I’ve never understood why people make this argument:
but it’s expensive, especially if you have to simulate its environment as well. You have to use a lot of physical resources to run a high-fidelity simulation. It probably takes irreducibly more mass and energy to simulate any given system with close to “full” fidelity than the system itself uses.
Let’s imagine that we crack the minimum requirements for sentience. I think we already may have accidentally done so, but table that for a moment. Will it really require that we simulate the entire human brain down to every last particle, or is it plausible that it will require a bare minimum of mathematical abstractions?
Additionally, we’ve seen people create basic computers inside of minecraft and little big planet, now let’s pretend there was a conscious npc inside one of those games looking at their computer and wondering:
what if we exist inside of a simulation, and a device like this is being used to generate our entire world—including us?
and the other sentient npc says
nonsense, there aren’t enough resources in the whole of our reality to simulate even a single island, let alone the entire world
For all we know all the particles in the universe are as difficult to run as the pixels on-screen during a game of pac-man, and/or perhaps the the quantum observer effect is analogous to an advanced form of view frustum culling.
Why would we ever assume that an outer reality simulating our own has similar computational resource constraints or that resource constraints is even a meaningful concept there?
I’ve never understood why people make this argument:
Let’s imagine that we crack the minimum requirements for sentience. I think we already may have accidentally done so, but table that for a moment. Will it really require that we simulate the entire human brain down to every last particle, or is it plausible that it will require a bare minimum of mathematical abstractions?
Additionally, we’ve seen people create basic computers inside of minecraft and little big planet, now let’s pretend there was a conscious npc inside one of those games looking at their computer and wondering:
and the other sentient npc says
For all we know all the particles in the universe are as difficult to run as the pixels on-screen during a game of pac-man, and/or perhaps the the quantum observer effect is analogous to an advanced form of view frustum culling.
Why would we ever assume that an outer reality simulating our own has similar computational resource constraints or that resource constraints is even a meaningful concept there?