I remember when I first learned about cellular automata and wrote my own little programs to run their simulations. First with Conway’s famous rules, and later with others, fiddling both with initial conditions and the rules. It is very easy to see why these automata get described as life-like, just by how they look with random initial conditions, or the kinds of complexity they’re able to encode.
I was struck by the fact that these worlds all evolve in a completely deterministic way. Every time I’d run a specific rule-set on a specific initial condition, the resulting behavior and pattern would always be the same. In a way, I didn’t have to run the simulation all the way to generation 1000 for the state of it at that time to be knowable and a mathematical truth. In fact, in a sense, these patterns that I was discovering were already mathematically “true” independent of it being embedded in my computer, existing already and forever as a kind of platonic ideal, being a simple consequence of logic.
If our own world could be described in a similarly exact way, if the behaviors that make up the entire universe could be summed up using some sort of logical machinery, whether mathematical formula, hypergraphs, automata, or whatever, then a similar statement would apply: We and our universe would “exists” as a consequence of logic, independent of any embedding that might try to simulate us. And in turn, for all we may be able to know, that might be the only sense in which we do exist.