How about the universe that quantum-emerges in a truly random sequence of quasistates which disintegrate immediately, and once in a while it happens to be the state that includes "your" "memory" of the previous ones. I mean chronologically from your perspective, they don't even have to appear in order.

By an amazing coincidence, this particular "frameset" is logically consistent and pretty boring, so you have no intergalactic empires, no magic, and no job.

If perception emerged directly from chaos like that, wouldn't you expect to perceive chaos, rather than a rich world built upon billions of years of evolutionary history?

I don't think there's "rather than" in this idea. You surely will perceive every state that is perceivable at all, but time and continuity have no meaning here. Specific history is just an image that always exists only for an instant. Eventually that universe might enumerate all states, so they'd form all sorts of sequences, but that's coincidental.

Sure, such a universe would create all states, but if perception from chaos were possible, then there would be overwhelmingly more chaotic states to perceive than sensible ones, so you would expect to find yourself perceiving chaos.

I think perception cannot exist without a robust evolutionary history to build upon, which is why you perceive something sensible.

It depends on what we see as "perception". Imagine in our regular universe model, the "perceptor" quickly switched between all creatures just like a CPU core switches between all busy processes. That wouldn't invalidate any of the creatures/processes "experience" and wouldn't mix them (ignoring cache, processes aren't that isolated really). All these processes are transient states of the same physical CPU core.

Back to the chaotic universe, the "perceptor" switches between the states, every state is a complete picture. Yes it does see more chaotic states, but they don't leak into each other, including through expectations. There's no memory outside of a state that it could accumulate and experience continuously. Eons of state changes pass between two attoseconds, but there's no way to remember.

That's what I mean by perception. In-frameset perception obviously has to be continuous to make (or not make) sense.

That would still make the human brain an exceptionally rare state, compared to all the other chaotic states the perceptor perceives.

This particular human brain refuses to believe that the perceptor perceives anything when selecting a chaotic state. If you'd like to hear chaos' opinion on the matter, please pound on your keyboard for a while.

Essentially dust theory from Permutation City. I've thought about this a lot.

Sssshhhh, you’ll summon all the simulation people out of the woodwork!

I could see why a charge imbalance prevents life from forming, but why would it also collapse the entire universe?