Comment by kirubakaran
3 years ago
I think the idea is that *if* we're in an ancestor simulation, then "they" will make the rules as close to theirs as they computationally can. Why ancestor simulation? Why else would "they" spend all those resources?
Lot of IFs based on our view of their values, I know... I don't necessarily agree with this line of reasoning... just stating how I understand the argument.
To counter that argument, if "they" live in world where computation is cheap (eg they have something like Zeno machines[1]) they may not be spending what they view as lots of resources.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno_machine
>Why else would "they" spend all those resources?
Why the assumption that it takes a significant amount of their resources to run our simulation?
Limits like speed of light, planck length, etc might indicate some resource constraint in the simulator
None of those are rules that have to exist outside the simulation. If we're truly in a simulation, everything is a lie potentially.
We put limits in apps that we run by the dozens on our computers - not because they represent some huge resource hog individually, but because we want to run many of them in parallel and not bog down the OS.
Besides, sometimes an approximation is enough, and even though we could waste 10000x the resources on an app, we chose not to.
Or maybe it was done as a joke. Maybe the speed of light is some cosmic punchline. Maybe it was a lazy programmer and they decided to go with a small int.
It's trying to divine some sort of intention behind things we inherently can never know.
in the simulation, but not in the thing running the simulation
3 replies →
>Why else would "they" spend all those resources?
We could just in a video-game style world, with mechanics (laws of physics etc) totally different to the ancestor's world. Like we often do when we make games...
> Why else would "they" spend all those resources?
Entertainment? Random Number generator? Maybe they are in the future and doing some historical analysis. Plenty of reasons to spend resources.
> the idea is that if* we're in an ancestor simulation, then "they" will make the rules as close to theirs as they computationally can. Why ancestor simulation? Why else would "they" spend all those resources?*
This always struck me as the most WTF simulationist assumption. To the degree we simulate our ancestors, today, it’s in games. Given an infinity to ponder and simulate, it strikes me as ludicrous to assume even a significant fraction of computer power would go to ancestor simulations.
We're still at the very dawn of our computational age, though. There are still humans alive now who were born before digital computers. We have hardly any experience with them. It's very, very difficult to predict what we might be doing with them in a millenium or two.
> very, very difficult to predict what we might be doing with them in a millenium or two
Sure. But why that? I’m not debating that some people wouldn’t obsess over, I don’t know, their personal lineages or old military battles. But I can’t see devoting most resources backwards versus probing forward for opportunity.