Calculation may be the wrong word for what’s necessary for a simulation, but I don’t think you can have a simulation without something analogous to computing. But the computation may look foreign, think analog vs digital computers. I mean, what would it mean to simulate something if you weren’t interested in finding some measurable thing? How do you seperate the ability to observe the simulation and not be able to measure anything? I may be too steeped in engineering to be able to answer this, since the last thing I simulated was an analog circuit. But I also studied artificial life, and even there the goal was to learn something about life.
I think about this a lot, and sometimes wonder if the edges of science can't be solved until some meta being comes along and implements that edge case. And then the edge cases get weirder and weirder. But really, I'm relying on my intuition of superlinearity when I think about this stuff, and I can see certain problems with simulations going to infinity faster than, say, the infinity of the infinite time argument that we must be in a simulation.