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Comment by charlielidbury on On Falsifying the Simulation Hypothesis (or Embracing its Predictions) · 2021-05-20T13:05:46.791Z · LW · GW

You mentioned at the end that as humanity does things that require a more complex simulation, such as exploring the rest of our solar system, the change of us being in a simple simulation (and therefore a simulation) reduce. How do you think this changes when you take into concideration the probabilities of us reaching those goals? A concrete example; our simulators might be running ancestor simulations to figure out "what is the probability of us discovering faster than light travel". To answer this they create 10^6 simple simulations of earth, with varying starting conditions. To answer their question they only need to simulate the solar system in significant resolution for those simulations who have explored it, which may be an slim slice of the overall set of simulations. In this example, a simulation who has explored the solar system cannot say "my simulation is computationally expensive to run, therefore there's a low chance of it being simulated" because the simulators can upgrade simple simulations to complex ones once they have reached sufficient complexity.

Have I got a point here? Many thanks for yours (or any onlookers) thoughts on the matter!

Appologies for the verbose phrasing of the question; "If you cannot explain it simply, you do not know it well enough" and I certainly don't know it well enough. :)