this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2025
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You're not describing a simulation, you're describing a perception. A person perceives that they're seeing an indistinguishable reality, but we know that people's brains do not have the computational power to simulate molecular motion in even a cubic centimeter of air.
Or, if they look at the stars, are they then simulating an infinite space with infinite mass and all of the associated interactions inside of their finite brain? Of course not, that would be impossible.
Dreams are perceptions, not simulations.
The mind while lucid dreaming is creating a whole environment, which for some people has incredible level of detail. Your "consciousness" is experiencing a whole video game or whatever, which must be simulated to be percieved. Imagine you had some kind of really advanced VR setup and body suit that could touch your senses very richly - something must be feeding that perception, a simulation
Our brains build a model of the world inside of our head, that’s what we experience.
Those same processes can generate output that isn’t there, we can hallucinate. This is what we’re doing when we’re dreaming. We’re not simulating a world it is computationally impossible.
To perfectly simulate a volume the size of your bedroom for even a few minutes would take millions of years of compute time. That is not happening inside your brain.