To my considerable surprise, the paradigm that’s emerging from our recent discoveries potentially seems to suggest a definite—though at first seemingly bizarre—scientific answer.

In what we’ve discussed so far we’re imagining that there’s a particular, single rule for our universe, that gets applied over and over again, effectively in all possible ways. But what if there wasn’t just one rule that could be used? What if all conceivable rules could be used? What if every updating event could just use any possible rule? (Notice that in a finite universe, there are only ever finitely many rules that can ever apply.)

At first it might not seem as if this setup would ever lead to anything definite. But imagine making a multiway graph of absolutely everything that can happen—including all events for all possible rules. This is a big, complicated object. But far from being structureless, it’s full of all kinds of structure.

In a typical case we can think of different reference frames in rulial space as corresponding to different description languages in which an observer can describe their experience of the universe.

I've always assumed that any entity that exists in our universe must at least “experience the same physics as us”. But now I realize that this isn’t true. There’s actually an almost infinite diversity of different ways to describe and experience our universe, or in effect an almost infinite diversity of different “planes of existence” for entities in the universe