How should one distinguish between cases where his response is legitimate and cases where it is not? Obviously it's fine in some cases, but to me this doesn't seem like a legitimate usage. I have no idea why the symmetry of time would be relevant to his overall point, but I think that's mostly the fault of his comment and not the fault of a lack of knowledge on my part.

I've read technical explanations of things that still make sense to me despite unfamiliarity with the underlying reading material. However, his comment specifically is impenetrable because it's basically a bullet list of big words without reference to the underlying concepts, or attempts to justify those concepts, or explanations of their interactions, or an explanation of the ultimate underlying conclusion. Hypothetically, these big words might be a great argument that I would understand if only I had more physics knowledge, but why should I believe that? How is his post responsive to my point?

His comment, despite its verbosity, was something I could roughly follow, and from what I understand of it he was overcomplicating the issue. He broke down the initial argument into smaller and more technical responses, without actually addressing the points I was making. Going into the specific mechanisms of the way the universe works doesn't refute the basic argument I've made about how existence without interaction is a wholly abstract concept that can never pay rent, nor does it refute the argument I've made about how the problem of induction applies here. It also fails to refute the more general assumption connecting the two arguments which is that difficult and possibly unsolvable logical problems shouldn't be discarded or ignored unless there's some kind of pragmatic reward for doing so.

Given that, his comment still seems worthless and pedantic to me; it seems like he's trying to rehearse the evidence, except that the evidence he's rehearsing isn't really even relevant to what I'm saying; it also might be that he was intentionally trying to be confusing and hoping I believed that Scientific Terminology is Magically True, or that I was too intimidated to continue. It's not that I find anything he did suspicious in itself, but given each specific questionable action in the context of all of the others, a general pattern emerges that I don't like.

The reason I asked for him to explain his terminology wasn't an attempt to ignore his argument, and I'm a bit annoyed that you claim that. It was because I didn't think he really had made a new argument, but I was trying to be charitable and give him a chance to explain whatever new ideas he might have failed to get across, and a large reason for this charity is because I'm usually reluctant to challenge claims that I don't understand. Having asked for an explanation, and received none, I feel more confident that I'm right and that his comment didn't add anything to this discussion.

He believes that we should extrapolate from our current experiences towards belief in things which we will never experience, and I think my arguments are responsive to that general point because they contest the underlying assumptions of his argument, on both a pragmatic level (why does it matter?) and on a logical level (how do you justify extrapolating these concepts?). I've already explained this elsewhere; no one has yet addressed those points, but I continue to receive lots of bad karma and people continue to repeat the same refrain instead of engaging in some actual clash. This is annoying.