I think explicitly computing details in full (as opposed to abstract reasoning about approximate properties) has no bearing on moral weight (degree of being real), but some kind of computational irreducibility forces the simulation of interesting things to get quite close to low level detail in order to figure out most global facts about what’s going on there, such as values/culture of people living in a world after significant time passes.
Note I’m not talking about moral weight here, and my point here is that all discussions about counterfactuals (especially human intuitions around counterfactuals) could in principle be executable/actually doable with enough compute and the ability to specify details, so counterfactability/counterfactual worlds isn’t special from a philosophical perspective, as it implicitly refers to other real worlds/universes.
Of course, this isn’t the only way to do so for a large class of counterfactuals/counterfactual worlds, and sometimes you can run them fully accurately on less compute/data if you can identify simplicities/abstractions that are lossless.
I think explicitly computing details in full (as opposed to abstract reasoning about approximate properties) has no bearing on moral weight (degree of being real), but some kind of computational irreducibility forces the simulation of interesting things to get quite close to low level detail in order to figure out most global facts about what’s going on there, such as values/culture of people living in a world after significant time passes.
Note I’m not talking about moral weight here, and my point here is that all discussions about counterfactuals (especially human intuitions around counterfactuals) could in principle be executable/actually doable with enough compute and the ability to specify details, so counterfactability/counterfactual worlds isn’t special from a philosophical perspective, as it implicitly refers to other real worlds/universes.
Of course, this isn’t the only way to do so for a large class of counterfactuals/counterfactual worlds, and sometimes you can run them fully accurately on less compute/data if you can identify simplicities/abstractions that are lossless.