This has been bugging me quite a bit recently. The model I keep coming back to is some giant cellular automata embedded in a some sort of higher dimensional compute structure —- perhaps what we call the “big bang” was the randomly initialized start state, and everything since has been its update algorithm ticking along with an encoding of what we call “physics”. This plays interestingly with things like quantum mechanics - perhaps they’re the underlying implementation of “Math.random()” and things like entanglement are implementation details leaking through. Similarly, perhaps wave/particle duality is the result of some sort of legacy code built to deal with light as particles that got shoehorned into the current implementation’s wave-based approach (easer to simulate at-scale), and it only gets activated when the results are under observation!

It, like every proposed answer to the existential question, is both unverifiable and unrefutable, making pondering it somewhat pointless. Though it is good to know even our proposed higher-dimensional overlords haven’t solved the problem of leaky abstractions!

I had a pet theory that Plank Time is the clock-step (or mantissa precission) of our simulation. :)

A global clock can't exist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_of_simultaneity

Who said anything about global? Each “cell” (elementary particle? string?) in the automata could be responsible for its own update function, based on its own clock ticking along at its own plank time.

Plank Time would be the smallest size of a grid in that Wikipedia animation.

There's an idea I really like that if we ever reach "the end" of pi then that's strong evidence that we're in a programmed world.

You cannot reach the end of pi:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_that_%CF%80_is_irrationa...

Yes, that's the whole idea. Pi is infinite, so if we ever get to the end of pi or it starts repeating, it means whatever is simulating our universe has finite resources. There are a lot of issues with this idea, but I like it. I doubt we'll ever find the end of pi, though.

>My outlook is that things just exist in some higher dimension but because we perceive things in 3D we wrongfully assume there needs to be a start/end.

This is a thought I've often had as well. Like we exist on an X-Y coordinate plane, but there's a Z axis we just can't access. Particles popping into and out of existence? Just moving along the Z axis (our entire existence is on a single scalar value on that axis). GR and the "warping of spacetime"? Well, the bowling ball on a trampoline analogy obviously requires an extra dimension beyond the 2D trampoline surface to warp into. EPR and Bell's Theorem, viz no local hidden variables? Well, there's the non-locality. I'm not a physicist and this is all obviously a vast oversimplification, but it just seems that so many fundamental questions are confounding because they all seem to point to a missing degree of freedom.

the way I deal with it.....

Don't come up with weird ass theories and posit them as true or even "possible". Things we don't have good evidence for, at best, can be said to be "an intriguing idea". They are fun to ponder, and help us consider what possibilities could lead to better descriptions of the cosmos, but they don't lead to any actual understanding of what is real

So the best thing for a lot of these questions is to get good at going "I don't know" and instead trying to understand what we do know. We have a bunch of problems to solve about the universe (dark matter / quantum gravity) that may change the nature how we might even ask this kind of question. So I mainly focus on what's the most we can know with reasonable certainty at the moment.

> Isn’t the big question how matter exists at all?

I think the big question is why we experience the existence of matter.

Matter exists because we observe it to collapse it into existence. Without humans there would be no universe ;)

Greg Egan's Quarantaine explores this idea.