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Because "materialistic" means observable, falsifiable, testable, quantifiable, connected to the unbroken chain of cause and effect. Previous loops of an infinite loop universe are not part of that unbroken chain, cannot be observed, tested, quantified, or falsified in any way.
If you cannot access the basement universe, you have no evidence of anything about it at all. If you could access it, and its physics didn't present a break in cause and effect, that would be evidence for materialism. But if it had the same physics we do, it has the same break in cause and effect that we do, hence the same problem. You are of course free to posit that the other side of the break in cause and effect is just more Materialism, but such a claim has equal evidentiary support as belief in God or the Karmic wheel, which is to say, none. You have to take it on faith, axiomatically, because the break itself gives you zero evidence to support such a thesis. In fact, if the other side were identical to this side, one wonders how the break could exist at all.
And I can argue that the "true" laws of physics consist of the ontological necessity of God, but I wouldn't expect that to persuade you. Likewise, you should not expect unfalsifiable claims of a "true" physics that you can neither describe nor test to be persuasive to those who do not choose to be persuaded.
The fact remains that you do not believe in such a "true physics" because evidence has compelled you to do so, because that evidence does not exist. You believe in such a "true physics" because your axioms, if true, necessarily imply that they must exist, even if you cannot see them. Your axioms are supported by evidence you do have; they are not idle fancy. But being axioms, they are chosen, not forced. You believe what you have chosen to believe, and you interpret and weight evidence from the perspective of that choice. Axiomatic certainty has little persuasive value to those who do not share the axioms.
Indeed not, but neither is it knowledge. I can claim that we each will have perfect knowledge of God, eventually. You could reasonably reply that you will believe in God when you see him, and not before. I can argue the same about "true physics" for the same reason.
The fact that we can't observe or test how the support structure got here is the entire problem under discussion.
And yet I am confident that neither you nor anyone else can actually produce a rigorous algorithm for any of the non-material unfalsifiable concepts discussed above, of the sort needed to actually perform a comparative test of Kolmogorov complexity. If you could access these things, they would by definition be observable. If there were observables that provided answers to these questions, we would have mapped the clockwork as we intended, and there would be no need to go fishing in such dark waters for answers to the unanswerable. To use Kolmogorov complexity as evidence, you need to actually run the numbers, and I'm pretty sure you can't, because they don't exist.
Unless you have falsifiable evidence for how the Big Bang could cause itself, Materialism demands it have a cause. God is no more complex a cause than "true physics" causing a looping universe or any other unobservable, unfalsifiable hard break in the chain of causality. If God could be demonstrated rigorously to be more complex, that would be an argument against it being the simplest solution, though I'd be interested to see whether Boltzmann brains, solipsism or simple denialism come out simpler still. But again, I see no reason to believe that you or anyone else can write rigorous algorithms for things that are fundamentally unknown and unknowable.
I'm agnostic on abiogenesis, as I'm not aware of it being demonstrated in the strong sense, but it seems plausible enough. Evolution, sure. And likewise, certainly there are a number of Christians who deny either/both. I disagree with them, but on the other hand, there are a number of Atheists who have believed "Science" that was entirely fictional, so it seems to me that it more or less balances out. People, generally, often believe things that are demonstrably not true for a variety of reasons. All we can do is attempt to minimize this tendency.
In what way? It can't be in explanatory value if its explanations are shared by its opponents, and the disagreements are over things it can't actually explain. One might argue that it is unsporting of people like myself to accept science that can actually be demonstrated, while not accepting "science" that cannot, and limiting my speculations to areas where speculation seems to be both the only option available and also warranted by the evidence at hand. Yet why should I do otherwise?
There are arguments that could convince me: close the loop on physics, resolve the contradictions, demonstrate Determinism of the brain. Scientists believed they'd do these things for hundreds of years. Maybe they'll do it still. Maybe AGI will bust the whole business wide open. And yet, until the evidence can actually be observed, science itself demands that results be demonstrated, that claims be testable, that we keep a clear delineation between what can be proven and what has merely been asserted. That demand must come before the preference for Materialism.
Were you to be convinced that Kolmogorov complexity cannot be meaningfully applied in the way you suggest above, would that change your conclusions? In any case, "better" is a value statement. Better how?
Then explain what caused it. This is the basic method of science. Claims must be tested. You don't get credit for an explanation if you can't show your work.
