The Principle of Triviality

(abuseofnotation.github.io)

1 points | by boris_m 17 hours ago ago

4 comments

  • philipswood 17 hours 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 5 hours 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 3 hours 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?

      • philipswood 3 hours ago

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