Nick Bostrom

They could run the simulation at a higher speed.

Maybe one minute of their time could simulate 1,000 years.

It depends on how fast the computer is that you run the simulation on.

Well, so that kind of thing wouldn't fit into our universe, like a computer that simulated all of our universe.

Okay.

It wouldn't be possible to build that in our universe.

Yeah, you'd be like that.

I think it would be very infeasible to simulate our world at the level of...

quantum properties, at least if the simulator's universe looked anything like our universe.

But maybe the physics at their level of reality is different.

I mean, maybe it's possible to build more powerful computers.

You could even imagine hypercomputation being possible in some other kind of physics so that they could run literally infinite computations.

And then maybe they could simulate a world like ours at full quantum detail.

And then run it forward and watch the future evolution.

But I mean, from our point of view, it would...

presumably not make much difference whether they did it that way or the much cheaper way that would only render things at the sufficient level to be convincing to the people inside.

And in fact, even if you imagine that there were some simulators that could do this at full quantum detail, it would cost them so much more compute that it would still likely be the case that almost all simulations would run in the more efficient way.

that would only simulate things at the coarser grain.

So even if there were some full grain simulations, we would probably be in one of the other ones, because that would be a lot cheaper, and so you could create orders of magnitude more.

Understanding is a matter of degree, right?