> Give that I do not know what exactly you mean with a functional universe, this may go totally into the wrong direction, but at least naively I see no problem

> Give that I do not know what exactly you mean with a functional universe, this may go totally into the wrong direction, but at least naively I see no problem for the rules to simply change in any kind of universe. I'm sure that I don't know exactly what I mean, but I fully intend to find out. A functional universe may be the only way to derive a Theory of Everything that is a) self-describing (and therefore recursively encodes all the "layers" simultaneously), and b) whose existence isn't rejected by the undecidability of the halting problem. As to whether rules change; that might suggest that what we currently believe to be universal constants may not be constant, and that would be controversial besides. > Would you mind elaborating this point? I'm thinking directly of the arguments at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_everything#Arguments_against https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_everything#Arguments... (with the proviso that I believe Gödel's incompleteness theorem emerges as a corollary of Turing's proof of the undecidability of the halting problem). > why would it be impossible for the gravitational law to become an inverse cube law tomorrow Hard to rule out, isn't it? But in the circumstances I posit that we would not be around to perceive it. Hard not to consider one of the anthropic principles as a result. The proponents of the strong one might love the idea that a complex assembly of self-describing, self-evaluating functions is lazily evaluating the universe (but they'd be putting the cart before the horse) > The only thing that matters is whether the speed of light is finite or not To me the defining characteristic of c is that it is the fastest speed of propagation of evaluation, whether that is electromagnetic, or gravity waves, or any other of what we currently term the fundamental interactions. Agree, the term "speed of light" is misleading. But I went to school in a building named after James Clerk Maxwell and it's hard to give up.