| HN Mirror

> Can you help me design experiments to prove the following?

Sure.

> * Simpler theories, with equal explanatory and predictive power, are preferable

You don't need an experiment for this. A more complicated theory is undesirable, all else being equal, because it requires more effort to deal with. A simpler theory will let you avoid that wasted effort.

> * I'm not dreaming

Any experiment will do here. You can't perform experiments in dreams. That is one of the things that distinguishes dreams from reality.

> and there's no evil demon deceiving me

You can never prove that. You might be living in the Matrix, and the Matrix could be controlled by an evil demon. That possibility can never be completely eliminated. However, there is no evidence for it, and so neither the matrix nor evil demons are needed to explain observations, and so they can be discounted for that reason. In other words, the Matrix or evil-demon hypotheses have no predictive power.

> * The next swan will be white because all prior swans I've observed are

That's a false assertion so you can't design an experiment to prove it. Science does not rely on induction.

> * Technology acts as a context of justification for scientific propositions, and proves its efficacy

Do you have a better explanation for how technology comes to exist that is consistent with all the data?

> * Experiment is the ultimate arbiter of truth

Again, that is not a provable assertion. That is a heuristic that empirically produces better results than any other criterion that humans have come up with so far.

There is actually reason to believe that it can't be improved upon, just as there is reason to believe that an oracle for the halting problem can't be constructed in our universe. But you can't prove it.