The broad answer to those questions is “depends what the simulation is being run for”.
To see why, consider why we run simulations. Answers include entertainment, e.g. SimCity; training, e.g. flight simulators; fundamental research, e.g. simulation of neural networks; engineering, e.g. simulation of a model building to determine whether its design withstands this or that catastrophic event, such as a quake. I’m probably forgetting many other areas.
A simulation is generally intended to answer a specific question or class of questions about some aspects of reality. The degree of fidelity, the “shortcuts” taken, the possibilities for intervention and so on are all determined by what questions are of interest to the people running the simulation.
If we decided to run a simulation to answer the question “can intelligent life arise out of deterministic physics”, then we would build the simulation to have simplified but realistic physics, such that we could run the sim at a much faster rate than our baseline reality. Such a sim would likely not model anything at a higher level of abstraction than the laws of physics, since that would defeat the point.
If, on the other hand, we were running a simulation for the aesthetic purpose of recreating forgotten parts of our history, we would likely not bother with such minute details. For those who’ve read Permutation City, we would make something closer to Copies than to the Autoverse.
In fact, you could do worse than buy your dad a copy of Permutation City to stimulate his thinking about such questions.
The broad answer to those questions is “depends what the simulation is being run for”.
To see why, consider why we run simulations. Answers include entertainment, e.g. SimCity; training, e.g. flight simulators; fundamental research, e.g. simulation of neural networks; engineering, e.g. simulation of a model building to determine whether its design withstands this or that catastrophic event, such as a quake. I’m probably forgetting many other areas.
A simulation is generally intended to answer a specific question or class of questions about some aspects of reality. The degree of fidelity, the “shortcuts” taken, the possibilities for intervention and so on are all determined by what questions are of interest to the people running the simulation.
If we decided to run a simulation to answer the question “can intelligent life arise out of deterministic physics”, then we would build the simulation to have simplified but realistic physics, such that we could run the sim at a much faster rate than our baseline reality. Such a sim would likely not model anything at a higher level of abstraction than the laws of physics, since that would defeat the point.
If, on the other hand, we were running a simulation for the aesthetic purpose of recreating forgotten parts of our history, we would likely not bother with such minute details. For those who’ve read Permutation City, we would make something closer to Copies than to the Autoverse.
In fact, you could do worse than buy your dad a copy of Permutation City to stimulate his thinking about such questions.
I find it very plausible that whatever would have the capacity to simulate us would have a wider range of motivations than we do.