[cgriswald]

Nick Bostrom’s simulation argument makes those assumptions and others in order to prove that the likelihood we are being simulated approaches unity. A core component of the argument is that they’re enough like us that we are a simulated version of them in a simulated version of their universe.

Without those assumptions there isn’t any basis for a claim at all. “We are in a simulation” isn’t any more coherent than saying “a dog is dreaming us.” It could be, but there’s no reason to believe it is at all.

So, I don’t think you can just wave away constraints and say “Well maybe those are just local” because it raises questions about utility. Why would beings in a world without constraints simulate us in a world with constraints? It wouldn’t be necessary to constrain us. Likewise, an ancestor simulation that runs at a rate less than real time seems to have very little utility.

Unfortunately, once you introduce constraints you suddenly have some minimum condition for which you can’t actually simulate and actually have to just do. And you not only have to do those things for your simulation, but for their simulations, and their simulations… (And all these simulations are required to make the claim that we are almost certainly in a simulation because they’re part of the math.)

[nertirs]

I am not saying, that the simulating world has no constraints. Only that there is no reason for the constraints present in the simulation to perfectly mimic the real world.

I would argue, that a perfect simulation is most of the time less efficient than a simulation with very specific parameters. For example, humans studying game theory with artificial agents create very specific environments.

There are also plenty of reasons to run a simulation on a slower tick rate than a real world. For science, we simulated a black hole, which required hundreds of hours to simulate a single frame. For entertainment, we made movies, for which it is not uncommon to require thousand hours of cpu time just to render a single minute.

The stacking problem can be easily solved by applying the concept of entropy to it. You can't expect to receive the same amount of energy you put into a system. Therefor a simulation can't perfectly simulate the world running the simulation. Which means, that at the end of every single simulation chain exists a simulation not yet capable of generating a simulation. But this statement provides us no more information about the relationship between the simulator and the simulation.

We can introduce whatever constraints or assumptions we want. It makes no difference. My argument was against the statement, that one can say something is more likely or more reasonable, when debating if we are living a simulation. One can't.