I don’t really have much of an opinion one way or the other as far as whether we live in a simulation, but it is something fun to think about. As a computer scientist, I’ve always imagined that if we were in a simulation that C was essentially an artifact that arises from the quantization precision at which we’re being simulated. By that, I mean in any given state s[sub]n[/sub] we run the laws against s[sub]n-1[/sub] for a given time interval.
So, for instance, when I’ve done simulations of gravitational mechanics, I have a position, mass, velocity, and acceleration for each body. All I have to do is apply basic gravitational mechanics formulae against those for whatever our time interval is to get the next set of values. The larger the time interval, the larger the error introduced at each step of the calculation, and that error cascades. But values I put in for the time interval may or may not actually match realtime. That is, I might have each step calculated with a time interval of 1 ms, but if it takes 1s to process each step, then the calculation runs 1000x times slower than realtime. Or, in reverse, if I step by 1s, but I can calculate each frame in 1ms, then it runs 1000x faster.
What this all has to do with C is that we know that it is a constant velocity, and it arises as such because of the quantization between the steps, the photon travels that distance for each step of the calcuation, and the rest of the calculations fall in to place, just as from the grativational mechanics example from each time interval. I imagine it being like a giant massively multiprocessor system, and these photons are just messages from one processor to the next, so it can’t just get to an arbitrary cell to the next, it has to cover each one in between, and that requires each sell to recieve the photon and pass it on to the next.
Hell, this view could explain a lot of interesting things. For instance, I see it as an interesting explanation for my understanding of relativity. Objects with mass have more interactions so that cell has to do more complex calculations for each tick, so those ticks happen slower and, thus, the message travels slower. I haven’t carried this whole thought process out much farther than that, but it’s fun to think about.
As for the OP, though, I’m not sure there is any really good argument that we’re not simulated unless we could say the universe isn’t quantized. As long as it’s quantized, I think it’s possible that a sufficiently complex computer, one with enough time and memory, could calculate the observable universe. Obviously, that seems impossibly complex, but that’s only because our limits are the universe. I don’t see why there couldn’t be a universe arbitrarily larger and more complex than ours that couldn’t actually see simulating our universe as relatively simple to compute.
