I think you're massive underestimating intelligence - not ASI, but just, like, human-level intelligence. Most of the existence of human civilization has taken place in conditions wildly different from the ancestral environment, and we adapted anyway - and the reason why it was possible was because we have a tiny bit of general intelligence.
For your simulation argument, see e.g. https://alicorn.elcenia.com/stories/starwink.shtml - I think you're arguing that nothing like this could possibly happen, because humans are too dumb to ever figure out unfamiliar physics without prolonged experimentation, even given hundreds of years of theoretical research and several attempts in the real world? I think the closest real-world example of this is space exploration - it's extremely expensive and takes years to put stuff in space, and yet probes and rovers we launch end up working most of the time. On my model, it's because we have a decent grasp of the underlying physics in enough detail to predict real-world complexity, and we have toy testing areas we can test the tech on, and if you do this cautiously enough you can, in fact, launch a thing that ends up working.
I think there's a fundamental difference, between the sort of careful planning that lets you launch space probes, and blind optimization like evolution does. The former can generalize to unfamiliar domains even when the latter doesn't. That's what intelligence gives us.
For your simulation argument, see e.g. https://alicorn.elcenia.com/stories/starwink.shtml - I think you're arguing that nothing like this could possibly happen, because humans are too dumb to ever figure out unfamiliar physics without prolonged experimentation, even given hundreds of years of theoretical research and several attempts in the real world? I think the closest real-world example of this is space exploration - it's extremely expensive and takes years to put stuff in space, and yet probes and rovers we launch end up working most of the time. On my model, it's because we have a decent grasp of the underlying physics in enough detail to predict real-world complexity, and we have toy testing areas we can test the tech on, and if you do this cautiously enough you can, in fact, launch a thing that ends up working.
I think there's a fundamental difference, between the sort of careful planning that lets you launch space probes, and blind optimization like evolution does. The former can generalize to unfamiliar domains even when the latter doesn't. That's what intelligence gives us.