It's very hard to take these ideas seriously (Score 1)

It's hard to take these ideas seriously as long as they're always framed as actually running on a computer in a "real" universe somewhere. Even if we can demonstrate that we live in a simulation-like universe, it never followed that a real universe is necessarily non-simulation-like. Therefore, investigating such matters only serves to reveal a deeper character to the description of nature, but doesn't imply anything about things beyond what we can observe.