Why can't we recognize that we do not stand at the endpoint of life and science but (hopefully) at one of its many segments, and that maybe not being able to calculate something does not equate its impossibility ?
Why can't we recognize that we do not stand at the endpoint of life and science but (hopefully) at one of its many segments, and that maybe not being able to calculate something does not equate its impossibility ?
It's not a weakness limited to science, believe me...
Today, we have a pretty good understanding of the broad strokes of how nature works (think local energy & momentum, spacetime, quantum mechanics, etc.) Yes, we don't understand everything yet (not by a long shot) but we expect future insights do be compatible with what we've seen and measured so far[0]. In that sense, today's "laws" of nature constrain tomorrow's (updated) "laws" of nature. This is also how the authors arrives at his conclusions.
[0]: Yes, there is no guarantee for that. It could happen that physical laws change wildly from one day to the next. But this is not a particularly interesting direction for a research program, because if you start with that assumption, then anything could happen at any time, and physics as the discipline of trying to understand nature would become a rather pointless endeavor. However, the success of physics at describing nature seems to indicate that we're onto something.
Nobody thinks that science as it stands now is complete or even necessarily correct. All scientific knowledge is always provisional, subject to revision as evidence requires.
Guessing how conservation laws for energy and information applies in a universe with entirely different laws, or whether they should even apply in the first place, appears impossible and this entirely prevents us from guessing whether the SH is possible in such case. For example, hypothetical conscious creatures in the famous Pac-Man video game in the ’80s will just be incapable of figuring out the constraints on the universe in which their reality is being simulated, even based on all the information they can gather around them. They would not guess the existence of gravity, for example, they would probably measure energy costs in ”Power Pellets”, and they would not conceive the existence of a third dimension, or of an expanding space time, and so on. Even if they could ever realise the level of graininess of their reality, and make the correct hypothesis of being living in a simulation, they would never guess how the real universe (”our” Universe, if it is real indeed) function in a physical sense. In this respect, our modelling shows that the SH can be reasonably well tested only with respect to universes which are at least playing according to the Physics play book - while everything else appears beyond the bounds of falsifiability and even theoretical speculation.