Nick Bostrom

Not just gaps in our understanding, but things we were fundamentally confused about.

Yeah, they'll laugh their ass off at everything we're talking about right now.

Yeah, or cry their eyes out or whatever.

So I do think we are, in a fundamental sense, very much in the dark about the really biggest picture.

Yeah, I think you do need some computation assigned to simulating relevant parts of the environment.

I think the biggest part will be the brains, but certainly if you had to simulate all of the environment at subatomic detail continuously, I mean, like quantum simulation of the entire universe would be completely infeasible if the simulators have anything comparable to the compute power that we could realize in this universe.

Now, I mean, I think that's the key to understand this whole simulation argument stuff, that if you had to simulate all of the environment in subatomic detail continuously, it probably would be completely infeasible to do that.

But I claim that's not needed.

All you would need to do is to simulate enough of the parts that we are observing, when we're observing them, that to the simulated creatures, it looks real and that they can tell the difference.

And that's a lot less.

All right, wait a minute.

So it's a procedural content generation.

So we use it in our computer games today a lot.

Like you often only render the parts that some character in the game are observing.

um and maybe you have some very coarse grain simulation of the whole thing continuously but you may fill in details if and when is needed so if like right now i don't have any idea what the atoms in this desk in front of me are doing right but if i took in principle an electron microscope or something i could

look and I better see atoms there, right?

And if necessary, I mean, they could even pause the simulation or edit it or erase memories if they really screwed it up.

But yeah, I think the kind of capability you would need to even create anything resembling this kind of simulation

is very advanced, and I think with that advanced capability would also come the ability to edit and to monitor human thoughts and intentions and then kind of be able to do this kind of procedural generation that even we do in our computer games today.

Yeah.