Alma-Tadema

One thing that always bothered me is the computing power required to run a meaningfull simulation of an universe. One explanation is that the containing universe is vastly more complex and that our simplified universe can be runned on computers that may cost the same as a cellphone(of course in the context of their universe). The problem comes in when WE want to run a meaningfull simulation. Even the game of life would be limited to trillions of cells on the fastest super computers. Okay so you say moore's law, even if we convert all the mass in the solar system with processors that have almost theoretical energy per computation efficiency, you run your gazzillion cell game of life simulation and seeds it randomly, even if intelligent "life" arises all you will see is well... a mass of boiling cells...not much of a "zoo factor" which is after all the main reason for running the simulation in the first place, you want to see something interesting, novel and new. So you up the complexity which means more processing power, so you convert the galaxy which you can't... The problem with parallel computers is the communication delay between nodes, the speed of light limit. Even if you add more computers the effect will be less and less. Even if we slow down our own perception by allocating more resources to the simulation, there is the little problem of the sun running out of fuel, you can end up literally slowing down your perception and thought processes so much that the universe starts dying around you. So when the simulation is to simple it is boring and when it is too complex it is impossible to implement. That is frankly why I think the more complex universe argument does not wash, the beings in that universe themselves would also be vastly more complex and more intelligent, which means we will be the equivalent to the game of live, extremely boring. One way that negates all that is if you can find a way to access an infinite pool of processing resources. Now the only way that we currently know of is Prof. Tipler's Omega Computer hypothesis. In the omega computer a person as complex(or simple) as ourselves can run a perfect simulation of the universe. Of course it is assumed that the GUT(Great unifying theory) will be ancient knowledge. This will enable the person to run the universe with perfect and accurate rules. This means that the simulated universe will ultimately collapse into it's own omega computer which means some person in that computer... you get the idea a infinite recursion of omega computers in the master process. This has the implication that the model universe will never reach the halting state(the final moment of the Crunch a point of no volume) but will exponentially demand more processing resources. This will be like trying to reach the speed of light you have to use more energy as your mass increases, but only tends towards lightspeed even if you use infinite energy for acceleration. Even if a fraction of persons decide to run a simulation, there will be infinite amount of universe simulations because a fraction of infinity is still infinity. This of course applies to all the omega computers and universe simulations down the chain. The master omega computer does not mind, the OS just keep on allocating resources from an infinite pool to an infinite amount of processes that exponentially demands more resources. So my conclusion is that the simulation argument by Bostrom is right only if Tipler is right or you can access an infinite amount of processing power(only Tipler has currently shown how this may be possible). In this case we are almost certainly in a simulation, but this does not realy matter or have any implication, even the master or "real" universe has been reduced to an omega computer. The GUT itself will be fundamentally complex, thus while complex processes can emerge from interacting simple processes the GUT itself will be irreducible complex. The GUT will under some instances and circumstances like the Crunch recurse into infinitely more complex loops and calculations.