Fair question. I was meaning something like growth continues indefinitely.
If I wanted a careful statement I’d say it wasn’t turtles all the way down (as Nick Beckstead argues), but that it’s turtles down as far as we can see. For many practical purposes these are indistinguishable in terms of raising problems we need new methods for thinking about—though it does kill some arguments which try to use the tail of the “all the way down” assumption.
In a similar vein, infinity can often be a good working approximation for very large finite numbers—but if you treat that literally and start trying to play Hotel Infinity tricks, you get in trouble.
Fair question. I was meaning something like growth continues indefinitely.
If I wanted a careful statement I’d say it wasn’t turtles all the way down (as Nick Beckstead argues), but that it’s turtles down as far as we can see. For many practical purposes these are indistinguishable in terms of raising problems we need new methods for thinking about—though it does kill some arguments which try to use the tail of the “all the way down” assumption.
In a similar vein, infinity can often be a good working approximation for very large finite numbers—but if you treat that literally and start trying to play Hotel Infinity tricks, you get in trouble.