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Comment by xandrius | Hacker News Reader

Ok, now I see what you are going for.

It's a compelling idea but there is no evidence helping it.

For me, it's easier to take what we see in our own "lawn" and expand it outwards to the cosmos as a whole. A frog evolved from a single-cell as well as an elephant did, and the geological landscapes we see are the result of physics, time and random fluctuations. I apply that to every other galaxy and that's it.

Of course, one could think that single cell to be "planted" like a seed would be but no supporting evidence for now (or ever?).

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No evidence helping it? Not a single thing that’s ever happened supports the idea that our current reality was constructed?

> For me, it's easier to take what we see in our own "lawn" and expand it outwards to the cosmos as a whole.

The uncomfortable thing about reality is that it’s often different from what is easier for us.

What you choose to expand out into the galaxy or even the entire universe is a critical choice. You could choose to extend the relationships between plants, or how power structures develop, or the explosion of complexity localized on Earth, or the human tendency to purposefully create environments for life.

> the geological landscapes we see are the result of physics, time and random fluctuations

Most of them. Not all of them. Bingham Canyon Mine is an open pit 4km wide and 1.2km deep. El Teniente mine is 3,000km of tunnels up to 2km deep. There’s Mount Rushmore and the Hoover Dam. There are artificial islands and nuclear test sites.

That’s all just in the last 150 years. Draw the trend of human progress and where does it end up a billion years from now?

That’s even just assuming the conditions that created the universe mirror the conditions here on Earth, which is a tremendous assumption. It might be like having a letter dropped through your door slot for the first time and reasoning the postal service is entirely made of paper folded and stuffed into other paper. The actual reality of mail carriers with pensions, trucks with antilock breaks and sorting machines bigger than any animal that has ever existed would be unfathomable. Anyone suggesting it would be easily dismissed in favor of a simpler and less correct explanation.

> No evidence helping it? Not a single thing that’s ever happened supports the idea that our current reality was constructed?

I'm curious. What evidence do you see?

Mostly things that exist without other concrete explanations. Consciousness in humans and animals. A lack of contact with other intelligent life. The constants of the universe being such that the universe can exist at all and not do something like collapse on itself.

The common report of having met non-human entities, especially when on psychedelics.

Our own tendency to creat artificial worlds (farms, zoos) and simulations.

None of it proves anything or necessarily moves towards a constructed reality versus a specific alternative.

I understand you're not saying this is a proof of anything.

However, I have a hard time understanding the connection between those things you list and "... and therefore this may be evidence of a constructed universe."

I just don't see it. For example, things "without concrete explanations" are more easily chalked to our lack of understanding. Or even better, to the idea that there's no "why" to the universe, it just is; we can sometimes understand the "how" to some degree, if at all.

I think some emergent properties like consciousness and others are elegantly hypothesized about in Stephen Jay Gould's "The Panda's Thumb". Some things arise as secondary structures to other things which more readily relate to the environment. Like some hypothesize -- mind you, not interested in whether this specific hypothesis is right or wrong, just an example -- that walking upright/hip posture may have precipitated the evolution of mammalian brain cortex as a side effect!

I don't want to pick on or challenge your every sentence, because I understand this is just opinion and we're all entitled to it. But I really don't see where's the evidence for a constructed universe.

If there were highly advanced beings that constructed the universe, and designed it to obfuscate that very fact, what would evidence of that look like?

If they are perfect at hiding their hand, we wouldn't be able to tell.

But that kind of thinking is akin to solipsism, a mental dead end. What if you're the only real person and the rest is simulated or a dream? Would you be able to tell?

What if god left all those dinosaur fossils as a joke, and big dinos never really existed? Well, it's possible, but it's a thought-terminating idea, so best not considered.

But you’re the one doing the thought terminating. These things don’t have to be a dead-end.

What if it wasn’t perfectly obfuscated? Is there any evidence at all you’d consider to be in favor of the world being not as it first appears? Not something that’s way more easily explained otherwise, like fossils.

There are things that come to mind for me. One is the brain’s ability to experience hypergeometry and additional dimensions on psychedelics. I don’t see how a brain that has the capability of being enhanced in that way happens through evolution alone. I don’t think geometry scales in the way that running does, for example.

Similarly is are the many cases of people experiencing beings outside of consensus reality. People see people talking to them clear as day, that no one else sees. You can write this off as either a drug-induced hallucination or mental illness, but that’s deciding the cause a priori. It’s circular reasoning.

Without getting into the details of hallucinations and experiences you mention: how is anything of that even weak evidence of a constructed reality?

> I don’t see how a brain that has the capability of being enhanced in that way happens through evolution alone

Regardless, it's exactly how evolution works. Evolution allows for irrelevant and harmless traits with no purpose to exist. It even allows for somewhat harmful traits to exist, as long as they are balanced by a competitive advantage they piggyback on (e.g. what if hallucinations and listening to voices are a side effect of creativity and imagination?).

What would a constructed universe look like? I dunno. I would like to see contradicting evidence and timelines, maybe even obvious "coverups", maybe if a hyperadvanced civilization appeared across the whole globe (no secrecy) saying "hey it was us!" (but maybe they'd be lying, so who knows).

Skepticism is one of our most important tools. It tells us to triple check any extraordinary evidence and rule out all possible natural/ordinary explanations first.

You would have to pass a pretty high bar to consider a constructed universe... and remember, it would have to be strong evidence, because like you objected, "well God/Genuine faked all the fossils" is uninteresting.

I didn't say they are perfect, I asked what do you think evidence of that would look like.

I don't know how to answer the question.

Possibly timespans for interesting things to happen would be way shorter (compared to sentient animal lifespans). Less wasted time. Fewer deadends. No/fewer extinction events (possibly, or maybe our aliens designers like seeing stuff die or explode like with do playing SimCity?).

Things would make more obvious sense. There would be fewer contradictions. The purpose of life would be clearer, since it was designed. The physics and "rules" of the universe would have fewer special cases and would be easier to model. There would be no paradoxes. We would be able to explore the whole universe more easily.

I'm sure you can think of objections to each of my arguments, but really, some evidence would be there. Everything currently and firmly points the opposite way, except we don't know what happened before the Big Bang... but that's "pink invisible unicorns" stuff which I don't think we will be able to ever answer conclusively.

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