3 ms·
It's perfectly fair to complain that these discussions are untestable, at the very least, but unfortunately they're inescapable. We need some heuristic for eval
by srl 6y ago
It's perfectly fair to complain that these discussions are untestable, at the very least, but unfortunately they're inescapable. We need some heuristic for evaluating which anomalies/patterns are likely to be hints of "new physics" (and are thus worth investing resources in exploring further), and which ones are just coincidence or otherwise not worth investigating.
Anthropic arguments seem to provide a reason to be uninterested in a large class of apparent surprises. Should we invest in investigating those surprises, or not? The discussion may be metaphysical, but the decision has real-world consequences.
- mensetmanusman 6y agoThanks for the comment. I am by no means trying to downplay metaphysical discussions, most lived human experience is in that realm (“what should I wear/eat/do/etc.”), so one could argue it is more important than many scientific/engineering endeavors looking to find new ways to serve advertisements :) I love the discussion of complexity and automata, and I struggle to think how our limited minds will ever work around the problem of unbounded complexity...