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Kawoomba comments on My Wild and Reckless Youth - Less Wrong
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Oh, thank you, Gwern! Ok, so retrodiction is more like this: There are facts that we currently know and phenomena that have already happened so you should consider whether your theory would have predicted them. It's not "did something related precede this" but "If we had known this theory before realizing certain facts or making certain observations, would the theory have predicted or explained these?"
Hmm for examples... if there were an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving God, what would I predict? If life on earth evolved, what would I predict?
What would God do? Make something awesome or lounge around feeling enlightened. I'm personifying here, and I know it... I have no idea what a God would do but I suspect that it would not be "Make a bunch of creatures knowing that a bunch of them will experience horrible suffering. Demand that they have faith but confuse them with a bunch of different religions to choose from. Create each of them knowing exactly how they'll reason and what they'll experience and what that combination will result in and demand certain beliefs that won't make sense to some of them."
Whereas with evolution, I'd predict that various life forms would evolve, some would succeed, some would not, life would be more like a chaotic experiment than a harmonious symphony, the smartest life forms would be dreadfully confused for quite some time before having it together...
And this sounds like earth.
I would expect most life to just end up as planets full of green goo (ie. like grey goo but natural). But I'd expect that in a tiny minority of cases things like Fisherian Runaway, complex signalling and just plain luck happen to throw some individual toward the 'general intelligence' path (and a bunch of other deal breaking to not happen on the way). I'd expect any intelligent agents to observe that they are on a planet, in a galaxy in an Everett Branch where life had evolved much like you said.
I disagree. The incentivising force for continued adaptation is changes in your environment (including your fellow other species). Static goo - or uniformly adapting goo - cannot be optimal for all of a planet at once, leaving room to be outcompeted by diversifying dark-green goo, which may eventually evolve into goo-man (I mean, hu-man):
A planet filled with homogeneous green goo would still be subject to offering advantages based on adaptation on two major axes:
1) Planets universally offer different conditions for habitats, pole temperature versus equatorial temperature, seismic activities on active planets, surface versus underground habitats. The green goo would eventually split off into various types, each best suited to the environment. There is no such thing as an "optimal green goo for every environment", optimal refers to a specific set of conditions. Some tasks are hard for single-celled organisms to fulfill, which is probably why the uniform green goo that life developed as on earth diversified while spreading, and that bacteria, while ubiquitous, still aren't considered the dominant life form.
2) As a hypothetical, even a planet transformed into a uniform green goo blob in space would be an environment in itself, allowing for niches for different forms of life (as long as there's still some entropy to waste i.e. a mechanism for mutation). For a crude comparison, think of lava as goo on a different time scale.
Lastly, if you allow certain variations in your green goo, you could well argue that earth as it is now is an amalgam of various sorts of green goo - us. Especially from the vantage point of our basic goo unit - the gene. See the goo now?
(To me, the curious thing isn't the eventual appearance of memetic-temetic based adaptability (intelligence), but of subjective experience to go with it. Good fiction novel on that: Peter Watts’ Blindsight.)