Peterdjones comments on Dennett's "Consciousness Explained": Prelude - Less Wrong
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Maybe I was being too generous when I read this chapter, but I don't think that's what Dennett was saying. He was saying that in order for a brain-in-a-vat to work, the operator would have to anticipate every possible observation you could make, resulting in a combinatorial explosion that could not be handled by anything simpler than the universe itself.
That ties in with his next point (that you mention) about hallucinations, and how they persist only until you make an observation that the hallucination-generator can't fake.
It wasn't about bandwidth (rate of information transfer) at all. But perhaps I should re-read it.
Assuming the simulation is runnign in our universe. However, the Simulators could be fooling the Brains aout the size of the universe. Maybe what the Brains think the universe is, is a tiny corner of theirs. Equally, they could be fooling the Brains about the capactities of computers, even the fundamental of computer science.
See, scepticism is a Universal Solvent [*]. Once you accept it all bets are off.
[*] D. C.Dennett.