I think that if this post is left as it is this post would be to trivial to be a top level post. You could reframe it as a beginners’ guide to Occam, or you could make it more interesting by going deeper into some of the issues (if you can think of anything more to say on the topic of differentiating between hypotheses that make the same predictions, that might be interesting, although I think you might have said all there is to say)
It could also be framed as an issue of making your beliefs pay rent, similar to the dragon in the garage example—or perhaps as an example of how reality is entangled with itself to such a degree that some questions that seem to carve reality at the joints don’t really do so.
(If falling trees don’t make vibrations when there’s no human-entangled sensor, how do you differentiate a human-entangled sensor from a non-human-entangled sensor? If falling-tree vibrations leave subtle patterns in the surrounding leaf litter that sufficiently-sensitive human-entangled sensors can detect, does leaf litter then count as a human-entangled sensor? How about if certain plants or animals have observably evolved to handle falling-tree vibrations in a certain way, and we can detect that. Then such plants or animals (or their absence, if we’re able to form a strong enough theory of evolution to notice the absence of such reactions where we would expect them) could count as human-entangled sensors well before humans even existed. In that case, is there anything that isn’t a human-entangled sensor?)
Good points in the parenthetical—if I make it into a top-level article, I’ll be sure to include a more thorough discussion of what concept is being carved with the hypothesis that there are no tree vibrations.
There’s also the option of actually extending the post to actually address the problem it alludes to in the title, the so-called “hard problem of consciousness”.
Eh, it was just supposed to be an allusion to that problem, with the implication that the “easy problem of tree vibrations” is the one EY attacked (Question Y in the draft). Solving the hard problem of consciousness is a bit of a tall order for this article...
I think that if this post is left as it is this post would be to trivial to be a top level post. You could reframe it as a beginners’ guide to Occam, or you could make it more interesting by going deeper into some of the issues (if you can think of anything more to say on the topic of differentiating between hypotheses that make the same predictions, that might be interesting, although I think you might have said all there is to say)
It could also be framed as an issue of making your beliefs pay rent, similar to the dragon in the garage example—or perhaps as an example of how reality is entangled with itself to such a degree that some questions that seem to carve reality at the joints don’t really do so.
(If falling trees don’t make vibrations when there’s no human-entangled sensor, how do you differentiate a human-entangled sensor from a non-human-entangled sensor? If falling-tree vibrations leave subtle patterns in the surrounding leaf litter that sufficiently-sensitive human-entangled sensors can detect, does leaf litter then count as a human-entangled sensor? How about if certain plants or animals have observably evolved to handle falling-tree vibrations in a certain way, and we can detect that. Then such plants or animals (or their absence, if we’re able to form a strong enough theory of evolution to notice the absence of such reactions where we would expect them) could count as human-entangled sensors well before humans even existed. In that case, is there anything that isn’t a human-entangled sensor?)
Good points in the parenthetical—if I make it into a top-level article, I’ll be sure to include a more thorough discussion of what concept is being carved with the hypothesis that there are no tree vibrations.
There’s also the option of actually extending the post to actually address the problem it alludes to in the title, the so-called “hard problem of consciousness”.
Eh, it was just supposed to be an allusion to that problem, with the implication that the “easy problem of tree vibrations” is the one EY attacked (Question Y in the draft). Solving the hard problem of consciousness is a bit of a tall order for this article...