Yet the universe runs on strikingly simple math (relativity, quantum mechanics); such elegance is exactly what an efficient simulation would use. Physics is unreasonably effective, reducing the computational cost of the simulation. This cuts against the last point.
This does not seem so consistent, and if the primary piece of evidence for me against such simulation arguments. I would imagine simulations targeting, eg, a particular purpose would have their physics tailored to that purpose much more than ours seems to (for any purpose, given the vast computational complexity of our physics, and the vast number of objects such a physics engine needs to keep track of). For example, I’d expect most simulations physics to look more like Greg Egan’s Crystal Nights (incidentally this story is what first convinced me the simulation hypothesis was false).
One may argue its all there just to convince us we’re not in a simulation. Perhaps, but two points:
Given the discourse on the simulation hypothesis, most seem to take our physics as evidence in favor of it, as you do here. So I don’t think most think clearly enough about this for our civilizational decisions to be so dependent on this.
The simulators will have trade-offs and resource constraints too. Perhaps they simulate few highly detailed simulations, and many highly simplified simulations. If this is exponential, in the sense that as the detail decreases the number of simulations exponentially increases, we should expect to be in the least detailed world consistent with the existence of sentiences and for which its not blatantly obvious we’re in a simulation.
Of course this argument would break given sufficiently different physics from ours, enabling perhaps our world to be simulated in as much depth as it is very cheaply. But then that seems intuitively at least very unlikely & complex a hypothesis.
This does not seem so consistent, and if the primary piece of evidence for me against such simulation arguments. I would imagine simulations targeting, eg, a particular purpose would have their physics tailored to that purpose much more than ours seems to (for any purpose, given the vast computational complexity of our physics, and the vast number of objects such a physics engine needs to keep track of). For example, I’d expect most simulations physics to look more like Greg Egan’s Crystal Nights (incidentally this story is what first convinced me the simulation hypothesis was false).
One may argue its all there just to convince us we’re not in a simulation. Perhaps, but two points:
Given the discourse on the simulation hypothesis, most seem to take our physics as evidence in favor of it, as you do here. So I don’t think most think clearly enough about this for our civilizational decisions to be so dependent on this.
The simulators will have trade-offs and resource constraints too. Perhaps they simulate few highly detailed simulations, and many highly simplified simulations. If this is exponential, in the sense that as the detail decreases the number of simulations exponentially increases, we should expect to be in the least detailed world consistent with the existence of sentiences and for which its not blatantly obvious we’re in a simulation.
Of course this argument would break given sufficiently different physics from ours, enabling perhaps our world to be simulated in as much depth as it is very cheaply. But then that seems intuitively at least very unlikely & complex a hypothesis.