[coldtea]

>Simulation involves a lot of overhead

True for some values of "a lot", false for others.

What's undeniably true is that it incurs some overhead over NOT running a simulation.

But that doesn't prove that a simulated life form incurs overhead larger than its real life counterpart.

For one, there might not be any real life counterpart.

We say "simulation" here, but what we actually mean is "virtual world", which might simulate an actual world, or it might be its totally own thing (the same way I can chose to write a simulation of actual things, like e.g. "the Sims", or a simulation of a domain I only imagined). If, for example, as per TFA, our universe is a simulation, is doesn't mean that it actually simulated something else. Just that it's a simulation in itself.

So, "simulated" in this discussion means "not an organically created world made of some physical substrate, but consciously created/programmed by some advanced civilization".

So, the thing simulated could be totally unlike (in properties, physical laws, etc) what exists in the universe of those doing the simulation.

Second, a simulation (as we know it and practice it ourselves) usually has much less overhead than the real life thing it simulates (when it does simulate some real life thing). That's like, it's whole point. E.g. a weather model running in some supercomputers has some overhead, but nothing like that of the actual weather. Similarly, Sims has some overhead, but nothing like the equivalent real-life place and humans would have.

Where you seem to be confused is that you assume that: (a) a simulation must be of something that exists, (b) a simulation must be perfect, e.g. 1:1 to the thing it simulates. Only then would your argument make sense.

But neither of those things are necessary -- even our Earth and universe, if they are simulations, they could be very crude models, running with very low resources, in a vastly more complex and powerful real universe.

[Retric]

(a) is not an objection because 'life form' is flexible. Any computing sub strait could directly compute say a neural network vs a simulation of a neural network. The simulation will always be slower, but the 'real' version running on "FPGA" or it's higher dimensional equivalent imposes direct mapping between what happens in the 'real' world and what is being computed. EX: If we use a FPGA that's hit by a cosmic ray that bit is flipped, on the other hand if you have an array of FPGA's and compare them then that's decouples the 1:1 mapping creating a simulation but adds overhead.

(b) a simulation must be perfect.

No, if you can get away with a less accurate simulation you can get also get intelligence from less computational power using the same approach in the 'real' world.

[883771773929]

Adding on to this with an analogy from simulating dynamics in cellular automata, most of the interesting models of physics we see act with high redundancy in both spatial and temporal locality.

A simple rule like Conway's Game of Life that isn't too physically realistic but is instructive because of how intimately it's been analyzed while exhibiting some relatively high complexity, shows remarkable compressibility using techniques such as memoization in HashLife[0].

Even more striking is the potential for superspeed caching where different nodes are evolved at different speeds often allowing _exponential_ speedups of pattern generations to be calculated for longer than the timeframe of the universe we speculate about today for real physics.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashlife

[Retric]

No free lunch. Hashlife takes more memory and only works well in low entropy environments.

But, consider if you want to run a simulation 100 times using the same data you can speed that output up by just copying the output of the first simulation 100 times. But that's not simulating the same mind 100 times it's simulating the mind only once. Hash life and similar approaches don't increase your ability to compute unique mind states.