"Without some form of Occam's Razor, you can't do science — or at least, you can't come to any definite conclusions, because there are always infinitely many models that would explain any observation."
I'm afraid that's a category error. I wasn't talking about science. I was talking about truth.
Many truths are literally incomprehensible. There are many systems out there in the world that may even consist entirely of atomic parts that we fully understand but we still can not understand the totality of all the parts, that simply consist of too many bits (in the information theoretic sense) for us to ever understand. The truths are true nevertheless.
I'm a bit old fashioned that way. The idea that there is no objective reality, or that if we can't understand it it can't exist, may be very exciting philosophies among the word-loving crowd, but I do not find them useful models of reality.
It actually wouldn't surprise me that much to discover that we can't quite nail down the laws of physics the universe operates on even in principle for some reason. (And I don't mean with any sort of copouts like "it might be a simulation" or anything; I mean the laws of physics that appear to govern the universe we appear to live in, regardless of whether that is itself sitting on top of something else.) Based on our progress in understanding the universe, I'd still guess that it's reasonably likely that we can find all the basic, atomic principles. But I wouldn't be stunned to be wrong.
I'm afraid that's a category error. I wasn't talking about science. I was talking about truth.
Many truths are literally incomprehensible. There are many systems out there in the world that may even consist entirely of atomic parts that we fully understand but we still can not understand the totality of all the parts, that simply consist of too many bits (in the information theoretic sense) for us to ever understand. The truths are true nevertheless.
I'm a bit old fashioned that way. The idea that there is no objective reality, or that if we can't understand it it can't exist, may be very exciting philosophies among the word-loving crowd, but I do not find them useful models of reality.
It actually wouldn't surprise me that much to discover that we can't quite nail down the laws of physics the universe operates on even in principle for some reason. (And I don't mean with any sort of copouts like "it might be a simulation" or anything; I mean the laws of physics that appear to govern the universe we appear to live in, regardless of whether that is itself sitting on top of something else.) Based on our progress in understanding the universe, I'd still guess that it's reasonably likely that we can find all the basic, atomic principles. But I wouldn't be stunned to be wrong.