What are your thoughts on the problem of infinite regress?
What are your thoughts on the problem of infinite regress?
I think all of us here can agree that seeking to describe our universe in terms of laws and principles that allow us to make predictions about its dynamics is a worthy and fascinating pursuit. It is also undeniably valuable to any species that wishes to live and thrive in it.
However, us humans have developed this need to explain everything in terms of reasons for why things happen. What that means, exactly, varies between different contexts, but some interpretations are
- reasoned (practical or theoretic) justifications for actions taken by an agent;
- (primary) causes of events ("which of recent events was most necessary for this event to occur?");
- teleological purposes attributed to objects or events which explains their behaviours or occurrences (e.g. involving attractors in complex adaptive systems);
- sets of rules (dynamics) governing the evolution of systems which demonstrably gives rise to observed phenomena - the type of reasons most physicists are primarily concerned with.
There are a lot of finer distinctions to make - this was mostly off the top of my head. The point is: given any reason at all, one can always additionally demand a reason for that reason - but at which level in this hierarchy of explanations would you find the final, most fundamental and satisfactory explanation for why anything at all? Could such a level exist, or is the hierarchy infinite? Is the notion of what constitutes a 'reason' fundamentally anthropic, and is then requiring explanations for natural events a case of category error?
tl;dr: why, when and where is 42?
My take is that any logical reasoning requires some axiom or assumption at its base which is not justified. Then we can apply that reasoning to cases where we believe that assumption applies.
In physics, we work from a set of assumptions about the nature of reality which are not justified by anything but empirical observation. The application of empirical observation and the scientific method in general is not justified by anything other than the historical success in its application (famously "it works, bitches").
These are not stringent justifications, but practical.
If there is anything we can be sure of, it's that we perceive ourselves as existing. That makes empirical observation the best, and only, sanity-check.
I'm actually breaking
ruleguideline 1 here ("The questions we pose, we believe to have falsifiable answers."). It's a sillyruleguideline, so I'm going tochange itremove them all.edit: screw it, we don't need guidelines (yet).
I personally feel like there isn't nearly enough of a basis to form a strong stance from, but I'm pulled in different directions by different concerns.
On an emotional level, I'm perhaps slightly discomforted by the idea of "turtles all the way down". On the other hand, being human, I feel that need for answers - to find explanations. So if nature really simply isn't explainable in terms we care about, and asking "why [anything]" is a category mistake, that's a bit.. unsatisfying.
If there is a "definite, most fundamental level of explanation", I.. don't know how that would make me feel because I can't imagine how that would work. Gödel's second incompleteness theorem tells us that any formal system capable of encoding (at least) basic arithmetic (natural numbers, addition and multiplication) is unable to prove its own consistency. If our universe can encode such arithmetic, then we can never prove any Theory of Everything to be right from within, leading to the conclusion that it is either (i) inconsistent or incomplete, or (ii) verifiable from a more complex system (necessitating an infinite hierarchy of increasingly complex universes as you go "outwards"). If our universe can't encode such arithmetic, then.. well that would be interesting and I haven't considered that idea enough to know if that could possibly be the case (most of mathematics would then be what.. entirely ill-defined/incoherent?). It could also be that our universe contains actual paradoxes, thus requiring a paraconsistent logic to accurately describe.
Anyway, those are my musings for now.