[sdwr]

Was coming to say something like this. Gets to some fun conclusions - ex. paleontologists invent dinosaurs by looking for them.

Another angle on it would be showing that the universe has multiple possible levels of detail - that objects behave like newtonian point masses most of the time, that digestion is replaced by a simple hunger meter when nobody's paying attention.

From this direction, time's main function is compressing "now" so there's more space for something else later.

I'd be willing to believe that everyone has a god-given amount of universe rendering time that can be allocated in different ways, and that other people's attention stacks with it in a complex, layered way.

[TechBro8615]

This thought experiment implies that humans, or conscious agents, represent a highly concentrated source of entropy, currently (mostly) confined to planet Earth. Meanwhile, in the vastness of space, most of the mass has settled into some relatively deterministic equilibria, with no conscious agents to alter the course of its future. Yet we're down here on the blue planet messing everything up.

Coupling this thought with the simulation theory, it makes me wonder how the simulation would respond to increasing entropy over a larger volume than just our local system. That is, if we send a bunch of biological/artificial agents in all directions throughout the cosmos and let them wreak havoc, would it crash the simulation? Or what if we just smash a bunch of asteroids out of their stable orbits and let their disruption cascade throughout the system? Or maybe we've already messed everything up by broadcasting highly entropic radio waves throughout a spherical volume with a radius of ~100 light years?

[sdwr]

My guess is it would conserve entropy/processing on Earth to match the increased cost.

But there's a difference between "screaming into the void", like broadcasting radio waves, that presumably have 0 effects, and other things.

[dTal]

0 effects on what? For whose benefit is this simulation? The thought experiment implicitly privileges the observer.

[polishdude20]

That would also mean that when I don't see or hear other people, they don't "exist" as physical things that can be seen or heard until I encounter a situation in which they would be.

It's the same as "If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound?"

But then again, that information has to be stored somewhere right?

Like, if a tree falls in the woods and nobody is around, sure you can say it isn't being perceived so it won't be "rendered" but the moment someone walks in the forest and sees that fallen tree, it would need to be rendered from some information about the fall and information of how it looked before the fall. That information would have to be sitting somewhere in limbo waiting to be rendered. So why not just actually let it sit IN the rendered "realm" and now you have one place for data to live in. You save on data transfer fees too.

[mywittyname]

> But then again, that information has to be stored somewhere right?

As a collection of probabilities stored as a wave.

If a bank account has a 50% probability earning a penny every second, the bank doesn't need to store all of the intermediate values for every "clock tick", but instead calculate how much has accumulated since the last time someone checked the account and store that value with a timestamp.

[polishdude20]

Where is this wave stored though? And what is the wave made of? A wave of what?

[sdwr]

The idea is that the universe "cheats" by replacing a computationally expensive process (a tree falling, breaking into pieces, being eaten by insects, moss growing) with a series of cheaper, "good-enough" replacements, based on the level of scrutiny.

Not existing is the cheapest.

Then, broad strokes, location and orientation

Then pieces, level of decay

etc,

and moving between the layers is you spending your attention budget to force the universe to do more work.

[polishdude20]

At that point, the least amount of work would be to flip the various chemical and neural vitamin my brain to make me think there is a tree there.

[RajT88]

》 ex. paleontologists invent dinosaurs by looking for them.

I have seen creationists in web forums trot this exact argument out (only the creator was God of course).