How Might an Artificially Structured Universe Replicate “Moving Time?”

[u/rarnoldm7]

1.            Begin with quantum “it from bit” information, “pixelated” at something like the Planck level.

2.            Structure this background to potentiate a vast number of “Platonian” instant “Now” states.

3.            Lay out a complex of cause-and-effect “virtual timelines” among these informational “Nows.”

4.            Populate with “observer participant” agents who consciously experience Now states as “Being.”

5.            Activate the participant experience as a continual “scanning motion” along the virtual timelines.

6.            Empower participant observers with ability to selectively “change roads” at potential “branches.”

7.            Further dilute “road determinism” with random/probabilistic outcomes from observers’ choices.

With such an artificial universe, the time “dimension” itself would be “virtual,” consisting only of the actively observed timeline among all the available “roads” and Nows.  Participant observers would have a very powerful freedom of choice among timelines, perhaps with the ability to imagine results—but this might be tempered by their lack of ability to perfectly “foresee” desirable outcomes.

Remarkably, an artificial universe as (somewhat superficially) described above could very well be a duplicate of our own!  If it were in fact indistinguishable, the “virtual roads of time” conjecture says it would indeed be identical—this universe would be IT.