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TheOtherDave comments on 2013 Less Wrong Census/Survey - Less Wrong
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I'm curious: why? (Not necessarily disagreeing, just wondering.)
Because the simulations we make have simpler physics than we do.
Sensible.
On the face of it, I would expect that if a physics P1 is the result of some agent A that lives under some other physics P2 constructing a simplified physics for simulation purposes, it would have characteristically different properties from a physics P3 that is not the result of such a process. Put differently... if our physics is P1, it should be more likely to be easily understood by A's cognitive processes than if it's P3.
That said, I don't understand the general constraints on either physicses or cognitive processes well enough to even begin to theorize about what specific properties I would expect to differentially find in P1 and P3.
Still, I wonder whether someone a lot smarter and better informed than me could use that as a starting point for trying to answer that question.
I agree that it seems more likely that if we're in a simulation, it's got a simplified version of our simulator's physics rather than some drastically different physics. On the other hand, this is very much guesswork.
And on yet another hand, if you assume that our simulators have huge amounts of computational power, they might be exploring universes with possible laws of physics thoroughly enough that the proportion of simulations with simplifications of the home physics isn't very high.
I'm faintly horrified at the idea of physics which is much more complicated than ours-- ours is complicated enough.