Is there a layer zero though? What does that even mean? It implies the universe is designed and built upon layers of abstraction. That's just in our heads though, not out there. The layered model is a human abstraction.
a) Actually pouring a cup of water into a pond (layer zero), and
b) Running a fluid dynamics simulation of pouring a cup of water into a pond (some layer above layer zero).Genuinely curious about your statement that its an illusion / arbitrary distinction, to figure out if there's a gap in my thinking / reasoning. To me there's a clear distinction between the actual thing happening via physical dynamics vs. us (humans) having creating a discretized abstraction (binary computation) on top of that and running a process on that abstraction.
Maybe there's some true computational universality where the universes dynamics are discrete (definitely plausible) and there's no distinction between how a processes dynamics unfold: i.e. consciousness binds to states and state transitions regardless of how they are instantiated. I did use to hold this view , but now I'm not so sure.