool, but this is a very contrived situation where the entire universe is arranged in such a way as to form a sort of fixed point. The vast majority of configurations of the Game of Life or of the real world are not fixed points and would break the clever tricks that are used to make this.
Also, because the simulation is infinite and speeds up and simplifies itself as you zoom out, you don't properly appreciate the fact that every layer is a thousand times slower than the layer that simulates it and contains a thousand times less cells (I don't know if it's a thousand). If you transposed this to the real world, it would take one kilogram of computing substrate an hour to simulate one gram of matter for 3.6 seconds and that's kind of useless.
Requiring infinite amounts of information to explain a finite universe? Occam's Razor comes down pretty hard on the side of "no".
People have tried to explain the universe with cellular automata and so far none of these systems has even been consistent with our current observations of the universe, let alone predicting some new behavior that would allow us to prove or disprove that the theory was true. (If your theory doesn't predict anything new, it's not a new theory at all!)
Requiring infinite recursion of cellular automata would seem to make the whole problem much harder...
Most current models of the universe suggest that it occupies a volume and has a finite number of particles. But these are just models based on observations and constraints.
There is no dispute that the observable universe is as you describe, but there is absolutely no consensus as to whether the universe is finite or infinite.
That's not true in the context of big bang cosmology. It's true that today we would not be able to observe things beyond the observable universe by definition, and so there's not much purpose in reasoning beyond today's observable universe, but the observable universe changes over time and when reasoning about the early universe there would be differences between a finite universe and an infinite universe.
Well, we don't have the tech to build such a simulator ourselves, so we'd have to be a leaf node of the simulation tree, that has yet to run long enough to discover how to spawn the next levels. But I guess not all leaves are successful at spawning - some just self-destruct.
Seems most likely, but why is there anything at all to begin with?
.. a feeling deep in the pit of my stomach.
Does anyone else sometimes get these "intuitive flashes of insight" - like your brain configures itself in a pattern that "lifts the veil".
I've been thinking of starting meditating to stabilise or cultivate this state if possible because i've feel like i've been losing this slightly psychedelic ability since i was a kid.
Most often i get it in the hypno/hypopompic phases, sudden flashes of eureka that disappears just as fast, like a loud echo of "wow this is existance", "time is unbelievably deep", "demensions and perspective are bizarre in essence", "is this just a fraction of a shared dream" etc.
Why shouldn't stuff be allowed to spontaneously come into existence? Why should there be any rules at all to begin with? If there is truly nothing, then there isn't any rule to force the nothing to stay nothing. So the question becomes "how was the universe chosen to be this way, rather than some other way?". The choice must be made, but there is no objective reason to prefer any option over any other. "Nothing exists" is a simple answer, but simplicity is not objectively preferred.
I think the presence of this subjective choice forces a subjective experience into existence with the free will to decide it. Though I haven't a clue how the characteristics of the experience are chosen - that's also a subjective choice. It's subjective choices all the way down.
If you wanna get really lost, consider how the 'aha' feeling could itself be illusory and indicative of nothing at all. Similar to how everything in a dream is convincingly real. Or how ideas sound better when you're high. 'Aha' is not a reliable narrator.
My challenge to people chasing 'aha', is to see how long you can stay in the present moment.
Could we be living in a infinitely recursive simulation?