If the simulation were running on a substrate very different from the “reality” being simulated, then it might not have the same resource limitations we’re used to, and it might not have any resource-conserving hacks in it.
If you have infinite computing power, and are in a position to simulate all of the physics we can access starting from the most ontologically fundamental rules, with no approximations, quantizations, or whatever, it’s relatively easy to write something that won’t glitch. To get the physics we seem to have, you might actually have to have “uncountably infinite computing power”, but what’s special about ℵ₀ anyhow?
Admittedly, I don’t know if the entities that existed in such a universe would count as “biological”. And if you keep going down that road you start to run into serious questions about what counts as a simulation and what counts as reality, and the next thing you know you’re arguing with a bunch of dragonflies and losing.
On the other hand, such entities would be more plausibly able to run whatever random simulations struck their fancies than entities stuck in a world like ours. Anybody operating in our own physics would frankly have to be pretty crazy to waste resources on running this universe.
Or maybe it’s actually a really crappy, complicated, buggy simulation, but the people running it detect glitches and stop/rewind every time one happens, and if they can’t do that they just edit you so you don’t notice it.
If the simulation were running on a substrate very different from the “reality” being simulated, then it might not have the same resource limitations we’re used to, and it might not have any resource-conserving hacks in it.
If you have infinite computing power, and are in a position to simulate all of the physics we can access starting from the most ontologically fundamental rules, with no approximations, quantizations, or whatever, it’s relatively easy to write something that won’t glitch. To get the physics we seem to have, you might actually have to have “uncountably infinite computing power”, but what’s special about ℵ₀ anyhow?
Admittedly, I don’t know if the entities that existed in such a universe would count as “biological”. And if you keep going down that road you start to run into serious questions about what counts as a simulation and what counts as reality, and the next thing you know you’re arguing with a bunch of dragonflies and losing.
On the other hand, such entities would be more plausibly able to run whatever random simulations struck their fancies than entities stuck in a world like ours. Anybody operating in our own physics would frankly have to be pretty crazy to waste resources on running this universe.
Or maybe it’s actually a really crappy, complicated, buggy simulation, but the people running it detect glitches and stop/rewind every time one happens, and if they can’t do that they just edit you so you don’t notice it.