The Raft Model of Reality

tags:: #a/concept Philosophy

In science, we used to think there were a certain set of fundamental, base properties of how the world works, that we use to build our other more complicated theories on top of. This was the Building Model of reality.

However, we learned that even our most simple theories, in the most simple of imagined worlds, don't hold up. Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems show us that Every theory is either incomplete or inconsistent.

So instead we must model reality like a raft barely held together by a bunch of theories. Some are good, some are bad. At any time we can take out a piece, investigate it, improve it and put it back together. That's the best we can do, change things a bit in context of everything else we know.