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Comment by addaon | Hacker News Reader

> That means the more relevant thing to ask is if a quantity of information is more likely to exist in the base reality or the simulated one.

Well, what quantity of information? It seems relatively unlikely that one would bother simulating an entire universe for billions of years at this level of fidelity; what's the point? On the other hand, the quantity of information needed to simulate your current experiences, including the experience of having memories, is probably in the megabytes; human bandwidth just isn't that high.

The same logic suggests that, even if you discount simulation for reasons of faith or whatever, Boltzmann brains are worth considering. The idea that the experience you're having right now of reading my precious prose is worth keeping a universe running, or even a large-scale simulation, is a bit self-centered of you, isn't it?

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I think I'm very suspicious whenever infinities come into probability calculations, because I think human institution's break down when it comes to infinites. What I like about pointing out that the information content of the a cubed square foot has a ceiling is that it implies that there can't be an infinite number of simulations except in the way that there is an infinite amount of space (at least without throwing out that bit of physics) and an infinite amount of space is something I feel more capable of reasoning about.

Unless we think most information exists in simulations than if you take a random bit of information out of the universe it's more likely to be associated with the root existence's goinings on than it is with any kind of simulation. This works because it's an argument about that bit of information, not anything else. I think you could push back and say that really actually information isn't what's important and that actually even if we think that most information won't be part of a simulation most consciousnesses will be, but idk, that seems suspect, we don't have any reason to think that. Certainly most simulations we do now seem not to include consciousnesses.

I think the idea of Boltzmann brains fall apart because in that sea of possibility space it actually seems much more likely for the seeds of a universe to form than a complete brain full of consistent memories of writing 3/4th of a post on a randomly generated website called hacker news. I think it's just another illustration of the problems apply infinity to probability.

Also worth considering that simulating the universe for billions of years could run on the equivalent of a raspberry pi in some higher order universe. It just seems huge to us because we are living in it

Another thing to consider might be that the simulation has not been running for “billions for years” but might have just started.

And the simulator may have been done with simulating it all in a blink of an eye. Our perception of time is completely irrelevant.

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