However, this is only most useful if the goal is to just generate an interesting reality. If the goal is to regenerate an entire historical period accurately, you cant start with the simulated observers - they are greater unknowns than the environment itself.
I believe we're arguing along two paths here, and it is getting muddled. Applying to both, I think one can maintain the world-per-person sim much more cheaply than you originally suggested long before one hits the spot where the sim is no longer accurate to the world except where it intersects with the observer's attention.
Second, from my perspective you're begging the question, since I was talking about a variety of reasons for simulation and arguing that simulating a single entity seems as reasonable as many---but you seem only to be concerned with historical recreation, in which case it seems obvious to me that a large group of minds is necessary. If we're only talking about that case, the arguments along this line about the per-mind cost just aren't very relevant.
I have a 404 on your link, I'll try later.
Another simple assessment related to the doomsday argument: I don't know how long this Moore's Law progression will carry on, but it's lasted for 50 years now, so I give reasonable odds that it will last another 50. Simple, but surprisingly better than nothing.
Interesting, I haven't heard that argument applied to Moore's Law. Question: you arrive at a train crossing (there are no other cars on the road), and just as you get there, a train begins to cross before you can. Something goes wrong, and the train stops, and backs up, and goes forward, and stops again, and keeps doing this. (This actually happened to me). 10 minutes later, should you expect that you have around 10 minutes left? After those are passed, should your new expectation be that you have around 20 minutes left?
The answer is possibly yes. I think better results would be obtained by using a Jeffreys Prior. However, I've talked to a few statisticians about this problem, and no one has given me a clear answer. I don't think they're used to working with so little data.
A more powerful line of reasoning perhaps is this: as long as there is an economic incentive to continue Moore's Law and room to push against the physical limits, ceteris paribus, we will make some progress and push towards those limits. Thus, eventually we will reach them.
Revise to say "and room to push against the practicable limits" and you will see where my argument lies despite my general agreement with this statement.
Power efficiency, in terms of ops/joule, increases directly with transistor density.
To my knowledge, this is incorrect. Increases in transistor density have dramatically increased circuit leakage (because of bumping into quantum tunneling), requiring more power per transistor in order to accurately distinguish one path from another. I saw a roundtable about proposed techniques for increasing processor efficiency. None of the attendees objected to the introduction, which mentioned that the increased waste heat from modern circuits was rising at a faster exponential than circuit density, and would render all modern circuit designs inoperable if there were to be logically extended without addressing the problem of quantum leakage.
I cannot express how much I would rather having never existed.
This is somewhat concerning, and I believe, atypical. Not existing is perhaps the worst thing I can possibly imagine, other than infinite torture.
If you didn't exist in the first place, you wouldn't care. Do you think you've done so much good for the world that your absence could be "the world thing you can possibly imagine, other than infinite torture"?
Regardless, I'm quite atypical in this regard, but not unique.
You literally couldn't have grown up in that world, the entire idea is a non sequitur. Your mind's state is a causal chain rooted in the gritty reality of this world with all of it's suffering.
Imagining that your creator could have assigned you to a different world is like imagining you could have grown up with different parents. You couldn't have. That would be somebody else completely.
And wouldn't that be so much better.
You propose that not existing would be a terrible evil. But how much better, for all the trillions upon trillions you're proposing must suffer for the creator's whims, would it be to have that computational substrate be used to host entities that have amazingly positive, productive, maximally Fun lives? I know I couldn't have existed in a paradise, but if I'm a sim, there are cycles that could be used for paradise that have been abandoned to create misery and strife.
Again, I think that this may be the world we really are in. I just can't call it a moral one.
I was talking about a variety of reasons for simulation and arguing that simulating a single entity seems as reasonable as many---but you seem only to be concerned with historical recreation.
Historical recreation currently seems to be the best rationale for a superintelligence to simulate this timeslice, although there are probably other motivations as well.
...Power efficiency, in terms of ops/joule, increases directly with transistor density.
To my knowledge, this is incorrect. Increases in transistor density have dramatically increased circuit leakag
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).