Is the Whole Universe a Computer™?

" Is the whole universe a computer? ", ask Jack Copeland, Mark Sprevak, and Oron Shagrir in chapter 41 of the book The Turing Guide . They split this question in two, first asking whether the universe itself is a computer, then whether the universe could even be computed. These are lofty, unanswerable questions, sure, but they encroach on our territory - philosophy, automata, nonsense. So, in our…