Well, we’ve never caught Nature glitching or bugging or even simplifying its calculations, and absence of evidence is evidence of absence. That we’re living in a simulation is about as plausible as the Abrahamic narrative, about as falsifiable, and about as proven.
How would we recognize “simplified” calculations? If the “next level up” laws of physics differ from ours, their idea of what is cheap or expensive to compute might also differ.
Even if the upper physics was sufficiently similar to ours to share some characteristics (e.g. the need for large computations to be parallelized and the expense of parallel communication), and our laws of physics were simplified in a way to accommodate those characteristics (e.g. with a limit to the speed of information propagation), would we recognize that simplification as such, or would we just call it another law of physics and insist that we’ve never seen it simplified?
Well, we’ve never caught Nature glitching or bugging or even simplifying its calculations, and absence of evidence is evidence of absence. That we’re living in a simulation is about as plausible as the Abrahamic narrative, about as falsifiable, and about as proven.
Um, how would you tell? Wouldn’t glitches or simplified calculations appear as just additional laws of nature.
I think of glitches as being small breaks in the laws of nature.
How would we recognize “simplified” calculations? If the “next level up” laws of physics differ from ours, their idea of what is cheap or expensive to compute might also differ.
Even if the upper physics was sufficiently similar to ours to share some characteristics (e.g. the need for large computations to be parallelized and the expense of parallel communication), and our laws of physics were simplified in a way to accommodate those characteristics (e.g. with a limit to the speed of information propagation), would we recognize that simplification as such, or would we just call it another law of physics and insist that we’ve never seen it simplified?
I’m inclined to think that people (especially modern skeptical people) would find ways to paper over small glitches.