by Nevermark | 2026-03-03 09:19:09+00:00
> What you accept as a brute fact is conditional on your world view.

Thanks again, for your patience on this.

Ok, is there is a subjective aspect? Driven by practicality of course? A pragmatic limit to explanation searches would make sense to me. It could even be for objective reasons, such as that our universes laws somehow prevent us from gathering enough information to pin down why something is determined the way it is.

(While not denying that something did determine the property, but is just inaccessible to us as far as we can tell.)

But as a hard principle, that there are specifics that had no complete determination, they just are this way instead of that way, "because because (period)" ... that concept seems both incoherent and slippery to even process for me.

But as a pragmatic concept about the search for explanations, it would make full sense to me.

----

> brute facts are perfectly consistent with that tautology.

I really seem to be having trouble with some nuance.

I think everything is fully determined, even if we may not ever achieve a full explanation of that determination. Is that consistent with brute facts?

----

> You seem to be trying to argue that the infinite regress can be avoided

> You're trying to leap from a simple tautology to specific metaphysical claims

Almost. I am not trying to make the full leap, but am pointing out that reality must be fully self-determining, and that is a strong and therefore useful constraint for searching for a theory of reality.

No other situation provides such a strong requirement. And a strong unique-to-theories-of-everything constraint provides us with an axiom to start reasoning toward a theory of reality/existence.

That is a significant foothold, and not commonly pointed out.

---

> Your appeal to uniqueness isn't justified either. Why must reality have that property?

Two reasons, the first is trivial. By reality I am talking about "everything". So in that trivial sense reality must be unique.

But also in terms of guidance or verification of a theory of reality. Reality has to not only explain its own structure, but its own inevitability, i.e. its existence, and without recourse to anything else.

A provably unique theory, that meets the terms of a theory of reality, would do that.

A theory of reality is going to come down to mathematical verification, in a way that local physics never can. Local physics is not so strictly determined. Local structure can reflect structure from other parts of reality it is a part of, which we have no access to yet or even ever. So we always have to perform experiments, and even mathematically derived conjectures must verified with prediction and experiment.

---

> Under your model, what determines the speed of light?

Good specific.

> I assume your only position here would be to say that it is logically necessary?

Yes. The speed of light is a result of conservation constraints and local (i.e. our universe's) structure. The topology of space-time, general relativity, quantum properties of photons must all contribute. And presumably other factors we have yet to understand.

Just like all the relations, ratios and other mysteries we have already solved, regardless if we ever thought we could.

Presumably, anyone who operates with the principle of brute facts, could have named those as brute facts, before they were solved?

Likewise, the ratio of matter and anti-matter is a product of some structure and history we haven't sorted out yet. And the puzzling distribution of masses of the leptons and hadrons are determined by some structure, perhaps involving the fine structure of space-time, that we haven't worked out yet.