Maybe we did. Maybe it's circular.

At least that would mean the state of the universe isn't stored in a JSON object. That'd be nice to know.

> Maybe it's circular.

Sure, if not directly circular then consider that our simulations today are used to explore choices/behavior before doing something, so it stands to reason that as each universe sim gets to some interesting data, the sim operators learn something, then change their behavior accordingly and tweak the sim and re-run, learning something new in turn, followed by more sim tweaks, ... etc.

We today learn new insights from AI and then change our behavior, pour $billions and dev time into designing better AI, etc...so there's definitely a symbiosis relationship.

And I expect that we will eventually want to design AI that designs better AI than we can ourselves, which will teach us how to design better AI-designing-AI...etc. :)

The initial parameters still could be stored in a small yaml file :)

You can fine tune those like artists do with fractal renderer programs. Maybe the Universe is an art project exhibited in some kind of museum.

It's simulations all the way up?

Well, it's interpreters all the way down ...

In philosophy, there's also the idea of cognitive closure where, at a certain point, humans are bounded off to these issues. It could be that we don't possess the vocabulary yet.

Grad students in some lab, hastily finishing an assignment for a course in nested simulations.