>I mean that you have no benchmark to evaluate the relative metric of how stuck we get. Well I only just posed the idea, and a lot would depend on working out

>I mean that you have no benchmark to evaluate the relative metric of how stuck we get. Well I only just posed the idea, and a lot would depend on working out what the terms mean. Of course it's difficult to reason in cases with vague terms. Where I part with you is in the conclusion you draw from the vagueness. You rattle off a string of questions, to each of which my response would be along the lines of "good question! How we answer that depends on XYZ, I think this is more likely, this is less likely. In this case you do this, in that case you do this other thing, etc." For me, those kinds of questions are prompts that allow you continue a constructive conversation in a spirit of good faith and intellectual curiosity. It's the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without necessarily accepting it, and all that. But you don't seem to want to have the questions engaged with or answered so much as you want to use them in a performative expression of helplessness to show that the whole exercise is doomed. To me that's skipping about 3, 4, or 5 steps in the middle. >Considering that physicists themselves lack consensus on the question, I don't see how one physicist's philosophical musing on the topic can be taken as more than (currently) unprovable speculation. Again, you're chasing ghosts. Before you said "how do you know that we aren't prone to getting stuck?" when I had never suggested we are not prone to getting stuck. Now you're saying can't "be taken as more than (currently) unprovable speculation." I agree! It is speculative. Where is this disconnect between what I'm saying and what you're responding to coming from?