@BobaFit Are you referring to whether we find such a city on Mars or on Earth? Do we have access to satellite information about the location of the city in your thought experiment?

@BobaFit Well, we could falsify that we are in THAT Paris if we were able to produce evidence that we are not in that Paris, for example, if we had satellite evidence that we are somewhere else.

Designed by what? "was designed" seems intrinsically underspecified

@Dave 1) Designed by some intelligent agent, e.g., AI, aliens, humans(?), God(?), etc. 2) Do you mean if we could show that Paris is not French? In principle, if you produce evidence that Paris belongs to a different country, then sure. I'm not well-versed in international law and diplomacy, but for sure there must be some kind of official documentation capable of certifying that certain place belongs to certain country. If you could produce a document that certifies that Paris belongs to e.g. Germany, and if this were a well-known fact among Germans, that would falsify that Paris is French.

@Mark pick one, make a specific hypothesis about who/why/where/how and then you'll see that it can be shown to be false.

@Dave Why should I pick one specific category? What's the problem with the wider, more abstract category of "intelligent agent"? Besides, for any category one chooses, someone else can always object that the category is not specific enough. Even if I say "the agent must be an alien", you could say, "an alien from what planetary system? be more specific". If say, "the agent must be human", you could say "a human from which country? be more specific", etc.

@Mark because vague statements in general aren't easily falsified. That's why my first comment is "was designed" is underspecified. You literally put etc. in your list of potential agents making it unbounded. So there is now way to rule that out since you can always slip another agent into the list. This is to say nothing of putting the ultimate wildcard "God" in there, at this stage saying it appeared there "through magic" would sit comfortably in your list of agents.

The better the bounds you put on your hypothesis the more easily it is to identify what kinds of test might show it to be false. You selected a very vague statement and then wonder if it makes predictions that can be used to falsify it. Of course it can't (easily), it is too vague.

@Dave So do you take issue with talking about "intelligence" as a general concept? Relevant discussions:

This reminds me of the comments under this answer: philosophy.stackexchange.com/a/18395/3733 basically if disproving homeopathy requires disproving each possible homeopathic treatment, then it can't be shown to be false in any useful sense. The analogy here is that all your different potential agents are like all of the different potential homeopathic treatments anyone might dream up

What relationship between identifying falsifiable hypotheses and our understanding of the concept of intelligence are you trying to make?

@Dave I want to know if it's possible to establish scientifically whether there is an intelligence (regardless of the specific identity) behind an object, and the most common requirement for a hypothesis to be accepted as scientific is that it must be falsifiable.

In that context "an intelligence" seems too vague. Even right here on earth, are termite mounds or coral reefs made by "an intelligence"?

But the answer to are they made by arthropods/anthozoa respectively is more clear, because those taxonomic categories have specific definitions (that philosophers aren't still debating over...)

@Dave I just asked this question:

I'm thinking the answer is no

@Mark Why stop at aliens? The Turing Test is a question of whether computers manifest intelligence. While vanilla AI falls far short of being mistaken for something approximating intelligence, the AGI community advocates that there computers shall become intelligent. Some argue the singularity is real. Besides the supernatural Abrahamic Yaweh, and little green alien men, there is some form of advance computational intelligence...

The Matrix may be entertainment, but the notion that computers shall become like Gods is even related to the brain-in-a-vat argument. Who's to say that our universe isn't generated for our minds by a superintelligent computational force? It's outside of science, but even if one believes in God, why mightn't he farm out his design of the universe to his version of a supercomputer?