[Phanteaume]

Why is it a stance accepted in Science to arrive at dramatic conclusions like these and not realise that maybe, we are missing something ? I can't help but imagine how for most of humanity, germs did not exist, black holes did not exist, electricity did not exist, radioactivity did not exist, electrons did not exist...

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 ?

[crazygringo]

Because science is made up of humans and humans like to make dramatic conclusions, because those seem to be more likely to result in attention and promotions and prestige.

It's not a weakness limited to science, believe me...

[codethief]

Mankind didn't know about germs, black holes, electrons, radioactivity, … for a long time but back then no one ever claimed they didn't exist, either. They were simply outside our realm of experience but at the same time there was also nothing in our experience as humans that was really constraining their existence.

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.

[f30e3dfed1c9]

I think you misunderstand what science is and how it works. Everyone understands that we are not just possibly, but in fact certainly, missing not just one something but many things. But until there is actual evidence of those things, they can't be considered.

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.

[pchangr]

Because science is not looking for the absolute truth. Science is one (of many) method of knowledge generation.. which stands upon logic .. given P and Q .. we conclude X. And that will be true even if one day discover that given P and Q and R.. we conclude Y. Science is not interested in asserting statements without constraints.. for that.. you’d be better off with philosophy. And then things can get weird really quickly. Take this conclusion as example “Only universes with very different physical properties can produce some version of this Universe as a simulation” so my take can might as well be .. “oh, so the simulator has different properties”… and someone else might think “oh, so we don’t live in a simulation” and there is no way to know which one is actually true. Because we are just limited to what we know and even more so.. what we can know. So we just affirm based on a certain knowledge that we already have.

[nimih]

I think you're being profoundly uncharitable in that characterization of the author's work here, in that if you read the paper (and, really, even just the abstract), you'll see that they clearly understand the existence of such possibilities, and have simply chosen to limit their investigation to what their area of professional expertise (namely, the physical sciences) can assess with confidence. An illustrative quote from the concluding discussion:

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.

[sambapa]

Because how can you account for those undiscovered phenomena? You can only imagine them, but then you stop making science and start writing sci-fi

[canjobear]

They could just append "according to current scientific knowledge" to every sentence. But it would be a waste of time.