Like how would I know if the world was more absorber-y or more sensitive to small changes?
I’m not sure; that’s a pretty interesting question.
Here’s a tentative idea: using the evolution of brains, we can conclude that whatever sensitivity the world has to small changes, it can’t show up *too* quickly. You could imagine a totally chaotic world, where the whole state at time t+(1 second) is radically different depending on minute variations in the state at time t. Building models of such a world that were useful on 1 second timescales would be impossible. But brains are devices for modelling the world that are useful on 1 second timescales. Brains evolved; hence they conferred some evolutionary advantage. Hence we don’t live in this totally chaotic world; the world must be less chaotic than that.
It seems like this argument gets less strong the longer your timescales are, as our brains perhaps faced less evolutionary pressure to be good at prediction on timescales of like 1 year, and still less to be good at prediction on timescales of 100 years. But I’m not sure; I’d like to think about this more.
I’m not sure; that’s a pretty interesting question.
Here’s a tentative idea: using the evolution of brains, we can conclude that whatever sensitivity the world has to small changes, it can’t show up *too* quickly. You could imagine a totally chaotic world, where the whole state at time t+(1 second) is radically different depending on minute variations in the state at time t. Building models of such a world that were useful on 1 second timescales would be impossible. But brains are devices for modelling the world that are useful on 1 second timescales. Brains evolved; hence they conferred some evolutionary advantage. Hence we don’t live in this totally chaotic world; the world must be less chaotic than that.
It seems like this argument gets less strong the longer your timescales are, as our brains perhaps faced less evolutionary pressure to be good at prediction on timescales of like 1 year, and still less to be good at prediction on timescales of 100 years. But I’m not sure; I’d like to think about this more.