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Comment by kbelder | Hacker News Reader

Presumably it's just a coincidence we are pretty close to the middle?

No, presumably it's about as hard to detect things on ever larger scales as it is on ever smaller scales, so we'd expect to always be approximately in the middle.

There's some interesting discussion of this in Wolfram's "The Concept of the Ruliad" article in his physics project.

https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2021/11/the-concept-of-t...

Is it a coincidence that you are in the middle of your surroundings?

No, they are directly related. All the objects, and measurements, are defined by humans according to human experience.

But the upper and lower limits are not defined by human experience.

Of course they are! Very limited, derivative human experience, in the realm of squinting at numbers coming out of exotic research instruments and theories thereof -- but still human experience.

A being the size of the solar system would not be able to see any farther into the universe than we can with our telescopes, because it's about what light has reached the solar system and not at all about our sense of scale in interpreting it.

Yes, assuming this being is constrained to human senses + technologies. But why would we assume that?

“Creatures” in the Game of Life operate at roughly the level of that automata world’s minimum distance.

Their is no a priori reason we would be in the middle.

It's because we're not that big or small in terms of height and mass. That's why fleas are right in the middle.

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