 In other words, unless it can be proved that the encoding/decoding functions are not doing all the heavy lifting (and just use a secondary system, a waterfall or a CA, to vacuously transmit information), it is hard to consider the alleged “equivalence” meaningful at all: “we are merely trading an infeasible search among programs for an infeasible search among input encoding schemes” (Aaronson 2002: 413). Moreover, a rationale for studying CA (Ilachinski 2001: 8) is that their implementation can be massively optimized for specific problems with significant performance gain on standard computers (see for example Zaheer et al. 2016). Unless Wolfram’s notion of “equivalent sophistication” simply means “they compute the same functions”—in which case, the claim is a truism—, the Principle cannot explain this empirical difference. The Principle may have a more substantive reading if understood as a metaphysical thesis about the universe in general, not as a scientific generalization having merely heuristic value. Under this stronger reading, the Principle is no more concerned with particular systems that can be fruitfully analyzed via computation theory, but with the fact that (different epistemological properties notwithstanding) the world itself is a computer. In a sense, any system would just be the emergent manifestation of a unique, underlying computational reality. Which naturally leads us to finally address the boldest question: What if the universe itself was a CA? 