Your yearly dose of is-the-universe-a-simulation

You can go further than that. Depending on your goal, you only need to simulate enough that subject being simulated can not notice the difference. Everything else can be generated on demand.

E.g. consider the game Elite. It creates an - admittedly very simple - illusion of a persistent universe by using pseudo-random numbers to generate star systems.

It then populates those systems with ships whenever you visit one. But those ships only "exists" when you are in the system. Leave it and they disappear.

That's obviously too simple, but the point is that most of what you see you don't interact with more than superficially: For most of the ships you have no way of knowing (other than by looking at the code...) that if you turn around and fly back to the same systems, the simulations you run into are new rather than have just moved.

In general, you would be able to discontinue and discard most simulated objects after varying amounts of time. E.g. you may need to be able to regenerate a beach the subject has visited so that it looks the same, but only hours afterwards you can discard the sandcastle the subject built.

In fact, I'd argue that one of the problems with some open-world simulation games today is that they permanently retain state they shouldn't. E.g. if you chop down a tree in Minecraft and leave a stub, it will remain there forever. This is made worse, because the single player version and most servers will only simulate chunks where there are players - other chunks will be "in stasis", so if you quickly leave an area, states that even in-game should be brief and temporary gets frozen in time and restarted long after they should have changed if the player later comes back.

A "perfect" simulation will continue simulating any area "touched" by the "players", but over time gradually erase those state changes: Stubs rot, area overgrown etc.; buildings fall apart.

Over time you can let state left behind by a player converge on a generator function that lets the simulation eventually discard the state change entirely and fall back on just generating the area on demand.

To be more precise: The absence of ashtrays fluctuating in Morse code and spelling out messages or other clear signs of influence is not evidence of the absence of meddling.

We can not realistically know whether or not someone is meddling with a simulation we are in because there are infinite ways they could do so that would be indistinguishable to us from "just the way the universe is".

E.g. for what we know quantum mechanics is an artefact of ways of optimizing the simulation, for example.

But at the same time, there are clearly an infinite number of ways those running such simulations could make their existence quite obvious if that was the intent.

And frankly that is one of my biggest issues with the simulation argument. Let's call it the Fermi Paradox of the Simulation Agument: If we're in a simulation, where are the obvious signatures of these "simulation masters"?

Because if simulations of consciousness eventually becomes possible, I have a hard time of seeing how they'd not eventually become "cheap enough" with sufficient shortcuts that we'd be more likely to live in a far future version of The Sims than a serious scientific simulation.

And have you seen what people do to their Sims on Youtube?

If we are in a simulation, then I wonder why in the world things are not more messed up. Why hasn't some immature "simulation master" written their name across the night sky with giant fluorescent penises, for example. (Then again, maybe that's in the next simulation over)

I agree, it tickles my apatheist spot in the same way that talk of "God" does. Questions that are obviously not within the realm of human exploration are not interesting or compelling questions; the logical equivalent of "Is there a god?" or "What's North of the North Pole?"

It matters because if we are in a simulation there could be a "magic ritual" that would cause those running the simulation to pay attention. There might even be hints. Those claiming to talk to God might be half right. Of course we wouldn't have a way of knowing the consequence of drawing their attention - it could be the equivalent of dumping bleach in the petri dish, or they could decide to let us out.

If we are in a simulation that is strictly following a set of basic natural laws and running it beginning to end without an exceptional influence, then you are right, it probably doesn't matter.

But if you are running in a simulation as part of a game where the entity running the simulation takes delight in messing around with it?

I agree in a sense that if we "escape the box" we'll just expand our idea of what reality is (and wonder if there's a box outside i), but that doesn't mean that the existence or absence of anything outside the box doesn't matter. It's just that we have to accept that it's not certain that we can ever know, and that we almost certainly can never know if we've found the outermost box or just haven't found a way out yet.

His only unstated assumption to make it converge to 1 is that the odds of any given such compution being executed in any given volume of time and space must be positive. If it is, then no matter how low the probability is for any given location and time, given he postulated an infinite universe the probability will converge on 1.