Simulation without a Simulator? Resolved Description, Support Hierarchy, and Structural Asymmetry

Simulation arguments typically presuppose a symmetric hierarchy: an upstream process that enacts a world, and an inhabitant who occupies it, where both levels involve something like an operative standpoint. This paper argues that this symmetry is not structurally required. Drawing on a minimal distinction between compressed and resolved descriptions — a distinction that tracks the functional separability of model and selection roles established by algorithmic information theory — we develop a no-entailment result: support-dependence does not entail upstream resolution. A resolved internal standpoint may depend, as a condition of its reachability, on antecedent support conditions — including, in the simulation case, what would ordinarily be called a simulator — without those conditions themselves constituting any resolved standpoint. The standard picture of simulation as a relation between two resolved levels is therefore a special case rather than a structural requirement. The paper does not adjudicate between competing positions in the simulation literature; it isolates a specific structural assumption that those discussions tend to share and shows that the assumption is not entailed by the support structure that simulation arguments invoke. The general theory of compressed and resolved descriptions on which the argument draws is developed in companion work~\cite{Hitchcock2026CRD}; the present paper is a focused application to simulation arguments specifically.