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Same as the odds that a higher being (a god) exists.
Can't prove it, can't disprove it. All arguments for it speculative and subjective.
People claim that it is the most likely option because eventually tech will be so advanced that we could make a world simulation, and then we would make multiples, and therefore the probability of this not being a simulation is low.
This claim assumes that computers CAN get that complex (no indication that they could) it also assumes that if they could, we would create world simulators (Why? Parts of it sure, but all of it?) And it assumes that sentient beings inside the simulation could never know it (Why?)
It is as pointless as arguing about god.
I don't know why people assume that computation power increases indefinitely forever until it simulates a universe. why would it do that?
I mean, if you take an existing physics simulation and just scale up the hardware...
I would hope that we wouldn't build such a thing just out of ethical concerns for the inhabitants, but then again we've built a giant AI-training network with very little knowledge of if they have some kind of limited consciousness during the process.
Then what? We have no reason to believe that would cause parts of the simulation to be conscious and think they exist in reality.
We're physics. It seems like we exist.
But we have no evidence that we're anywhere close to being able to accurately simulate physics, even with planet sizes computers.
We can accurately simulate physics, outside of certain extreme environments. My evidence is that we routinely do, although hardware limitations mean if you want perfect accuracy it's going to involve just a few particles, with more and more approximation as you scale beyond that.
There are no extreme environments on Earth, by that definition, which is a big part of why physics is stuck on them in the first place. All known life is also on Earth, so that shouldn't matter, if life and consciousness is what we're interested in.
This is not true. For example, we don't know why [ice is slippery].(https://doi.org/10.1016/j.coldregions.2014.03.002).
Furthermore
Yes, there is. Ice. And superconductors. And so on... And even if all the other stuff is exotic, it's important to know all the other underlying principles to comprehend what's actually going on.
Yeah, that's more than a few particles. If you had a planet-sized computer, you could still simulate a block of ice, although it might still be hard to explain in a bird-eye view kind of way why the simulated ice is slippery. Which is what this paper is actually trying to do.
Ditto for superconductors. It's true that closer to absolute zero something is, the longer quantum features stay relevant, and that imposes a pretty punishing penalty. It's not infinite, though.
Biggest reason to to a complete simulation would be reversed time dilation. Run the simulation until the civilization is a few hundred to a few thousand years more advanced than your own, and see what technologies they have invented and refined.