Simulation Hypothesis Debate

See my response to the sibling comment. You don't need to simulate the entire universe. You only need to simulate those parts that can possibly affect a human being. There's no need, for instance, to simulate photometry for stars in the Andromeda galaxy because we lack the resolution to measure the movement of those stars.

You are right, "simulation" might narrow it unnecessarily, it could as well be a side effect of something entirely else. Going with "simulation" comes from humans running lots of simulations. Humanity has a $350 billion/year industry dedicated to making simulations for recreational use (aka video games), and then there's all the simulations we run for industry and research. And many simulations are simplified models of our world, with compressed time, space and some

How accurate are these simulations compared to the real world ? I understand the reasoning behind it, and it makes sense, but it strucks as an oversimplification of really complex things.

I don't think there's any reason you couldn't but the simulation might move so slowly that it's not useful.

I was with you until here:> it's worth bearing in mind that simulation is really hard and computationally expensiveThis is like ants saying "building mounds is resource intensive. We need our entire civilization working together to build one. You can try to get around this detail but..."This carries the implicit assumption that if there is indeed a simulation then it is limited to human capability, which would almost certainly be wrong.

The theory is you wouldn't need to simulate every atom any more than you do in a video game.

it is only a toy … not much to do with the spacetime … computer simulation != nature.

I suspect people who believe in the "life is a simulation" have little experience in running molecular dynamics simulations. Even simulating a single protein for a few microseconds takes a Linux cluster hours. The size of a computer that could simulate every protein on earth (let alone every other type of molecule) would be literally astronomical (as in larger than a planet; and no, plausible improvements in technology really wouldn't shrink that by much). Simulations of th

The simulation doesn't have to run in full detail, there could be approximations made far away from sentients. Also, the speed of the simulation doesn't need to be 1:1.

Yes. I don't expect anyone can simulate that at real-time speed though (unless they take a lot of shortcuts, e.g. simulating at a higher level, which becomes a bit pointless).