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This strikes me as equivalent to researchers hundreds of years ago saying "well if our universe is a clockwork simulation then we should be able to detect the gears turning by this method".

Certainly interesting ... I'm not sure that we could currently understand a single principle of a system capable of simulating our universe.




Well yes, it is equivalent. And they looked more and more carefully, and never found tiny clockwork gears, so that was not supported by the evidence.

What they did find were abstract, mechanical laws of physics.


A more apt analogy would have been testing for a specific number of gears with a specific number of teeth in a specific configuration. Choosing very specific hypotheses purely based on your ability to falsify it and no other supporting theory or evidence seems like a low reward strategy.

I'm certainly not trying to argue against pure research in any way.




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