If you do probabilistic estimates based on large numbers of simulations though, you can cut down on the fidelity of the simulations dramatically. I know that this is something you’re arguing for, but really, there’s no good reason to make the simulations as detailed as the universe we observe.
To take forest succession modeling programs (something I have more experience with than most types of computer modeling) as an example, there are some ecological mechanisms that, if left out, will completely change the trends of the simulation, and some that won’t, and you can leave those that don’t out entirely, because your uncertainty margins stay pretty much the same whether you integrate them or not. If you created a computer simulation of the forest with such fidelity that it contained animals with awareness, you’d use up a phenomenal amount of computing power, but it wouldn’t do you any good as far as accuracy is concerned.
If you care about the lives of the people in the past for their own sake, and are capable of creating high fidelity recreations of their personality from the data available to you, why not upload them into the present so you can interact with them? That, if possible, is something that people actually seem to want to do.
But nonetheless . ..
None of the examples you give actually prove that simulation fidelity has an exponential relation to simulation time across the entire space of possible simulation algorithms.
That’s true, they don’t constitute a formal proof. Maybe a proof already exists and I’m not aware of it, or maybe not, but regardless, given the information available to us in this conversation, right now, the weight of evidence is clearly on the side of such a simulation not being possible over it being possible. You don’t get high probability future predictions by imagining ways in which our understanding of chaos theory maybe gets overhauled.
If you do probabilistic estimates based on large numbers of simulations though, you can cut down on the fidelity of the simulations dramatically. I know that this is something you’re arguing for, but really, there’s no good reason to make the simulations as detailed as the universe we observe.
To take forest succession modeling programs (something I have more experience with than most types of computer modeling) as an example, there are some ecological mechanisms that, if left out, will completely change the trends of the simulation, and some that won’t, and you can leave those that don’t out entirely, because your uncertainty margins stay pretty much the same whether you integrate them or not. If you created a computer simulation of the forest with such fidelity that it contained animals with awareness, you’d use up a phenomenal amount of computing power, but it wouldn’t do you any good as far as accuracy is concerned.
If you care about the lives of the people in the past for their own sake, and are capable of creating high fidelity recreations of their personality from the data available to you, why not upload them into the present so you can interact with them? That, if possible, is something that people actually seem to want to do.
That’s true, they don’t constitute a formal proof. Maybe a proof already exists and I’m not aware of it, or maybe not, but regardless, given the information available to us in this conversation, right now, the weight of evidence is clearly on the side of such a simulation not being possible over it being possible. You don’t get high probability future predictions by imagining ways in which our understanding of chaos theory maybe gets overhauled.