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.
Why the assumption that it takes a significant amount of their resources to run our simulation?
The same way hat if we looked at a physics simulation codebase, and notice that it uses higher granularity constants, more coarse calculations and other such limits (like moderate refresh rates), we could deduce that the programmers put those there because the simulated physics would be too costly for the CPU they run on otherwise.
well, it doesn't necessarily imply that. perhaps the beings running the simulation simply wanted to experiment with things like a slower speed of light (in the simulation). or perhaps in their universe, there is no light, and they wanted to play around with the concept?
It doesn't prove it, but it sure does imply it.
It could also imply a few other things (like what you suggest). An observation, after all, can imply several alternative potential explanations.
I'd say though that "they wanted to play around" is a weaker hypothesis than "they had performance constraints" (as one is more universally applicable, and would apply to all kinds of simulations run, whereas the other depends on a specific choice of the simulation creators). Plus we see more constraints than the "speed of light".
>or perhaps in their universe, there is no light, and they wanted to play around with the concept?
Btw, "speed of light" doesn't have much to do with light (it's just the example upon which the theory was made). It applies to anything massless, all kinds of electromagnetic radiation, and so on. The real meaning of "speed of light" is the speed of causation propagation, or the speed of information propagation if you wish.
So unless their universe didn't have causation either, and everything happened "all at once", they'd have the same kind of limit (regardless of whether they had light).
It's trying to divine some sort of intention behind things we inherently can never know.
Besides, sometimes an approximation is enough, and even though we could waste 10000x the resources on an app, we chose not to.
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...
Entertainment? Random Number generator? Maybe they are in the future and doing some historical analysis. Plenty of reasons to spend 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.
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.