Physicists claim the universe isn’t a simulation — it’s built on “non-algorithmic understanding.” I say it’s just the ripple left by a Tired God who threw the bag of pebbles in and walked away.
A group of physicists in Canada has just announced that we don’t live in a computer simulation. Their argument: the universe is founded on what they call non-algorithmic understanding.
It’s a grand phrase, but nobody knows what it means. Sounds like something you’d encounter halfway through a mystic initiation: an undefined force, beyond logic, that somehow keeps the cosmos ticking while eluding all description.
I imagine it like this: I’ve suddenly been promoted to Universal Creator. No briefings. No HR induction. Just me and an early morning at the Devil’s Punchbowl — that steep bowl of ancient earth out on the edge of nowhere.
Each dawn I take a bag of pebbles and lob them into the pool below. Every splash sends ripples through spacetime, spinning off galaxies, laws of physics, the whole cosmic machine. The ripples intersect and form patterns. Somewhere in that chaotic dance, intelligent creatures evolve and decide they’ve discovered “algorithms.”
They build universities, chalk equations, write papers declaring that the universe cannot be a simulation because it’s founded on “non-algorithmic understanding.”
Meanwhile, I’m still at the Punchbowl, tired of the ritual. One morning I throw in the whole bag of pebbles and walk away to find breakfast.
That, to me, is closer to how creation probably works — not as a perfect clockwork simulation, but as a divine accident of boredom and impulse. Existence as improvisation.
If the Canadian physicists are right, and the foundation of reality is non-algorithmic, that might not be a triumph of human intellect at all. It might mean that reality itself was never thought through.
And maybe that’s the secret beauty of it: we’re not lines of code. We’re ripples from a stone tossed by a Tired God — still spreading, still forming new patterns, long after the thrower has wandered off.
Source
University of British Columbia Okanagan News Release: UBCO study debunks the idea that the universe is a computer simulation — 30 October 2025
Interesting thought!