All this is rather missing the point, though, because my argument is not that Materialism is disprovable. My point is that Materialism is axiomatic, and that like all axioms it is chosen, and that this fact can be trivially demonstrated by backtracking to the point at which evidence terminates at the chosen axiom, itself unsupported.
I think you're adding more to the concept of "materialism" than it strictly/necessarily implies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materialism
(I am using it interchangeably with physicalism, since I obviously know that energy and fields exist and not "just" matter.)
I do not see where any of your objectioms come into the picture as an indictment of materialism itself.
At most, you're bringing up notions of falsifiability in the Popperian sense, but that is strictly inferior to Bayesianism, where 1 and 0 are not valid probabilities, it's impossible to actually prove or disprove any hypothesis, at most you can get arbitrarily close (or assume them as your starting prior, in other words an axiom, which no amount of evidence will budge).
So the fact that we can't be perfectly sure of what's going on in potential previous universes or even the Basement of the Simulation is a quantitative and not qualitative failing. Since literally nothing else you didn't start out as holding axiomatic can meet the same standard, what of it? I can see where the bulk of the probability mass lies.
But I am compelled to believe so. The overwhelming trend for millennia has been that our best model of the laws of physics explains a wider and wider set of phenomena, to the point that outside particularly exotic situations like black holes, extremely high or low temperatures, or at the Big Bang, most of physics is solved, the equations predict mechanics to well within the limits of your sensors and computational hardware for simulating it. Not even the enormous amount of dark matter and energy out there even remotely comes close in terms of causal influence as a star a dozen lightyears away does through the tenuous tug of its gravity.
It is not complete, but it's inching ever closer, and we're busy trying to tease out 0.00000001% divergences between reality and our predictions to find the errors. Try doing that with a Bible.
Besides, there could potentially not be just one "true physics" but a family of equivalent models that produce the are isomorphic to each other and produce equivalent results, while being technically distinct. This is just a minor quibble, if I'm to be exacting.
Believe it or not, not even I claim that adopting Atheism makes you infallible when it comes to matters of fact. At best, it makes you less wrong (ever wonder why the biggest collection of rats don't fall themselves "100% Guaranteed Correct.com"?), and at least here, they're avoiding a glaring and unforgivable form of being wrong.
It doesn't remotely balance out.
Bayesianism is a strict superset of "Science". It allows me to observe the distribution of the numbers produced by a die and see it's glaringly lopsided, and then to take the money of anyone who loudly claims that we must studiously pretend that it's balanced since we don't know for sure what the exact odds are.
As I've kept on saying, the balance of probability is nowhere close to evenly split. Materialism/physicalism is overwhelmingly likely to be correct, even more so if you compare it to religion. Since you can't have perfect credence without starting with it, better take what you can get.
On the matter of falsifiability, on a scale much smaller than deriving a GUT or solving the Hard Problem, if someone was to train an AGI on solely known physics/empirical observations of reality and it started espousing the Jude-Christian God (all references being scrubbed from the training set), I will happily do an about face, at least if you can convince me there isn't any data contamination or other forms of tampering involved.
Religion as you see it, while hardly the worst strain around, is still a pernicious distortion of your memeplex and epistemic rationality. There's no way in hell an independent, intelligent entity without the same biological failure modes as humans would come to the same conclusions as you do, I'll bet on it.
Sure? It would change how confident I am in said conclusions, at the very least. And not to just a tiny degree either.
Once again, as I've said so many times, by the standards of Occam's Razor (itself a consequence of Bayesianism when you have two hypothesis, of different levels of complexity, that do the same job of predicting the data, leaving aside that in this case they are hilariously lopsided), and from constraining of expectations.
To the extent it's a value judgement, it's an unavoidable one.
Trust me, not veering off a cliff is sufficient reason for me to feel like I'm being more sane even if I don't know where the road ends. I'm no physicist, I merely have justified confidence that nobody is doing a better job than they are.
Besides, cause and effect become very confusing at that level, if you think Kolmogorov complexity is a headache, you haven't seen nothing yet. All directed acyclic graphs and complicated causal boundaries while throwing even the concept of objective time to the wind. But the maths works, I'll do better at understanding it when someone finds a way to lend me about 20 more IQ points. In the meantime, I am content with my confidence that I'm on the correct team, even if we're still hashing out the finer rules and tiebreakers of the sport.
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