> If this is true, there must be some species at some level of simulation who's not being simulated.
You can't fool me, it's turtles all the way down!
With that out of the way, I'll observe there is no reason that such a base layer of reality need bear any particular resemblance to ours except in the tautological sense that it would need to be Turing complete in order to be capable of hosting a simulation.
I agree that it would probably not resemble our universe. I would think it has to be a universe that's capable of simulating our universe without consuming all of the host universe's resources as it would need at least some sort of species that would want to simulate our universe. At least initially.
I'm not sure what you (and other people) really mean when you say our universe is simulated.
- Do you mean that the entire universe is simulated down to the planck level?
- Do you think there's some sort of optimization going on?
- Do you think it's done by a species that evolved to become curious to see what would happen if you simulate the universe (like us)?
I can say that our universe is simulated too, but I have no idea if this simulation was made by someone or if it "just is".
But if you believe the universe is a simulation in some host universe, then it must be possible to have a universe that "just is" / or is Turing complete as you put it.
> I mean that such a universe could be so different from ours that the idea of 'species' may not even be sensible.
Alright. I've heard people say they think our universe is being simulated because that's what we would do. For those who think that, the host universe is at least somewhat similar to us.
> Unspecified. Perhaps gross approximations are used unless an attempt is made to observe (internally or externally) more detail.
But if gross approximations are true, that reveals information about the host doesn't it? If they resort to approximations because they don't have enough resources, that tells us they must really want to do this for some reason. Did they want to create our simulation for fun? Out of desperation? Are we made for research purposes? All those questions point to something human-like in my opinion, and thus "species".
Have to take this opportunity to re-share one of my favorite dreams. From back in the early 90s when I watched Star trek regularly. I was on the bridge. A crew member. The captain shouted some order to the crew. I shouted "belay that order" The captain said "I'm a level 5 - I know what I'm am doing". I replied "I am a level 12, so you should listen to me".
Could be an Ouroboros, the entirety of existence being created from nothing in an enormous circular dependency. It sounds farcical but when you think about why the universe exists in the first place, it seems as good a reason as any.
"This helps us arrive at an interesting observation about the nature of space in our universe. If we are in a simulation, as it appears, then space is an abstract property written in code. It is not real. It is analogous to the numbers seven million and one in our example, just different abstract representations on the same size memory block. Up, down, forward, backward, 10 miles, a million miles, these are just symbols. The speed of anything moving through space (and therefore changing space or performing an operation on space) represents the extent of the causal impact of any operation on the variable “space.” This causal impact cannot extend beyond about 300,000 km given the universe computer performs one operation per second. "
