I agree that computational irreducibility and chaos impose hard limits on prediction. Even if an intelligence understood every law of physics, it might still be unable to simulate reality faster than reality itself, since the physical world is effectively its own optimal computation.
I guess where my speculation comes in is that "simulation" doesn’t necessarily have to mean perfect 1:1 physical emulation. Maybe a higher intelligence could model useful abstractions/approximations, simplified but still predictive frameworks that are accurate enough for control and reasoning even in chaotic domains.
After all, humans already do this in a primitive way, we can't simulate every particle of the atmosphere, but we can predict weather patterns statistically. So perhaps the difference between us and a much higher intelligence wouldn't be breaking physics, but rather having much deeper and more general abstractions that capture reality's essential structure better.
In that sense, it's not "magical thinking", I just acknowledge that our cognitive compression algorithms (our abstractions) are extremely limited. A mind that could discover higher order abstractions might not outrun physics, but it could reason about reality in qualitatively new ways.
I guess where my speculation comes in is that "simulation" doesn’t necessarily have to mean perfect 1:1 physical emulation. Maybe a higher intelligence could model useful abstractions/approximations, simplified but still predictive frameworks that are accurate enough for control and reasoning even in chaotic domains.
After all, humans already do this in a primitive way, we can't simulate every particle of the atmosphere, but we can predict weather patterns statistically. So perhaps the difference between us and a much higher intelligence wouldn't be breaking physics, but rather having much deeper and more general abstractions that capture reality's essential structure better.
In that sense, it's not "magical thinking", I just acknowledge that our cognitive compression algorithms (our abstractions) are extremely limited. A mind that could discover higher order abstractions might not outrun physics, but it could reason about reality in qualitatively new ways.