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by mr_mitm 477 days ago
Black holes are a prediction of general relativity. The same theory predicts that all properties of spacetime exist up until the singularity. You cannot simultaneously believe in black holes and some sort of discontinuation of spacetime before the singularity.
1 comments

That is a theory that makes predictions, not evidence. As you may note in my comments above, I am speaking exclusively to evidence.
It doesn't make sense to talk about black holes outside the context of GR. What do you even mean by black hole if you can't describe it in the language of GR?
> What do you even mean by black hole if you can't describe it in the language of GR?

You’re right. But playing devil’s advocate, there are QM objects that look like black holes [1] as well as observations of a supermassive object at Sagittarius A*.

[1] https://arxiv.org/html/2307.06164v2

The parts of GR we trust in order to interpret the data from our instruments is trusted precisely because there is evidence to back up those parts of the theory. We have no idea if that theory holds on the other side of a boundary across which no causation can occur.
The data we have about black holes is nothing more than evidence of objects with a size and density which are only consistent with black holes according to GR. Without assuming GR is true, you have only evidence of unusually dense objects, nothing more.
The alignment of certain evidence of certain parts of GR does not necessarily imply the correctness of the parts of GR that are not relevant to the evidence we have access to.