[namaria]

That's not a good argument, because we have no way of knowing what is the ration between our time and that of the universe where our simulation runs. Even if it takes hours to generate one second of our universe, we only experience our own time.

Besides, time is not absolute, and having it run slower near massive objects or when objects accelerate would be a neat trick to save on compute power needed to simulate a universe.

[fnordpiglet]

I wouldn’t have used the slower argument but rather the information encoding argument. A simulation must necessarily encode less information than the universe being simulated, in fact substantially less. It wouldn’t be possible to encode the same information as the root universe in any nested simulation, even the first level. That would require the root entire universe to encode. This information encoding problem is what geometrically gets worse as you nest. At a certain point the simulation must be so simplified and lossy of simulated information that it’s got no meaningful information and the simulation isn’t representative of anything.

However - just because probabilistic reasoning explodes and the likelihood of something is vanishing doesn’t make it true.

First, the prior assumption is the universe can be simulated in any meaningful way at any substantial scale. That’s not at all obvious that the ability to simulate is high enough fidelity to lead to the complexity we see around us without some higher dimensional universe simulating what we see and the realities we see are achieved through dimensional reduction and absurdly powerful technology. This is also a probability in the conditional probability and I would not put it at 1.0. I would actually make it quite small, but its term as a prior will be significant.

Second, the prior is that whatever root universe that exists has yet to achieve the simulation in the flow of time, assuming time started at some discrete point. Our observations lead us to conclude time and space both emerged at a discrete point. The coalescence of the modern universe, evolution of life itself, emergence of intelligent beings, the technology required to simulate an enormous highly complex universe in its entirety, etc, are all priors. These are non trivial factors to consider and greatly reduce the likelihood of the simulation theory.

Third, it’s possible the clock rate of the simulation is fast enough that the simulation operates much faster than time evolves in the root universe, but to the original posts point, without enormous lossy optimizations, the nested universes can’t run at a faster clock rate in their simulation than the first level simulation. This is partially related to the information encoding problem but not directly. I don’t agree it geometrically gets worse, but it doesn’t get better either without further greatly reducing the quality of the simulation. That means either the quality converges to zero very fast, or they run at a synchronicity of the first level universe, requiring 1:1 time. Assuming it actually simulates the universe and not just some sort of occlusion scoped to you as an individual, that might mean it’ll take billions of years within the first level simulation for each layer of the nesting. This seems practically unlikely even in a simulated universe, so either those layers must not achieve a nesting or they must converge to simulations that have lost so much fidelity they simulate nothing very quickly.

[namaria]

Well first you imply a base universe is finite. That is not a given at all.

You don't need to simulate the full universe. Just the experience of consciousness inside it. You don't even have to simulate full consciousness for every 'conscious' being. In fact, I've always seen the simulation argument as a thought experiment arguing for consciousness being more fundamental than matter. There is no need to imagine a human made computer simulating an entire universe in subatomic detail for this thought experiment to intrigue us.

We being able to pinpoint a start of all time is actually a pretty good argument for it being simulated. Why would we be able to calculate a 'start time' for reality? That is not obvious to be a necessity at a base universe at all. There are theoretical cosmologies out there that do away with that need to conceptualize a universe.

The simulated universe doesn't have to run time faster then 'real time' at the base universe at all. In fact, running slower would be a feature if the beings in the base universe wished to escape into the simulation for whatever reason.

[fnordpiglet]

I didn’t imply the base universe is finite just it has to be orders of magnitude larger than the simulation.

Yes but if you only simulate a consciousness there is no nesting, otherwise on what does the consciousness run on? That’s the whole idea behind as you lose fidelity with reality the simulations becomes less capable until it’s unable to simulate anything.

Note nesting isn’t necessary for the probability argument to be true just many simulations. But the vanishingly small likelihood of not being a simulation depends on the nesting idea.

Again, yes, it’s possible what we observe is a simple simulation of experience but I don’t think this is the “almost certainly a simulation” argument.

[namaria]

Like I said, I see this as a thought experiment about 'what is reality' and 'what is consciousness'. Not on 'are we actually living inside alien computers'.

The fact that we only exist in a tiny planet, while we can observe a seemingly infinite universe but with a horizon limit and that 96% of the energy in the universe is unexplainable by our physics would be pretty good arguments for us living in a simulation nevertheless, if we assume nesting simulations necessitate reduction of scope.

> Yes but if you only simulate a consciousness there is no nesting, otherwise on what does the consciousness run on?

This I don't understand. What do you mean?