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There’s nothing here to say it wasn’t. Further, how can you be sure the universe wasn’t created as it appeared last Thursday and everything since has simply bee

by jakear 6y ago

There’s nothing here to say it wasn’t. Further, how can you be sure the universe wasn’t created as it appeared last Thursday and everything since has simply been some higher dimension’s cellular automata set up with that as its initial state and an update algorithm encoding what we call “physics”? The fact of the matter is that the existential question cannot be answered with any degree of certainty, so to accept any single explanation as truth while ridiculing valid competitors (all that cannot be disproven) is a close minded approach.

29athrowaway 6y ago
You could claim we are living in a simulation and our current reality was created yesterday from a backup but that's purely speculation. There are alternatives to speculation: science. That is what I prefer.
webmaven 6y ago
> There’s nothing here to say it wasn’t. Further, how can you be sure the universe wasn’t created as it appeared last Thursday and everything since has simply been some higher dimension’s cellular automata set up with that as its initial state and an update algorithm encoding what we call “physics”? > The fact of the matter is that the existential question cannot be answered with any degree of certainty, so to accept any single explanation as truth while ridiculing valid competitors (all that cannot be disproven) is a close minded approach. I also cannot be sure that reality exists at all, I could be imagining everything, including the mobile phone I am entering this reply into, the HN site, and the notional user that closed the comment I am replying to. Cogito ergo sum, but everything else is negotiable (possibly only with myself). There are any number of variants, including Matrix-like scenarios where some or all people are brains-in-a-jar, simulated, or meat-puppets, and most of them are unfalsifiable. Reproducible empirical evidence is, ultimately, the tool we have to work with, which as far as I can tell, seems to have brought us pretty far already (YMMV, assuming that "Y" even exists), and I'm not going to discard it based on an argument that is basically aaequivalent to "The fossil record could have been created by God to test our faith" (or "The fossil record could have been created by the Devil to lead us astray", pick your poison). Assuming anything other than that reality exists and can be meaningfully investigated with the tools at our disposal doesn't lead anywhere useful (or for that matter, interesting). We don't have to be certain of this proposition, we just have to be certain that it is falsifiable (all it would take would be one glimpse behind the curtain) and that the unfalsifiable alternatives are pointless wanking almost by definition.

by jakear 6y ago

29athrowaway 6y ago

You could claim we are living in a simulation and our current reality was created yesterday from a backup but that's purely speculation. There are alternatives to speculation: science. That is what I prefer.

webmaven 6y ago

> There’s nothing here to say it wasn’t. Further, how can you be sure the universe wasn’t created as it appeared last Thursday and everything since has simply been some higher dimension’s cellular automata set up with that as its initial state and an update algorithm encoding what we call “physics”? > The fact of the matter is that the existential question cannot be answered with any degree of certainty, so to accept any single explanation as truth while ridiculing valid competitors (all that cannot be disproven) is a close minded approach. I also cannot be sure that reality exists at all, I could be imagining everything, including the mobile phone I am entering this reply into, the HN site, and the notional user that closed the comment I am replying to. Cogito ergo sum, but everything else is negotiable (possibly only with myself). There are any number of variants, including Matrix-like scenarios where some or all people are brains-in-a-jar, simulated, or meat-puppets, and most of them are unfalsifiable. Reproducible empirical evidence is, ultimately, the tool we have to work with, which as far as I can tell, seems to have brought us pretty far already (YMMV, assuming that "Y" even exists), and I'm not going to discard it based on an argument that is basically aaequivalent to "The fossil record could have been created by God to test our faith" (or "The fossil record could have been created by the Devil to lead us astray", pick your poison). Assuming anything other than that reality exists and can be meaningfully investigated with the tools at our disposal doesn't lead anywhere useful (or for that matter, interesting). We don't have to be certain of this proposition, we just have to be certain that it is falsifiable (all it would take would be one glimpse behind the curtain) and that the unfalsifiable alternatives are pointless wanking almost by definition.