Greene's YT statement that 'we don't even know how to formulate physical laws without assuming time exists' has an overlap with my own interest area: why did nature choose *our* physics (including the probably spacetime-originating Big Bang), or indeed any physics at all? One can speculate that the answer is because this physics is one of the most prolific in terms of production of stable self-aware intelligences (ssai), so that we are most likely to find ourselves in such a world. This fits to the idea that we appear to be governed by the simplest physical laws that are consistent with the evolution of such intelligences. Under this view, nature would only be limited by what is logically possible, and in terms of ssai evolution by what can make sense to its inhabitants, so potentially being mathematically modellable. (This idea is not the same as those of Tegmark's mathematical structures, computationalist models, or modal realism.) Ultimately the aim would be to see if it is possible to use the method of comparative complexity to formally prefer simpler variants of theories of quantum gravity say, by analysing each of the function structures involved; this would not only determine the one most likely to be correct but also clarify whether the simplest versions of potential component theories (QM and GR in this case) will have to be modified into a QG-compatible form even at the expense of more complexity, in order to make the overarching theory simpler.
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