Careful not to fall prey to the Sorites Paradox—where exactly is the line between insufficient and sufficient evidence to form a hypothesis?
Sufficient evidence to promote and think more about a hypothesis (we weren’t talking about “forming” before) is when the expected value of so promoting and thinking is positive. So for example, I wouldn’t spend much philosophical speculation on the idea that the universe is actually running on a really big computer with the operating system Windows XP. It’s possible, it has lots of nice properties, but it’s simply not worth the energy of even writing a blog post about.
But yeah, sure, if by “like the game of life” you meant “any system that’s local and discrete in space and time,” then that’s an nigh-infinitely bigger chunk of hypothesis-space, and I won’t knock it.
Sufficient evidence to promote and think more about a hypothesis (we weren’t talking about “forming” before) is when the expected value of so promoting and thinking is positive. So for example, I wouldn’t spend much philosophical speculation on the idea that the universe is actually running on a really big computer with the operating system Windows XP. It’s possible, it has lots of nice properties, but it’s simply not worth the energy of even writing a blog post about.
But yeah, sure, if by “like the game of life” you meant “any system that’s local and discrete in space and time,” then that’s an nigh-infinitely bigger chunk of hypothesis-space, and I won’t knock it.