Well, yes, but the "real world" might have infinite dimensions, and the only reason we don't is because we're near the bottom of an infinitely high stack. The

Well, yes, but the "real world" might have infinite dimensions, and the only reason we don't is because we're near the bottom of an infinitely high stack. The problem with trying to make assumptions like these is that without "outside knowledge" we're stuck trying to postulate limitations based on a world that might well be a result of the "outside world" taking liberties for the sake of computability of their simulation. The original simulation hypothesis took simplifying steps for the sake of "selling it" that at the same time makes it easier to attack. E.g., the "ancestor simulations" presumes some degree of similarity between those running a simulation and the subjects of the simulation, but there's no reason for us to presume that simulations of our own past would dominate sufficiently if we gain the ability to simulate worlds that we can assume that anyone running "our" simulation if we are in one would represent our "descendants". Beyond not knowing if "our" physics reflects anything resembling the complexity of a containing simulation, we also need to presume a whole lot of things about "our" simulation to assume that it is expensive/complex to run. A small selection of such assumptions: 1. That the simulation actually simulates the whole of "our" universe. 2. Or even a significant part of it. 3. And that it simulates a long time period 4. Or even more than a single moment over and over. 5. That the world outside our individual mind exists 6. That there aren't all kinds of other crude shortcuts (chunks despawning and serializing differences from base simulation whenever nobody "interesting" observes it, etc.) 7. That we can know there aren't crude shortcuts because we're not seeing any. See 3, 4, 5, plus maybe the only reason "our" simulation is running is because nobody has spotted any shortcuts and triggered kill switches yet ("oh no, another experiment contaminated; time for a reboot") 8. As a variant on 5, that other people, or any significant number of people, exist, and make pruning the simulation computational budget hard. You can come up with an endless number of these. We can perhaps start to make some very vague guesses about some very generic qualities of a simulation, but the'd largely be in relation to qualities of a hypothetical "outside" that we don't know the qualities off. E.g. it may be reasonable to assume that our physics would either be no more complex than theirs or that our simulation would be strictly limited in scope, be it time, space, fidelity. But that wouldn't tell us much. From a scientific point of view, this makes the entire hypothesis rather pointless, unless we run head-first into extremely clear signs we are in one. But from a philosophical point of view it's what makes it fun to think about consequences.