Feb 2018 v01 online

simply be a hollow shell with a rendered outer
layer, with bones, internal organs, and tissues
being fully simulated only when you were cut
open, or put into an MRI. The crux here is
that there would need to be a level of
consistency between what we expect to
experience and what is actually simulated, as
to give us no reason to suspect that we are
living in a simulation. Even if we did observe
some discrepancies in the universe that gave
us evidence that we were living in a
simulation, it is likely that whoever (or
whatever) was simulating us would be able
“rewind” our universe, and address any
inconsistencies that we came to discover
before running it again. At the end of the day,
this would have a significantly lower
computational demand than generating and
running an entire universe down to the
subatomic level.
However, even if the universe were to be
procedurally generated in this manner, the
computing power required to simulate even a
single conscious mind would be immense.
With an average human brain functioning at
the equivalent of a billion billion calculations
a second, whilst our most powerful
supercomputer operate at a mere thousand
billion calculations a second, simulating
entire populations across any period of time
would require computational power massively
in excess of anything we are currently capable
of. Furthermore, the fact that computer
componentry has gotten so small in present
day as to have reached a physical limit – their
efficacy already being affected by phenomena
such as
– means
that assuming our computational
advancement will improve along the same
trend it has until now might be problematic.
This doesn’t mean that it is impossible for
us (or someone else) to create ancestor
simulations. Models for massively large and
powerful computers such as the
that harness the power of stars do