I thought that you meant “more course grained” according to the experience of the conscious entities in the simulation, not “more course grained” in the sense of including less total stuff (conscious and everything else) than an exact copy of the universe.
So a universe with a lone scientist and ample computational resources could afford to simulate the exact experience of the scientist, but couldn’t afford to simulate everything else at the same time. The confusing bit is that the scientist being simulated wouldn’t be able to tell if the simulation they were watching tick away actually corresponds to another conscious entity, or if the experience of observing a simulation tick away is just sensory data being piped in from the parent universe, in which case the scientist is...well, watching what exactly? Themselves?
I thought that you meant “more course grained” according to the experience of the conscious entities in the simulation, not “more course grained” in the sense of including less total stuff (conscious and everything else) than an exact copy of the universe.
So a universe with a lone scientist and ample computational resources could afford to simulate the exact experience of the scientist, but couldn’t afford to simulate everything else at the same time. The confusing bit is that the scientist being simulated wouldn’t be able to tell if the simulation they were watching tick away actually corresponds to another conscious entity, or if the experience of observing a simulation tick away is just sensory data being piped in from the parent universe, in which case the scientist is...well, watching what exactly? Themselves?