As someone who mostly expects to be in a simulation, this is the clearest and most plausible anti-simulation-hypothesis argument I’ve seen, thanks.
How does it hold up against the point that the universe looks large enough to support a large number of even fully-quantum single-world simulations (with a low-resolution approximation of the rest of reality), even if it costs many orders of magnitude more resources to run them?
Perhaps would-be simulators would tend not to value the extra information from full-quantum simulations enough to build many or even any of them? My guess is that many purposes for simulations would want to explore a bunch of the possibility tree, but depending on how costly very large quantum computers are to mature civilizations maybe they’d just get by with a bunch of low-branching factor simulations instead?
I think both your question and self-response are pertinent. I have nothing to add to either, save a personal intuition that large-scale fully-quantum simulators are probably highly impractical. (I have no particular opinion about partially-quantum simulators — even possibly using quantum subcomponents larger than today’s computers — but they wouldn’t change the substance of my not-in-a-sim argument.)
The other point that comes to mind is that if you have a classical simulation running on a quantum world, maybe that counts as branching for the purposes of where we expect to find ourselves? I’m still somewhat confused about whether exact duplicates ‘count’, but if they do then maybe the branching factor of the underlying reality carries over to sims running further down the stack?
As someone who mostly expects to be in a simulation, this is the clearest and most plausible anti-simulation-hypothesis argument I’ve seen, thanks.
How does it hold up against the point that the universe looks large enough to support a large number of even fully-quantum single-world simulations (with a low-resolution approximation of the rest of reality), even if it costs many orders of magnitude more resources to run them?
Perhaps would-be simulators would tend not to value the extra information from full-quantum simulations enough to build many or even any of them? My guess is that many purposes for simulations would want to explore a bunch of the possibility tree, but depending on how costly very large quantum computers are to mature civilizations maybe they’d just get by with a bunch of low-branching factor simulations instead?
I think both your question and self-response are pertinent. I have nothing to add to either, save a personal intuition that large-scale fully-quantum simulators are probably highly impractical. (I have no particular opinion about partially-quantum simulators — even possibly using quantum subcomponents larger than today’s computers — but they wouldn’t change the substance of my not-in-a-sim argument.)
hm, that intuition seems plausible.
The other point that comes to mind is that if you have a classical simulation running on a quantum world, maybe that counts as branching for the purposes of where we expect to find ourselves? I’m still somewhat confused about whether exact duplicates ‘count’, but if they do then maybe the branching factor of the underlying reality carries over to sims running further down the stack?
It seems to me that exact duplicate timelines don’t “count”, but duplicates that split and/or rejoin do. YMMV.