Yes, the recent popularity stems from Bostrom's simulation argument trilemma. But everyone always jumps over that, takes it as granted that we live in a simulat

Yes, the recent popularity stems from Bostrom's simulation argument trilemma. But everyone always jumps over that, takes it as granted that we live in a simulation, and proposes some wild ideas how we could find evidence or what might be hints of the simulation. This is what I wanted to address, that this is a relatively hopeless endeavour and I do have the impression that most people talking about living in a simulation are not aware of this. Despite, as you point out, it being a variation of solipsism about which people have pondered for centuries. To address the actual trilemma, I think the solution is that there are or will be no simulations. Generally the most compact representation of a thing is the thing itself. If you want to simulate something faithfully, then the simulator will need more resources than what you simulate. You are not going to build an electron simulator that needs less than one electron to simulate one electron. You are not going to simulate a computer with a gigabyte of memory on a computer with a gigabyte of memory. That might work under special conditions, when the simulated memory is mostly zeros and you can compress it, but it will not work in general. You can simulate the weather on earth well enough for the whether forecast to be useful if you throw away enough details, but you are not going to simulate it in full detail with a computer much smaller than earth's atmosphere. Simulating a cubic meter of universe faithfully will generally require at least a cubic meter of computer. I do not see us building galaxy-size computers. The other option would be to go the way of the weather forecast, make the simulation as simple as possible, simulate entire humans but not cells or atoms to make the problem tractable. That seems much more plausible. In both cases it seems unlikely to me that you could deeply nest simulations. If you have a faithful simulation and simulating a cubic meter of universe requires two cubic meters of computer, then you could at best simulate a universe half the size of the real universe if you turned the entire universe into a computer. The people in that simulated universe could at best build a simulation half the size of their universe and so on. The simulated volume would exponentially approach zero with increasing nesting level. If you go the other way, if you simulate entire humans and not cells or atoms, then it is not even clear how the simulated people would go about creating their own simulator as simulating arbitrary machines is not part of the simulation. So you are forced to move towards a more faithful simulation mechanism if you want to enable nested simulations which, as said, will probably shrink the simulation volume rather quickly.