David Kipping

They develop their own capability to simulate realities.

You get this hierarchy.

And so eventually there'll be a bottom layer, which I often call the sewer of reality.

It's like the worst layer where it's the most pixelated it could possibly be, right?

Because each layer is necessarily going to have less computational power than the layer above it.

Because not only are you simulating that entire planet, but also some of that's being used for the computers themselves, that those are simulated.

Yeah.

And so that base reality, or the sewer reality, is a reality where they are simply unable to produce ancestor simulations because the fidelity of the simulation is not sufficient.

And so from their point of view, it might not be obvious that the universe is pixelated, but they would just never be able to manifest that capability.

What if they're constantly simulating

Yeah, so that sewer of reality, they would still presumably be able to have a very impressive computational capabilities.

They'd probably be able to simulate galactic formation or this kind of impressive stuff, but they would be just short of the ability to, however you define it, create a truly sentient conscious experience in a computer.

That would just be just beyond their capabilities.

And so Carol pointed out that if you add up all the, you know, you count up how many realities there should be,

probabilistically, if this is true, over here the simulation hypothesis or scenario, then you're most likely to find yourself in the sewer because there's just far more of them than there are of any of the higher levels.

And so that sort of sets up a contradiction because then you live in a reality which is inherently incapable of ever producing ancestor simulations.

But the premise of the entire argument is that ancestor simulations are possible.

So there's a contradiction that's been introduced.

This is maybe more true than we think.

And presumably they'd eventually forget, you know, give it long enough they might forget about their origins of being once biological and assume this was their only reality.