Scientists are looking for ways to put the simulation hypothesis to the test
I probably don&#x27;t understand the argument. My limited understanding is it&#x27;s a thought experiment<p>1. We have GTA5<p>2. GTA5 will continue to improve until there are actual A.I. NPCs in it<p>3. Those NPCs will not know they are living in a simulated world<p>4. Every PS2000 playing GTA5 = more simulated people than actual people. QED, odds are we&#x27;re simulated people<p>The problem I have with this is the basic premise. Is it actually possible to simulate the entire universe? It seems impossible to me. The argument is supposed to be that like GTA5 only the parts being observed by the NPCs need to be simulated (actually GTA5 is only parts observed by the player).<p>In either case that seems false. In order for the causality to work out when an NPC observes any part of the universe all causality for all atoms for the NPC&#x27;s observation need to be calculated since they were last observed. I don&#x27;t believe you can take shortcuts like a game does.<p>Also, games rarely save the state of the entire game world, usually they reset any changes in few seconds.<p>Further, simulating atoms requires more atoms. In other words there are  impossible problems<p>*  You need more atoms in the universe to simulate a universe (so that means the outer universe has to be several orders of magnitudes larger than this one)<p>*  You can&#x27;t actually take any shortcuts so you need insane processing power. More processing power than our entire universe.<p>I seems like the basic premise, that it&#x27;s obvious we&#x27;ll eventually have universe simulators, is just flat out false. We could make a holodeck maybe, but it will have to be limited the same way games today are limited since otherwise it would require nearly infinite storage and computing power.