(See my other comments for what I meant by probability)
I don’t know much about dark matter and energy, but I’d say they’re relatively much less challenging cases. I take it that whether they exist or not should already affect the world in observable ways, and also that we don’t have fundamental reasons to expect we could never get more “direct observations” of their existence? I could be wrong about that, but if that’s right, then that’s just something in the massive category of “Things that are very hard to get evidence about”, rather than “Things that might, by their very nature, never provide any evidence of their existence or lack of existence.” I’d say that’s way closer to the AGI case than to the “a god that will literally never interact with the natural world in any way” case. So it seems pretty clear to me that it can be handled with something like regular methods.
My intention was to find a particularly challenging case for arriving at, and making sense of, subjective probabilities, so I wanted to build up to claims where whether they’re true or not would never have any impact at all on the world. (And this just happens to end up involving things like religion and magic—it’s not that I wanted to cover a hot button topic on purpose, or debate religion, but rather I wanted to debate how to arrive at and make sense of probabilities in challenging cases.)
(See my other comments for what I meant by probability)
I don’t know much about dark matter and energy, but I’d say they’re relatively much less challenging cases. I take it that whether they exist or not should already affect the world in observable ways, and also that we don’t have fundamental reasons to expect we could never get more “direct observations” of their existence? I could be wrong about that, but if that’s right, then that’s just something in the massive category of “Things that are very hard to get evidence about”, rather than “Things that might, by their very nature, never provide any evidence of their existence or lack of existence.” I’d say that’s way closer to the AGI case than to the “a god that will literally never interact with the natural world in any way” case. So it seems pretty clear to me that it can be handled with something like regular methods.
My intention was to find a particularly challenging case for arriving at, and making sense of, subjective probabilities, so I wanted to build up to claims where whether they’re true or not would never have any impact at all on the world. (And this just happens to end up involving things like religion and magic—it’s not that I wanted to cover a hot button topic on purpose, or debate religion, but rather I wanted to debate how to arrive at and make sense of probabilities in challenging cases.)