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Comment by retina_sam | Hacker News Reader

> sam makes an unwarranted number of assumptions, and as such must be cut away with occam's razor.

I agree with you that the logical thing to do with my answer is to cut it away with Occam's razor, and I don't blame you for it.

However, it should be noted that Occam's razor is a general rule of thumb, not some infallible law.

If you were handed a piece of paper with a high level description of how the universe truly works, would you recognize it as the truth or dismiss it as the ramblings of a lunatic?

If you went back in time even a few hundred years and handed the most brilliant thinkers of the day a piece of paper containing just one paragraph about general relativity, how many of those slips of paper would survive Occam's razor?

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You're missing the fundamental part about empirical testing.

In the slightly paraphrased words of Dara O'Briain: "Science knows it doesn't know everything, but that doesn't mean you can just 'fill in the gaps' with whatever comes to mind". Claiming that we couldn't recognise an advanced description of our world doesn't mean you can then jump in and say "... and so it's this!".

Likewise, if you were to hand Isaac Newton a paragraph explaining general relativity, something beyond his ability to measure even if he could conceptualise it, there would be no point applying Occam's Razor, because it's not describing something he can detect in the first place.

> Likewise, if you were to hand Isaac Newton a paragraph explaining general relativity, something beyond his ability to measure even if he could conceptualise it, there would be no point applying Occam's Razor, because it's not describing something he can detect in the first place.

Right, so either way, the slip of paper doesn't survive.

I'm not claiming my worldview is empirically testable or even verifiable. I just thought it would be fun to write it down in the off chance that it is true, so that people can later amuse themselves in hindsight.

If you were a scientist in the 1600s, and you read in the newspaper in the anonymous comments section that someone thought that "Time slows down the faster your travel. Time and space are two orthogonal dimensions of the same invisible fabric.", wouldn't it be funny for you to later find out that the random stranger that gave you that forgettable, idiotically insane theory in the paper actually somehow had astonishing insight?

But before anyone took relativity seriously, two things happened:

1. A constant speed of light independent of any reference frame turned out to be a logical consequence of the empirically-verified laws of electromagnetism, and

2. Measurements of the speed of light confirmed that it was constant in all reference frames we were capable of measuring.

Where is the corresponding theory and empirical observations to support dualism?

I'm not claiming my worldview is empirically testable or even verifiable

Then why did you say "(don't take my word for it; try it out" ? Isn't that explicitly saying it is both testable and verifiable?

> If you went back in time even a few hundred years and handed the most brilliant thinkers of the day a piece of paper containing just one paragraph about general relativity, how many of those slips of paper would survive Occam's razor?

I'm pretty confident Newton would get it. He could've verified the speed of light against observations of the moons of Jupiter. He knew about some puzzling aspects of magnets, and was theorising about magnetism while working on optics.

Of course, much better than telling people the answer is telling them which threads to pull, which of the many confusing phenomena in the world bears more investigation.

Your perspective is all wrong here. You can't have a high-level description of how the universe works until it is interpreted as such. Thus if someone gave you a piece of paper, their are far more available interpretations than the two you propose. Most likely, you would simply recognize it as something you don't understand. Like say, exactly what most people do when you hand them a book on QFT. They will neither admit it to be true or lunacy, since they do not have the capacity to judge it as either.

If you had a book that explained how the universe worked, it would either have to explain it in a step-by-step fashion in unambiguous language for your specific consumption, or you're inappropriately putting that spin on it entirely by your own volition.

>If you were handed a piece of paper with a high level description of how the universe truly works, would you recognize it as the truth or dismiss it as the ramblings of a lunatic?

Using false equivalence to convince people that your religious beliefs are correct is unscrupulous to say the least. Your arguments do not prove your claims. It would be better to simply claim up front that it takes a certain amount of faith...then proceed with your story.

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