The Principle of Triviality

1 pointsposted 10 months ago
by boris_m

6 Comments

philipswood

10 months ago

> Any self-consistent body of knowledge can be reduced to a number of clear elementary postulates from which everything else logically follows.

I'm not sure why the author thinks this would be true.

Or why by implication the inverse is false.

big-green-man

10 months ago

It appears to be the case. The world is a very complex place, but fundamentally every detail of it is emergent from a small body of rules and mechanisms, which we call quantum mechanics. The love you feel derives from that ultimately.

It is fractal in nature. So it would follow that any correct set of ideas derive from some principles, and if the principles have a lot of corner cases that require caveats then you're missing something and you don't have the principles hammered down after all.

philipswood

10 months ago

I look around using a torch and everything I look at, everything I can see, is lit.

So the natural and correct conclusion is that all objects are lit, right?

big-green-man

10 months ago

That's a bad analogy. You don't have to act on the world viewing it through a paradigm.

philipswood

10 months ago

We KNOW that quantum mechanics is incomplete. Everything is definitely not described by quantum mechanics.

big-green-man

10 months ago

Not by the current standard model, no, but there is a fundamental model, that we know a thing or two about at least, that describes the complexity we see happening around us.