I had some inspiration, connecting some popular "dots", but I came to the conclusion that my thoughts were bullshit, or require more than a mammalian brain to work out in detail without contradictions. I thought you might find it interesting, if not the line of thought then maybe the dots it connects. Since it's bullshit, it doesn't really merit a main WU.
How the universe could be created on the fly, or, what if God plays a game of Nomic ?
The game of Nomic is, or can be in some versions, like a MMORPG where everyone is a programmer/creator/wizard(c.f. Second Life). If the universe was a game of Nomic, at some point the rules would change; However, it would be difficult to make a rule without creating a conflict with the passage of time before. History still has to make sense. To solve this conflict, I propose that there is an algorithm to work backwards in time, so that the state of the nomic game at the time of the change becomes the starting point for the future and the point that the past leads to.
The study of Physics is studying how things work forward in time. Considering the complexity of quantum mechanics, it might be easier or at least not more difficult to work backwards than to predict the future.
For example, there was a science fiction story, which assumed that a paradigm change actually does change reality. Non-flatness of Earth is such a paradigm change. The diameter of Earth was first measured accurately by Eratosthenes of Alexandria, a scientist of ancient Greece. Before that, there was Aristotle, who considered the Earth to be a sphere, not flat. This was a paradigm change (Well, maybe not, since we have no records that say people believed in flatness from the time before). In our game of Nomic, or paradigm-shifting, the universe actually changes. However, it turns out that this is a contradiction, since like many Greek philosophers, Aristotle like ideal shapes and considered Earth and the other planets to be perfect spheres. Which is where the contradiction is, since Aristotle himself was a pimple on the perfect shape of Earth, and therefore if the Gods had followed to the letter Aristotles' concept(= new rule of Nomic) of a perfect sphere, we all would be flat circles on the surface of Earth.
A second reason why the idea is hard to handle is all these groups who would like to define history their way, like creationists. The history of paradigm-shifts would appear as a network, not as a straight path through history.
Also, you would have to find a way to discard evidence of a different past. This probably would require events that were very unlikely ("Someone created this evidence out of nowhere"). So the idea of having someone play Nomic with the Universe requires some intervention; you would have to change the state of the game ( a snapshot of the universe ) a bit to accomodate a new rule, and you would probably want a metric to measure that you didn't change it to much, and you would have to work out what not to change.
As an interesting side note, the (possibly changing) rules of the universe could be seen as a way of compressing the universe, while quantum events ("observations") represent the data fed to the compression algorithm. So the above paragraph means that if the "rules" of the universe are perfect, it can't be compressed better, so you cannot make "better" rules.
Does anyone recall which science fiction stories treat paradigm changes as real events ?