You give life and computers some special place in the universe for being to able "ask computations which can't be reduced". I don't think that's warranted. In the end, it's all fundamental particles and forces and interactions. I don't see why life would be special in that regard. A small part of material in the core of a star "asks" many more questions each second than a piece of brain tissue or a silicon chip.
I give computation and consistency a special place once you assume you are in a simulation.
If a computer inside the universe runs some proof of work computation like in BlockChain, (aka finding a mathematical one-way function that when iterated is terminated by a big enough trail of zeros), this computation has to be done in the higher plane universe, or a witness from inside the universe could deem the universe not consistent.
The alternative are time-travel explanations where you substitute questions, by replacing questions for which you can have already an answer.
You can approximate a star or any collection of particle by while preserving its observable statistics aka effective-super-particle and get huge computational speed-up. Life are run-away processes for which you can't define statistics.
But their very point was that the simulation wouldn't have to compute every single individual particle, only the "interesting" ones. The rest would be approximated to whatever level required.
I basically agree with you but I can't see how your argument applies here.
