I think mental is the wrong word for it. That’s rather anthrocentric. It would be more accurate to say that the universe is information itself. The entirety of

I think mental is the wrong word for it. That’s rather anthrocentric. It would be more accurate to say that the universe is information itself. The entirety of the universe is only accessible as the solution to a massive (or maybe not, we may discover, although that’s not likely given the state of physics at the moment) set of governing equations. The origin of these equations is mathematics itself, i.e. a completely platonic and immaterial thing. The fact that they exist means that a single solution may spool out of them: set an initial condition, and carry forward until t=infinity. The universe is exactly the product of this. But it’s not because anything actually computes anything - it’s just a natural consequence of the existence of such equations that there is some set of solutions to them. This also means: an infinite number of IVPs for the governing equations of “our universe,” and an infinite number of such governing equations for all the other universes. The spring mass damper model that I can see in my textbook exists in mathematical fact, and is a universe thusly. Why is that? Well, it arises from the purity of mathematics itself, which is actually God. That’s my theory at least.