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by DeveloperErrata 413 days ago
Consider the difference between the requirements to simulate the universe and simulate a person's experience of the universe. As people in the universe, we wouldn't be able to tell the difference, but the latter would be have much lower requirements
2 comments
IAmNotACellist 413 days ago
If you were simulating two beings' experiences of the universe and they met and compared notes, you might expect little incongruities where random chance was used in the decisions necessary to generate their perspectives.

Let's say a sparrow falls and a simulated being observes it, but so does a camera, which stores the footage in an unexamined hard drive. Years later another being observes the footage stored by that camera, and up until that point there had been no point in manifesting it in the simulation. Would the wings of the falling sparrow flutter exactly the same way for the two observers? What if they met and discussed it, as part of a deliberate experiment to test the consistency of the universe? Would they agree? Imagine the computational overhead necessary in storing details that you're not sure will ever be useful. The same logic could hold true for a photon generated by an exploding star 12 billion years ago that zipped across the expanding universe and eventually interacted with some silicon in a CCD in an astronomer's camera.

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strictnein 413 days ago
Human's already have differing memories of the same events. No low resolution simulations needed for that to occur.
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IAmNotACellist 413 days ago
A properly setup experiment could distinguish signal from the noise of normal memory variation.
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tmsh 413 days ago
Indeed, you only have to simulate what one person perceives and where they explore, etc. One person's conscious experience in theory should be able to be fully simulated with very little information relative to the complexity of matter etc. You just have to simulate the senses and model the universe around a person.

And why not do that as an experiment? If science/experimentation is a useful thing - why not have the main reality and lots of individual experiments?

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