It’s rare to see someone with the prerequisites for understanding the arguments (e.g. AIT and metamathematics) trying to push back on this
My view is probably different from Cole’s, but it has struck me that the universe seems to have a richer mathematical structure than one might expect given a generic AIT-ish view(e.g. continuous space/time, quantum mechanics, diffeomorphism invariance/gauge invariance), so we should perhaps update that the space of mathematical structures instantiating life/sentience might be narrower than it initially appears(that is, if “generic” mathematical structures support life/agency, we should expect ourselves to be in a generic universe, but instead we seem to be in a richly structured universe, so this is an update that maybe we can only be in a rich/structured universe[or that life/agency is just much more likely to arise in such a universe]). Taken to an extreme, perhaps it’s possible to derive a priori that the universe has to look like the standard model. (Of course, you could run the standard model on a Turing machine, so the statement would have to be about how the universe relates/appears to agents inhabiting it, not its ultimate ontology which is inaccessible since any Turing-complete structure can simulate any other)
My view is probably different from Cole’s, but it has struck me that the universe seems to have a richer mathematical structure than one might expect given a generic AIT-ish view(e.g. continuous space/time, quantum mechanics, diffeomorphism invariance/gauge invariance), so we should perhaps update that the space of mathematical structures instantiating life/sentience might be narrower than it initially appears(that is, if “generic” mathematical structures support life/agency, we should expect ourselves to be in a generic universe, but instead we seem to be in a richly structured universe, so this is an update that maybe we can only be in a rich/structured universe[or that life/agency is just much more likely to arise in such a universe]). Taken to an extreme, perhaps it’s possible to derive a priori that the universe has to look like the standard model. (Of course, you could run the standard model on a Turing machine, so the statement would have to be about how the universe relates/appears to agents inhabiting it, not its ultimate ontology which is inaccessible since any Turing-complete structure can simulate any other)
Yes.
For the interested reader, this line of reasoning is what @Vanessa Kosoy calls metacosmology.
It’s also what ultimately underlies Christiano’s malign Solomonoff prior argument.