Yes your paraphrase is not bad. I think we can assume things outside of Earth don’t need to be simulated, it would be surprising to me if events outside of Earth made the difference between evolution producing Homo sapiens versus some other less intelligent species. (Maybe a few basic things like temperature of the Earth being shifted slowly) For the most part the Earth is causally isolated from the rest of the universe.
Now which parts of the Earth can we safely omit simulating is a harder question as there’s more causal interactions going on. I can make some guesses around parts of the earths environment that can be ignored by the simulation, but they’ll be guesses only.
An idea I’ve seen floating around here is that natural selection built our brain randomly with a reward function that valued producing offspring so there is a lot of architecture that is irrelevant to intelligence
Yes gradient descent is likely a faster search algorithm, but IMO you’re still using it to search the big search space that evolution searched through, not the smaller one a human brain searches through after being born.
Yes your paraphrase is not bad. I think we can assume things outside of Earth don’t need to be simulated, it would be surprising to me if events outside of Earth made the difference between evolution producing Homo sapiens versus some other less intelligent species. (Maybe a few basic things like temperature of the Earth being shifted slowly) For the most part the Earth is causally isolated from the rest of the universe.
Now which parts of the Earth can we safely omit simulating is a harder question as there’s more causal interactions going on. I can make some guesses around parts of the earths environment that can be ignored by the simulation, but they’ll be guesses only.
Yes gradient descent is likely a faster search algorithm, but IMO you’re still using it to search the big search space that evolution searched through, not the smaller one a human brain searches through after being born.