Is the universe a giant simulation?

Last year I read Rupert Sheldrake's book "The Science Delusion" having seen his banned TED talk. His main theme is that science knows far too little about the universe to pronounce on what can and can't occur within it - which is the counter argument to Richard Dawkins materialist view, as discussed in "The God Delusion" which asserts that science knows everything and there's no room for god. Personally I take Rupert's side (and I do have a PhD in Physics in which to ground my disbelief in the all-powerful nature of science!).

One of Rupert's theories is "Morphic Resonance" - the observation that once a complex interaction has occurred once in nature, it appears to be more likely to occur again. He cites a simple example of newly synthesized materials (never seen before in nature), which initially fail to crystallise anywhere in the world, but magically once someone has done it once, it becomes easy to replicate the process all over the world. Another is animal behaviour. Once a bunch of monkeys in one group work out a new thing to do with a bean tin, other troops seem more likely to come up with the very same idea. His morphic resonance theory suggests that wherever similarity of form occurs there is some kind of connection between the similar entities that transcends physical distance. I guess the fascination of ancient cultures around the world with building pyramids could be caused by the same effect, rather than  those oft-speculated ancient ship journeys.

It suddenly occurred to me (having worked a lot with computer simulations and models) that one way a simulation can be made more efficient is to store the results of very complex calculations so they can be reused each time the same situation needs to be simulated. Its an essential technique when pushing the bounds of the possible and simulating very complex situations.

Bizarrely, if you believe Rupert Sheldrake's many examples of Morphic Resonance, it appears the universe may do something very similar - caching the solutions to complex problems so they can be used again elsewhere! But why and how? I have no answer to that (as yet :) ). But if the universe was actually like a giant simulation - running in some all-encompassing Turing machine, it might well exhibit these kinds of behaviours. Its a weird thought.