Simulation Hypothesis: Contesting on Merits
After running my previous publication through a few LLMs to seek out viewpoints and arguments opposite to mine, I realize that I must address a stronger formulation of what I disagree with.
First of all, it's evident (as argued previously) this is not a scientific theory, but a metaphysical theory. Why so? Because any naturally observable evidence must be, by definition, a part of Nature and the Universe. There's no way to distinguish a Natural phenomenon from a “simulated” phenomenon from within the simulation.
It follows that any evidence we (humans) may claim to be suspiciously suggestive as a simulation artifact, can just as reasonably be entertained as “just the way Nature behaves” (e.g. Quantum Mechanics, Planck length, anisotropic energy propagation, etc.). Just because it doesn't make sense to us or, even, if it resembles human-created information systems, it doesn't constitute as evidence for a crafted simulation.
Which brings us to the second point, the Anthropic Principle. The thought experiment of the Simulation Hypothesis, being itself a metaphysical exercise, dialogues with the notion of the Anthropic Principle.
The problem it seeks to answer is: “All of Nature's constants and laws seem to be tuned just so as to allow intelligent life to occur and consciousness to emerge. Isn't that just absurdly improbable?”
The Anthropic Principle turns this question on its head: “No, the likelihood is 100%”. For us to be “conscious” (which is required to ask this question in the first place), we must have appeared in a formulation of the Universe which is conducive to the emergence of intelligent, conscious beings.
What the Simulation Hypothesis formulation does is to take the Anthropic Principle to overdrive: (i) assuming there's a sufficiently advanced civilization with enormous computational power at their disposal; (ii) they could run numerous simulations of the universe, therefore of an even greater number of conscious beings; (iii) and given that we're conscious, and if (i) and (ii) are the case, we are more likely to be among the simulated consciousnesses than the non-simulated ones.
Interesting exercise, nonetheless, but I'd precisely argue that (i) is the weakest link: although we've observed that technology, computation and information systems have greatly expanded in power in the last few decades, there's absolutely no guarantee (or natural law) that makes it inevitable that it will continue to grow unboundedly. On the contrary, there are fundamental upper limits, for example on Earth, economically and practically, with regards to how much matter and energy one can employ for any particular purpose in general, and computing resources in particular.
But even if we don't assume it so limited for another civilization, and billions of whole universe simulations could be run, I think my point stands that, from the point of view of beings inside the simulation (such as hypothetically ourselves), the metaphysical understanding that this world we observe is either “simulated” or “real” bears no distinction.