| There's an important misconception here. The part you're right about is that simulating what we understand about our own reality on some subset of that reality (e.g. some kind of computer) is really, really hard, possibly verging on impossible. But that's not really the simulation hypothesis at all. It's relatively easy to build a simulation of a simplified or (and this is important) a different reality in some subset of our own. Trivial examples like Conway's Game of Life come to mind, but also (somewhat obviously) SimCity. The simulation hypothesis is that our reality is a simulation running in some subset of a different reality. Given what we know about building simulations in our own reality, the hypothesis implicitly recognizes that the meta-reality in which which our reality is a simulation is necessarily different (and likely more complex) than our own. There's an even deeper notion to the simulation hypothesis. If our reality is a "simulation", given the richness that we see around us, what is the difference between a "simulation" and something that isn't a simulation? Based on what I said above, the different "levels" would necessarily need to differ in terms of their own complexity. But is a reality in which our own could be simulated really any "better" than our own? |
One thought that stayed with me for a while is, my entire experience could, theoretically, be encoded in (a rather large) integer and in the same way that the number 2 exists in many contexts maybe I exist simultaneously in reality and multiple simulations as well.