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> After all, as we are likely never going to meet in person, it would be extremely inefficient to actually simulate you, too.

If you are at the point where you can simulate a whole world, I think this ceases to be an issue.

The maximum speed of light constraint sounds very much a hardware limitation on the FPS I wonder if the limitation continues to be hardware or difficulty in removing the restriction in a backwards compatible way

Adding in quantum mechanics was a terrible mistake then.

In my personal simulation hypothesis, quantum mechanics is a workaround for when pesky scientists started looking closely at the edge cases in the simulation’s behavior.

It’s expensive to simulate every particle, so it’s easier to simulate the macroscopic observables of a system in bulk. But if you try to look at individual particle interactions, you end up seeing that things aren’t deterministic any more (because the individual particles aren’t typically simulated), and the results of experiments are heavily dependent on when/what exactly you decide to measure.

Wave function collapse is what happens when the simulation had to fully evaluate a particle interaction that would have normally been optimized away.

I mean sure that sounds nice, but entanglement makes no sense as an optimization. There's no computational argument that can be made why you'd want something that classical computers are frankly incapable of calculating.

You could argue that the simulation must be running on a quantum computer then, but that's just moving the goal posts.

> entanglement makes no sense as an optimization.

Of course, which is why the universe doesn’t typically calculate full entanglement; hence entanglement doesn’t really show up on the macro scale.

Only when you do experiments on a handful of particles, and come up with an observable that depends on their behavior (interferometry, etc), the simulation has to scramble to come up with a coherent history that agrees with your measurement, in a lazily evaluated way. The larger scale the experiments are on entangled particles, the harder the simulation has to work to make it all happen and make sense. :-)

One could say that decoherence is the universe’s way of preventing us from stealing its compute power too much.

If this holds then things should start to break down once we get some serious entanglement on the way (VLHC anyone?).

And let's ignore that most of the supposed optimizations that quantum mechanics was allegedly bringing happen because of entanglement and not in spite of it.

Like the cars and pedestrians in GTA. I was trying to create the biggest pile up of wrecked cars that I could, and they kept disappearing whenever I turned my back in them!

To me it sounds more like a requirement for life to form, and by extension also for intelligent living observers. Many of the physical laws need to balance each other perfectly for that to happen. That does not mean they were "designed" that way, just that no intelligent living being will ever observe anything else. Therefor, the situation is as expected and does not indicate anything what so ever.

If it's extremely unlikely that such a balance would occur by itself then that itself indicates something. If I fell out of a plane and miraculously survived, I don't think my response would be "Of course I survived! If I hadn't, I wouldn't be here to say this!"

> extremely unlikely

That implies that there can only be exactly one universe, whereas the simulation hypothesis (just as the multiverse or many worlds interpretation) say that there are infinite. Thus, the probability of something happening is undefined, as there is no denominator and everything possible happens somewhere.

In that sense it implies that anything we haven't observed is impossible. It equally implies a wizard didn't do it.

I think a more useful view is that is extremely unlikely, and so we need an extraordinary claim with extraordinary evidence to explain it.

If my experience with physics engines indicates anything, it’s that the speed of light is probably an arbitrary constant set to prevent weird floating point errors or accidentally passing through objects.

But with a simulation, the mother universe needs that unlikely set of balanced circumstances, and a simulation set up in it, making it even less likely

I don't know - it could operate in a totally different way to ours.

In "Fall, or Dodge in Hell" the author, Neal Stephenson, explores this concept in great detail (over nearly 1000 pages).