AdeleneDawner comments on Open Thread June 2010, Part 2 - Less Wrong

7 Post author: komponisto 07 June 2010 08:37AM

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Comment author: AdeleneDawner 13 June 2010 05:41:53AM 3 points [-]

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?)

Comment author: SilasBarta 13 June 2010 07:17:37PM 3 points [-]

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.