To be honest, like 30y later, I still go back to that nagging thought _a lot_.
It lacks the magical spark, the qualia, the spirit, the transcendent. Or what people like to imagine makes our own reality special. Our own reality cannot be understood because it's such a hard problem, and it "feels like something" (maybe like a bat?), while a simulation is just math on CPUs. Consciousness is a hard problem because it transcends physical sciences, it's so great that it can exist even outside the realm of verification. /s
Hope you forgive the rant, it's just amazing how much philosophy can come from the desire to fly above the mechanics of life. But what they missed is that the reality of what happens inside of us is even more amazing than their imaginary hard problem and special subjective experience. The should look at the whole system, the whole game, not just the neural correlates. What does it take to exist like us?
But it may be possible that there's no such thing as "simulating" intelligence. If you do certain calculations, that is "intelligent." Same for consciousness, etc.
The idea is great, it was a wonderful narrative to run my life for a while, but eventually, the more I learned, the more impractical using full atomistic simulations seem for solving any problem. It seems more likely we can train far more efficient networks that encapsulate all the salient rules of folding in a much smaller space, and use far less CPU time to produce useful results.
I'm also more in the camp of "quantum effects making the universe non-determinstic." It's a nicer way to live.
However, most importantly, we simply have no experimental data around any of this for me to decide. Instead I enjoy my subjective life with apparent free will, regardless of how the machinery of the actual implementation works.
It’s maddening :)
Going further back to the 1600's, Descartes' idea of an evil demon deceiving one's mind with a perfect, fake reality made me think often of simulations in my undergrad philosophy classes
A player with a simulator will create dozens.
Why would that be? I see no reason why God might not create parallel universes
Even with no other arguments about the benefits of WHY one would want to live in a fully simulated world... It seems probable to me that we are based on the idea that it could be possible.
Technology growth is always non-linear. it's also fair to assume we could stagnate for 50 years also.
It was such a fascinating idea that I found myself more than once trying to mimic the atomic part at a much smaller scale over the years.
You might enjoy the show Devs:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devs
Fair non-spoilery warning, there is quite a bit of creepy existential angst.
seems to be a trend across all genres nowadays
I wonder if Greg Egan had the foresight to predict this for the story or if he invented that part for narrative purposes.