I think I do understand most of the technicalities, using Gregory Chaitin's ideas about the properties of self-delimiting programs as a bridge. What I don't get is what I percieve of as the insistence on "surprises" in the "universe of interest" that can't be seen "from outside". Zooming through a Mandelbrot set visualization, while it can be a great experience, ultimately offers you few surprises, and because there are few surprises, you know that the complexity - represented by the original equation - must be low. And Eliezer seems to be saying the opposite, namely that the are lots of surprises in a particular universe that cannot be known from the system as a whole, because the system as a whole only contains 400 bits of information. If you would write this multiverse program as self-delimiting, the way Chaitin does, where would all the extra complexity/information/surprises found in the "universe of interest" come from?