Nexic Reasoning: Defining a Generalized Calculus Over Anthropic Parameters

In the current scientific landscape, research on Earth’s biological natural history is primarily done through the use of fossil evidence and genetic evidence, with the former leaning closer to the reactive side of the spectrum, and the latter being perhaps more proactive when used in these contexts. They each have their limitations, however, such as the luck involved with finding fossils and the limited pictures which they can provide us with at all, as well as the lack of immediate tangibility available in genetic analyses, especially with regard to features like the ecological context of a past organism. All of this being said, we would now like to introduce a possible third form of extracting information about the history and evolution of Earth’s biosphere, and perhaps with something more of a narrative component at that. This novel framework is what we refer to as “Nexic reasoning”, which serves as a brief extension of the premises of Aethic reasoning to a mediocrity principle-based context. At its fullest, Nexic reasoning has the capacity to paint a surprisingly detailed picture about Earth’s history using little more than glorified Bayesian reasoning, may serve as part of an Aethic generalization to the interaction-free measurements of Elitzur and Vaidman, and indeed even directly implies the Rare Earth hypothesis, thereby forming an implicative link between concepts like the Aethic extrusion principle and the solution to the Fermi paradox. Most intriguingly of all, Nexic reasoning makes a series of falsifiable predictions about Earth’s biosphere as a function of our present knowledge about it, for which we know, of course, that the mere existence of such predictions opens the possibility of elevating Nexic reasoning, and all its claims, to the standard of a scientific theory.