[incongruity]

Perhaps a foolish question but does “simulation” necessarily imply calculation or is that just an extension of our current evolution of computing technology as an analogy for what a simulation would be? I’m not convinced the one necessitates the other.

[milesvp]

Oh, I don’t know. I mean conceptually a simulation is just a model that changes over some axis, time being a prime candidate. I’ve seen some goofy models that use an axis other than time to create some interesting visuals. There are definitely game makers playing with some of this stuff.

Calculation may be the wrong word for what’s necessary for a simulation, but I don’t think you can have a simulation without something analogous to computing. But the computation may look foreign, think analog vs digital computers. I mean, what would it mean to simulate something if you weren’t interested in finding some measurable thing? How do you seperate the ability to observe the simulation and not be able to measure anything? I may be too steeped in engineering to be able to answer this, since the last thing I simulated was an analog circuit. But I also studied artificial life, and even there the goal was to learn something about life.

[detourdog]

What I wonder about from your explanation is how does a simulation know where the noise is coming from. I feeling is that inside the simulation one is unable to differentiate the source of the noise.

[milesvp]

You're not wrong. But I suspect you'd find inconsistencies if you looked hard enough. Situations where 2 things don't interact in some obvious expected way. And that's just the simple case. If you've played enough video games, you'd know that devs can easily create scenarios where there is no way to get the correct behavior between 2 objects without doing some pretty drastic changes to their game engine. (I play a lot of simulation centric games). Basically the number of ways you can poorly implement objects interacting with one another explodes pretty quickly. So that means, that the bar is pretty high, for something living in a simulation to never notice irregularities quick enough for the simulator runner to fix them, assuming the simulator runner is able to fix them at all.

I think about this a lot, and sometimes wonder if the edges of science can't be solved until some meta being comes along and implements that edge case. And then the edge cases get weirder and weirder. But really, I'm relying on my intuition of superlinearity when I think about this stuff, and I can see certain problems with simulations going to infinity faster than, say, the infinity of the infinite time argument that we must be in a simulation.

[detourdog]

For the record I'm in the reflection of reality camp. I think the simulation camp is silly.