Stephen Wolfram

What turns out to be the case is that all three of the fundamental principles of physics are derivable, but they're not derivable just from mathematics.

They require, or just from some kind of logical computation, they require one more thing.

They require that the observer, that the thing that is sampling the way the universe works, is an observer who has these characteristics of computational boundedness of belief and persistence in time.

And so that means that it is the nature of the observer

the rough nature of the observer, not the details of, oh, we got two eyes and we observe photons of this frequency and so on.

But the kind of the very coarse features of the observer then imply these very precise facts about physics.

And I think it's amazing.

Yeah, it's a simplification.

But you don't think a simplification is an illusion?

No.

I mean, it's, well, I don't know.

I mean, what's underneath...

Okay, that's an interesting question.

What's real?

And that relates to the whole question of why does the universe exist?

And what is the difference between reality and a mere representation of what's going on?

Yes.

We experience the representation.

Yes.

So one question is, why is there a thing which we can experience that way?