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Comment by WClayFerguson | Hacker News Reader

You're forgetting that for the Simulator energy and mass are 'free'. Imagine something like Conway's "Game of Life" where creatures emerge and then start speculating about their own origins. Their measurements of energy would mean nothing to us. Entropy perhaps, but not energy.

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Energy and mass are free, but computability is fundamental. If denizens of the game of life discover their natural laws and calculate the computations their universe runs on, theoretically it should be the exact some as ours.

This example is great. My main point is that due to the laws of their universe, they will never be able to simulate any area of it in a smaller area, because the Game of Life isn't compressible.

I don't know what compressible means. If you mean the information content of the universe, then well, anything that is not pure random is generally compressible.

What evidence is there that physics is 'compressible' rather than simply 'uncertain'?

By compressible I mean containing any information not necessary to compute the next step.

I'm a believer that every particle and wave in the universe is being computed whether it's being observed or not. People who think QM is about 'consciousnesses' are generally not even deeply even conversant about QM, and have read some 'woo woo' books, and gotten confused.

Belief that consciousness is somehow more fundamental than 'brain physiology' is essentially a kind of solipsism and is completely unfounded in facts or experiments.

If we're in a sim, it's Physics rules that are being "run" and the existence of brains is purely emergent.

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