>>With the nice quirk that they don't offer anything that could be proven, at least for the time being. It's more of a mental experiment, so far.
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>Proven is, I understand it, a dirty word in science.

Sorry, I'm just a mathematician by origin, and we're full of foul language, Q.E.D.

>If string theories predictions match quantum and relativistic phenomena, then one would be justified in saying it is a better theory than QM or GR, because neither one can do that individually and together there are incompatibilities.
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>The reason some people are skeptical of string theory (I am, but for different reasons) is because they say it makes no new predictions.
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>New predictions are usually a home run, total knock out. But meeting all the old predictions with a single theory is still worth the win.

Well, out of the four or five flavors of string theory, is there one which meets them?

>>Ah, but this simulated person would observe the nature of simulated universe - but are we sure that the behavior of the universe would truly reflect the nature of the outside universe, if the behavior of simulated particles composing it is simulated to the best of experimenters' limited knowledge?
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>How would we know whether or model, that makes accurate predictions about nature, is truly reflecting nature or just a useful approximation?
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>We wouldn't.
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>This is why "proven" is a dirty word. Newtonian mechanics was "proven" over and over and over, until we started seeing its limits.

Good enough for me - this is not mathematics, this is physics. The proof needs only to meet the existing observations, and is taken as valid until further development. I don't mind that - that's as much proof as we can get. Actually, while I was writing SF stuff, I had this spoken by one of my characters: "So, you think you're old? How many fundamental theories do you remember?".

>Observations don't "prove" that theories are correct.
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>They can however, seem to offer some fairly certain proof that they are false.

Exactly. Until they do, I'll accept the current proof, if any.

>>But in this case, you have a hugely complex puzzle, where the first main problem to solve is how many pieces of the puzzle are missing. Or you can blindly trust the result which would be valid internally, as in one of Egan's complete virtual spaces, where the internal logic is flawless and not necessarily related to anything in the corporeal world.
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>Again, unless you have any better ideas, the main idea is the predictions churned out by the model match actual observations.

I'll summarize my take on this by restating that every model is parallel to the reality it models - the distance remains ad infinitum. Now if at this distance we get a match, it's a glorious achievement. If not, well, as long as the experimenters keep this distance in mind and don't start acting upon the results of the model as the economists do, good.

>>That won't get it out of the human discourse anytime soon. Just as people think Marconi invented the radio, Einstein alone created his theory, psychoanalysis is a branch of medicine or that the press is independent if it's independent from the government, so will they keep thinking that BB is the current scientific theory for another decade or two, if not five.
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>My bet is on 2029.
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>I'm more concerned about what I think and what the people who I talk to think, and can't be responsible for the entirety of public discourse. :-)

The public discourse is mostly off course, anyway.