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I was with you until here:

> it's worth bearing in mind that simulation is really hard and computationally expensive

This is like ants saying "building mounds is resource intensive. We need our entire civilization working together to build one. You can try to get around this detail but..."

This carries the implicit assumption that if there is indeed a simulation then it is limited to human capability, which would almost certainly be wrong.

> the implicit assumption that if there is indeed a simulation then it is limited to human capability, which would almost certainly be wrong.

Yes, totally. But the danger then is that if we say "it is more complicated than we can understand", then the simulation hypothesis essentially becomes a faith-based argument, where 'simulation' essentially means 'god', and then all the bets are off.

Ok, but we shouldn't artificially limit what would be likely if it were the case just because it results in outcomes undesirable to you. It's already faith based at this point anyway. Most religion is basically a simulation hypothesis.

When it comes to quantum computations, the difficulty is exponential with a truely ridiculous exponent. You are very plausibly just better off manipulating the matter directly once you get to any reasonable size, and there's extremely likely no way around this.

You are still just arbitrarily limiting what is possible to current human understanding. I find it extremely unlikely that the understanding we have of nature at this arbitrary point billions of years into the universe's development and ~10k into our development just happens to be the exact point where we have a clear understanding of the fundamental nature of reality and what is possible.

The other problem is that if this were a simulation, quantum mechanics might not be a fundamental mechanism of reality but rather arbitrary rules executed by the simulation.

It's ultimately a question of intention, of directionality. Do you live to eat, or eat to live?

The scientific view is that there is a pre-existing world out there, and a Way Things Work, and if we observe and struggle enough we can understand it.

The religous/simulation approach gives primacy to the soul/consciousness, and has the world as a driver of plot.

It's top-down vs bottom-up. Do we need to simulate a trillion trillion neurons to model a single brain, or is a neuron a concept that gives scientists something to talk about?

Good one: we eat to live to reproduce more who will eat to live to reproduce.

Merely 100 billion neurons; but the real computational compartment is the synapse and its dendritic pond. That gets you up to 10 trillion miniature analog circuits operating “concurrently” in a human brain.

But all almost miraculously running without a base oscillator for para-synchrony of compute. Figure that one out and we can then start talking about general AI and simulating Neo all over again again.

"But all almost miraculously running without a base oscillator for para-synchrony of compute"

Would you elaborate on this a little for those of us who don't know what a base oscillator is or what it does for a para-synchronous compute?

Sure: almost all computation needs a method to time and synchronize operations. The synchronization in digital systems is driven by an oscillators/clocks/crystals. The precision of synchronization is never perfect—hence the new term “parasynchrony” or “good enough synchrony” to compute.

Analog circuits also need a time frame (phase) for computation although it is not discretized.

So where in the brain—a fancy mixed bag of salty cellular neurons and glia—is there anything analogous to an oscillator or clock?

Answer: there isn’t!

Para-synchrony is learned gradually by living and moving in a world. It is the root of the emergence of coordination of movements and eventually, of semantic sequence.

The first years of life are about building “clock systems” into neural systems by tweaking synaptic weight and connection latencies to achieve coordinated movement (a hard compute) and accurate/useful perceptions (another hard compute). Movements, sensations, perceptions are all coupled closely and share DYNAMIC modulated meta-clock systems.

We eventually control these meta-clock systems to some modest degree—and that modest degree allows us to steer attention recursively. Hofstadter makes this point in Gödel, Escher, Bach toward the end.

Neuroscientists and developmental psychologists, and even philosophers (including Heidegger) take Time with a capital T, as a given. They are fixated on Representation.

Even Piaget takes “Time” as a given. But time or synchrony as we experience it is very much a neural construct that takes years to build and fine-tune.

Piaget got very close but in the end the question and the problem eluded him like a ghost. In “The Child and Reality”, he writes on page 15 (Rosin translation): “the action of looking, of following with the eyes, the action of bringing an object to the mouth, etc.—but they all lack coordination with each other.” Yet he forgets to ask why they lack coordination.

The answer is that infants have very low and slow parasynchrony across their sensory-motor systems.