This is very upsetting, I don't have anything like the time I need to keep participating in this thread, but it remains interesting. I would like to respond completely, which means that I would like to set it aside, but I'm confident that if I do so I will never get back to it. Therefore, please forgive me for only responding to a fraction of what you're saying.
If the N minds were separated by vast gulfs of space and time this would be true, but we are talking about highly connected systems.
I thought context made it clear that I was only talking about the non-mind stuff being simulated as being an additional cost perhaps nearly linear in N. Very little of what we directly observe overlaps except our interaction with each other, and this was all I was talking about.
Regardless, I don't think we can be confident that consciousness occurs at an inflection point or a noticeable bend.
Why can't a poor model (low fidelity) be conscious? We just don't know enough about consciousness to answer this question.
Yes, but because of the network effects mentioned earlier it would be difficult and costly to do this on a per mind basis. Really it's best to think of the entire earth as a mind for simulation purposes.
I really disagree, but I don't have time to exchange each other's posteriors, so assume this dropped.
However, one thing you may very much desire would be reunification with former loved ones, dead ancestors, and so on [...] So once you have enough computational power, I suspect there will be a desire to use it in an attempt to resurrect the dead.
I think this is evil, but I'm not willing to say whether the future intelligences will agree or care.
You are basically taking the current efficiency of human brains as the limit, which of course is ridiculous on several fronts. We may not reach the absolute limits of computation, but they are the starting point for the SA.
I said it was a reasonable upper bound, not a reasonable lower bound. That seems trivial.
I was assuming computing at regular earth temperatures within the range of current brains and computers. At the limits of computation discussed earlier 1 kg of matter at normal temperatures implies an energy flow of around 1 to 20W and can simulate roughly 10^15 virtual humans 10^10 faster than current human rate of thought. This works out to about one hundred years per second.
Most importantly, you're assuming that all circuitry performs computation, which is clearly impossible. That leaves us to debate about how much of it can, but personally I see no reason that the computational minimum cost will closely (even in an exponential sense) be approached. I am interested in your reasoning why this should be the case though, so please give me what you can in the way of references that led you to this belief.
Lastly, but most importantly (to me), how strongly do you personally believe that a) you are a simulation and that b) all entities on Earth are full-featured simulations as well?
Conditioning on (b) being true, how long ago (in subjective time) do you think our simulation started, and how many times do you believe it has (or will be) replicated?
Very little of what we directly observe overlaps except our interaction with each other, and this was all I was talking about.
If I was to quantify your 'very little' I'd guess you mean say < 1% observational overlap.
Lets look at the rough storage cost first. Ignoring variable data priority through selective attention for the moment, the data resolution needs for a simulated earth can be related to photons incident on the retina and decreases with an inverse square law from the observer.
We can make a 2D simplification and use google earth as an examp...
Many folk here on LW take the simulation argument (in its more general forms) seriously. Many others take Singularitarianism1 seriously. Still others take Tegmark cosmology (and related big universe hypotheses) seriously. But then I see them proceed to self-describe as atheist (instead of omnitheist, theist, deist, having a predictive distribution over states of religious belief, et cetera), and many tend to be overtly dismissive of theism. Is this signalling cultural affiliation, an attempt to communicate a point estimate, or what?
I am especially confused that the theism/atheism debate is considered a closed question on Less Wrong. Eliezer's reformulations of the Problem of Evil in terms of Fun Theory provided a fresh look at theodicy, but I do not find those arguments conclusive. A look at Luke Muehlhauser's blog surprised me; the arguments against theism are just not nearly as convincing as I'd been brought up to believe2, nor nearly convincing enough to cause what I saw as massive overconfidence on the part of most atheists, aspiring rationalists or no.
It may be that theism is in the class of hypotheses that we have yet to develop a strong enough practice of rationality to handle, even if the hypothesis has non-negligible probability given our best understanding of the evidence. We are becoming adept at wielding Occam's razor, but it may be that we are still too foolhardy to wield Solomonoff's lightsaber Tegmark's Black Blade of Disaster without chopping off our own arm. The literature on cognitive biases gives us every reason to believe we are poorly equipped to reason about infinite cosmology, decision theory, the motives of superintelligences, or our place in the universe.
Due to these considerations, it is unclear if we should go ahead doing the equivalent of philosoraptorizing amidst these poorly asked questions so far outside the realm of science. This is not the sort of domain where one should tread if one is feeling insecure in one's sanity, and it is possible that no one should tread here. Human philosophers are probably not as good at philosophy as hypothetical Friendly AI philosophers (though we've seen in the cases of decision theory and utility functions that not everything can be left for the AI to solve). I don't want to stress your epistemology too much, since it's not like your immortal soul3 matters very much. Does it?
Added: By theism I do not mean the hypothesis that Jehovah created the universe. (Well, mostly.) I am talking about the possibility of agenty processes in general creating this universe, as opposed to impersonal math-like processes like cosmological natural selection.
Added: The answer to the question raised by the post is "Yes, theism is wrong, and we don't have good words for the thing that looks a lot like theism but has less unfortunate connotations, but we do know that calling it theism would be stupid." As to whether this universe gets most of its reality fluid from agenty creators... perhaps we will come back to that argument on a day with less distracting terminology on the table.
1 Of either the 'AI-go-FOOM' or 'someday we'll be able to do lots of brain emulations' variety.
2 I was never a theist, and only recently began to question some old assumptions about the likelihood of various Creators. This perhaps either lends credibility to my interest, or lends credibility to the idea that I'm insane.
3 Or the set of things that would have been translated to Archimedes by the Chronophone as the equivalent of an immortal soul (id est, whatever concept ends up being actually significant).