Ok, I will grant you the “simulations run slower/ with more energy” so are less common argument as approximately true.
(I think there are big caviats to that, and I think it would be possible to run a realistic sim of you for less than your metabolic power use of ~100 watts. And of course, giving you your exact experiences without cheating requires a whole universe of stars lit up, just so you can see some dots in an astronomy magazine.)
Imagine a universe with one early earth, and 10^50 minds in a intergalactic civilization, including a million simulations of early earth. (Amongst a billion sims of other stuff)
In this universe it is true both that most beings are in underlying reality, and that we are likely in a simulation.
This relies on us being unusually interesting to potential simulators.
But, based on current human behavior, I would expect such simulations to focus on the great and famous, or on situations which represent fun game play.
My life does not qualify as any of those. So I heavily discount this possibility.
I would expect that more notable events would tend to get more sim time.
It might or might not be hard to sim one person without surrounding social context.
(Ie maybe humans interact in such completed ways that it’s easiest to just sim all 8 billion. )
But the main point is that you are still extremely special, compared to a random member of a 10^50 person galactic civilization.
You aren’t maximally special, but are still bloomin special.
You aren’t looking at just how tiny our current world is on the scale of a billion dyson spheres.
If we scale up the resource scales from here to K3 without changing the distribution of things people are interested in, then everything anyone has bothered to say or think ever would get (I think like at least 10 ) orders of magnitude more compute than needed to simulate our civilization up to this point.
However I’m not egocentric enough to imagine myself as particularly interesting to potential simulators. And so that hypothetical doesn’t significantly change my beliefs.
“Particularly interesting” in a sense in which all humans currently on earth (or in our history) are unusually interesting. It’s that compared to the scale of the universe, simulating pre singularity history doesn’t take much.
I don’t know the amount of compute needed, but I strongly suspect it’s <1 in 10^20 of the compute that fits in our universe.
In a world of 10^50 humans in a galaxy spanning empire, you are interesting just for being so early.
Ok, I will grant you the “simulations run slower/ with more energy” so are less common argument as approximately true.
(I think there are big caviats to that, and I think it would be possible to run a realistic sim of you for less than your metabolic power use of ~100 watts. And of course, giving you your exact experiences without cheating requires a whole universe of stars lit up, just so you can see some dots in an astronomy magazine.)
Imagine a universe with one early earth, and 10^50 minds in a intergalactic civilization, including a million simulations of early earth. (Amongst a billion sims of other stuff)
In this universe it is true both that most beings are in underlying reality, and that we are likely in a simulation.
This relies on us being unusually interesting to potential simulators.
Hypothetically this is possible.
But, based on current human behavior, I would expect such simulations to focus on the great and famous, or on situations which represent fun game play.
My life does not qualify as any of those. So I heavily discount this possibility.
I would expect that more notable events would tend to get more sim time.
It might or might not be hard to sim one person without surrounding social context.
(Ie maybe humans interact in such completed ways that it’s easiest to just sim all 8 billion. )
But the main point is that you are still extremely special, compared to a random member of a 10^50 person galactic civilization.
You aren’t maximally special, but are still bloomin special.
You aren’t looking at just how tiny our current world is on the scale of a billion dyson spheres.
If we scale up the resource scales from here to K3 without changing the distribution of things people are interested in, then everything anyone has bothered to say or think ever would get (I think like at least 10 ) orders of magnitude more compute than needed to simulate our civilization up to this point.
I agree with your caveats.
However I’m not egocentric enough to imagine myself as particularly interesting to potential simulators. And so that hypothetical doesn’t significantly change my beliefs.
“Particularly interesting” in a sense in which all humans currently on earth (or in our history) are unusually interesting. It’s that compared to the scale of the universe, simulating pre singularity history doesn’t take much.
I don’t know the amount of compute needed, but I strongly suspect it’s <1 in 10^20 of the compute that fits in our universe.
In a world of 10^50 humans in a galaxy spanning empire, you are interesting just for being so early.