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Comment by talove | Hacker News Reader

Ya but we do know the universe exists without any fucking clue how or why. So, it seems fine to let your mind wander a bit.

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Of course, that's an important feature of the way we relate to the world, but that doesn't make whatever we imagine likely or probable as claimed.

That's a sensible position. However, the GP's remark first asserts that our understanding of physical reality is incomplete, which is not unreasonable given that we have not yet reconciled classical and quantum physics. Further, quantum weirdness has strongly underlined the inadequacy of our intuitive perception of 'reality'; it entirely confounds it. It is possible that spatial expanse (distance), for example, is a secondary order phenomena and a side-effect of our being sentient at this scale of things. Bell [1] actually remarked that in his view the reason Einstein resisted the Bohr model was that he was "very much attached to space-time".

[1]: https://youtu.be/BFvJOZ51tmc?t=222

And it's also possible that resolving the issues between relativity and quantum mechanics will have no implications relevant to FTL and such. In fact there's no particular reason to expect that it would. So we're back to just flat out speculation.

That's fine by itself, I love speculation, but that doesn't make this or that probable. It's the extending such speculation to making high confidence definitive statements, as though something's been demonstrated or proved likely, that I'm objecting to.

Yes, but it is not unreasonable speculation. Speculation is not without value.

> but that doesn't make this or that probable.

Of course, that's a given.

Cool , we're in agreement, but it wasn't a given in the comment I was originally replying to which made very strong claims about what is probable.

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