Very nice, SDAITech1...it does boggle the mind, yet I keep groping for unboggling tools like Information Theory.

The universe repeats itself infinitely and yet never repeats itself!

Indeed, the universe is chaotic in strict accordance with the technical definition: Never exactly repeating, yet self-similar at all scales in all axes of spacetime.

And big. That's why we fall back on statistical techniques to chop it down to size, sometimes trying to deal with averages, sometimes dealing with a sample we hope is statistically representative of the whole.

But all this talk of chaos suggests that it's a tool that can span vast scales while preserving the information content (unlike statistical techniques that deliberately throw away vast amounts of information). I'm getting at the self-similarity thing. We've all seen visualizations of fractals, like the Mandelbrot set. At the top level we see a pattern, and as we zoom in deeper we see the the same pattern repeated, with infinite variation in scale and fine detail, but nevertheless repeated, down as far as we have the patience to go.

So, if we could perceive the chaos (i.e. use mental tools that organize information to reveal its chaotic patterning), we could analyze and manipulate the topmost level of the system, confident that our perceptions and our changes are accurate down to the finest level of the system. For our purposes, the topmost level of organization is equivalent to the finest level of organization. The problem of scale disappears, which is effectively like saying we gain infinite perception and infinite power.

Thanks for introducing the notion of frames of reference. It introduces some intriguing considerations into thoughts of the universe as information. Frames of reference are relative, which implies that they're related, which means that one frame of reference can be translated into another through simple arithmetic. The function Teleport(deltaX,deltaY,deltaZ) applied to an object translates its root frame of reference, dragging all its subsidiary frames of reference with it. To the extent that the object at its destination has some of its information altered, can you state unequivocally that it's the same object? Surely not in all respects: its properties X, Y, and Z have changed.

Frames of references can be linked, and nested in hierarchical relationships. In X marks the spot, X occupies a position x,y within this paragraph, whose frame of reference is the upper-left corner. The paragraph resides within a page, and the paragraph's frame of reference in turn has a position x,y relative to the page frame of reference...which means that X also has a position in "page space". The page exists in browser space, which exists in desktop space...in the real universe, you have to wonder, are all frames of reference linked from bottom to top? Is there such a thing as a truly independent frame of reference? If they're all linked, then when you tug at one, you tug at them all. We're used to the everyday magic of influencing an unimaginably large number of frames of references when we move an object and drag along the FOR of every last particle of which its composed. Could we figure out the inverse operation, pushing the universe by pushing on one of its embedded frames of reference?

One could read this post a million times and each time it will change slightly. Even for me.

Your post is fixed in bits, and is in fact invariant. But as you note, each time it's run through a mind it produces a slightly (or more) different result. It's the mind that's chaotic, never producing exactly the same result when fed the same input over and over.

So might it be that the universe is finite, but filtered through chaotic minds it becomes infinite? Do we, in a sense, ourselves generate branches and multiple universes continually as we move through life?

The mind is a Heisenbergian probability-wave-collapsing machine, but as a chaotic machine, we shouldn't be surprised if the universe we perceive after its probability functions are collapsed turns out to look chaotic. We stamp chaotic patterns on the unformed clay of reality.

(Vivid if creepy image: Intellgence eating the universe, consuming raw reality at one end and excreting filtered and ordered universes at the other. Ewwwww....)

With that, I bid you adieu...