>Now let's say WA improves their algorithm and it becomes identical to the algorithm used by the simulators. Now the computation that WA does is 1:1 with the computation the simulator has to do. You could argue, well, maybe they use better hardware that can do it more efficiently. Sure. But then WA can eventually do it on that same hardware. As all this improves, it necessarily goes to 1:1.

This does not "necessarily goes to 1:1".

That would require continuous progress, which the simulation might very well not be capable of. After all they've designed the universe, its physical laws, and constraints (including the thermal death of it). If they started with billion or trillion times more CPU power than anything we're up to now -- it could very well be that we'd never reach it.

In fact that could be a hardwired cap in our simulation. The very materials, laws, etc of the simulation could put a constaint on the demands of it.

The same way a NN that might have N inputs and L layers, wont ever magically grown more.

Our whole idea of 'computing' might not be any more universal in the higher level universe (of the creators of the simulation) than e.g. a simple algebra of addition and substation, or a matrix operation in a NN, is to ours.

Like they've set our "physical laws" (with e.g. theirs being nothing like it) they could have as well designed our math and logic possible within the universe, as a much smaller (with less expressive power and power demands) version of their own.

(In other words, I find limiting the idea often implied that the higher universe of the simulation creators needs to be just like ours, just with more computing power and advanced technology. Fundamental tenets of physical laws, math, and logic could be different -- the same way I can design a program that can just do addition).

>You might, instead, just store all queries in a lookup table the first time they are made. That would reduce your energy requirements. But now you've just traded infinite energy requirements for a possibly smaller, yet still infinite space requirement.

Or you could just feed bogus answers, that take little/no time to compute, but wire the "players" such that they think they got more detailed ones, which would be dirt cheap.

>So, I think what you're saying is that you would just fake it. You just "tell" the simulated beings that they did the thing, and you skip over it.

Yes.

>I'm not really sure how that would work in practice. If I need the result of my WA query so I can do some other math, and I'm writing all this down, how did I get all this notation on the page and how is it correct without anybody doing the calculations?

Who said it has to be correct? It's enough that you (as a simulated being) believe is correct.

>Do they just force me to see 'something' and tell me what I'm seeing is correct?

Yes.

>How do I get to an ultimate useful result?

"Useful" just means "able to affect/be applied" to the universe you (the simulated being) lives in. Which of core is the main specialty of the creator of such a universe: they can produce "useful" at will!

>In any case, if you're just going to go mucking about with people's minds, why bother with conscious beings in the first place?

Isn't this like saying "if you're going to be mucking about with weights, why bother with a neural net in the first place"? One could very well want a NN, and want to mess with the weights at any point they feel like it.

E.g. because you want to see what a simulated person will do under certain inputs, and revise those inputs, and so on. They don't necessarily want to see it (that is, us) "live its life fully free".

And even what we call "conscious" could be what the level of a worm or a NN is to us when compared to their consciousness.

These grew too long, but I basically make 3 (different, though some can be mixed) arguments in this. To recap:

1) If we assume that we could (if we try enough) reach the power limits of the host from within the simulation, then
they (the hosts) could just skimp on our more computationally demanding questions and have us convinced they run successfully and trust the BS answers we got. They could even hardwire the system so such answers appear to be fine when used.

2) The simulation could have a design-enforced cap of the computation it can use, the same way our simulated systems don't by themselves start demanding more energy. We might think our universe is "open ended" and could scale to all kind of high computational use, but it already has caps like laws of physics, logic, entropy, etc.

3) Our computations and their needs could be a grossly simplified version of the computational models on the "host" universe of the simulation creators, such thats it's laughingly low in resources (this is similar to 2, but from a different angle).