Here’s an attempt: (1) Maybe by default simulations aren’t conscious. You have to go out of your way to make a conscious being, e.g. maybe it has to be biological or something fancier than whatever the most efficient-yet-accurate simulation would be. (2) Also, maybe there are pretty universally enforced ethical prohibitions against going out of your way to make conscious beings and then putting them in such a nasty horrible situation as 21st-century Earth. The number of entities with the will & means to violate this prohibition is vanishingly small, small enough that any conscious simulations created by them are outnumbered by the conscious non-simulations / evolved creatures like us.
(2) seems like a good point to me! I hadn’t considered that before, ‘whether the expected being is simulated’ as opposed to ‘whether the expected universe is simulated’.
Here’s an attempt:
(1) Maybe by default simulations aren’t conscious. You have to go out of your way to make a conscious being, e.g. maybe it has to be biological or something fancier than whatever the most efficient-yet-accurate simulation would be.
(2) Also, maybe there are pretty universally enforced ethical prohibitions against going out of your way to make conscious beings and then putting them in such a nasty horrible situation as 21st-century Earth. The number of entities with the will & means to violate this prohibition is vanishingly small, small enough that any conscious simulations created by them are outnumbered by the conscious non-simulations / evolved creatures like us.
(2) seems like a good point to me! I hadn’t considered that before, ‘whether the expected being is simulated’ as opposed to ‘whether the expected universe is simulated’.