There are cosmologists who might agree with you, at least to the extent of viewing the universe as a quantum computer, computing itself.

Let's see if I can use my previous musings on whether the universe is a simulation to try and explain those quantums...

Maybe a "real" universe would be analog rather than digital? In other words, if an analog universe could be said to require an infinite number of bits to completely describe, a simulation of it would be digitized and quantized to produce an approximation in a finite (if very large) number of bits.

Remember vinyl records? ;-) of course we do. They're analog, because the walls of the groove continuously represent the shape of the recorded waveforms. The needle moves back and forth smoothly, no gaps (except for scratches and other damage).

Along came CDs, and we went digital. Digital is quantum; instead of a smoothly-varying record of the waveforms, about 22,000 times a second a "quantizer" records the level of the waveform at that point, and stores it away as a number. It's not a continuous record, it's a sampling of the waveform every 1/22,000 second.

If, as I noodled, the real universe is analog, it would be like a vinyl record. For example, electrons might be able to orbit a nucleus at any distance; and things could get infinitely big or be infinitely small.

If we were living in a simulation, the simulation would sample reality the way a CD samples music. It would represent reality as a vast array of stored numbers. Electrons would be confined to a fixed set of "legal" orbits around nucleii, corresponding to possible stored integer values.

In physics, which we assume is a description of the real universe, you find that there's no such thing as infinitely small. The smallest possible dimension of space is the Planck length, and the smallest unit of time is the Planck interval. Really small. If I recall right, the Planck Length is 1 over 10 to the 43rd power. Really really small.

So, I noodle, what if those gaps in space and time are the signature of a very powerful quantizer that sampled the real analog universe and converted it into a quantized digital form? The Planck limits could be the smallest number that can be represented in the simulation; smaller than that and you get a divide by zero error.

At the other end of the scale, things get kind of Zen: The universe might be/probably is/could be infinitely large, but for all practical purposes it's as big as the distance light could have traveled since the universe was born (every time the age of the universe is redefined by theory, its size also changes). So maybe c is actually the largest number that can be represented in the simulation. Beyond that you get an overflow error.

Not that we could ever prove the proposition, since this is the only universe we got, and we can't compare it to the hypothetical analog original.

But in The Matrix, the story depends on the people inside the simulation being able to influence the simulation; to bend their apparent reality to their wills. Similarly, at the farthest edge of that line of quantum computational cosmology, is the notion that it might be possible to "reprogram" this universe...simulation or real, the difference is moot: You can bend reality, apparent or "real", to your will, by changing a few numbers.

Sounds to me like a digital simulation of a universe is more fun than than a stodgy old analog "real" universe. Make mine digital.