The Infinity Hypothesis

A little less than a year ago I was in search of finding a professional calling. That's not to say the search has ended, or that it's even possible to complete it, but nonetheless it was prescient at the time. I was in Boston for the Sloan Sports Analytics conference. My latest, and to date final, attempt to find a role within the soccer industry.

One night I saw some old alums from Dickinson. All three very intelligent men. The first a beer lover, with intimate knowledge of the science and history of beer. The second a physicist, or studying to be one, spends lots of times in labs and in nerdy discussions with friends. The third a historian, or studying to be one. Something to do with Sicilian pirates during the Roman era. We had some quality discussion, and eventually things turned to methodology in each of our disciplines. I was ripped apart for my field. Not because philosophy has an inherently bad methodology but because of how I described it. We get hunches, and then try to see if they are correct via logic and thought experiments. Not very accurate or well described. But fast forward 9 months and I've achieved some clarity. Now coincidentally while reading a Chautauqua, I now see the need to employ some of it's mechanism (that is if I understand it properly).
.
To get around to The Infinity Hypothesis I need to jump to another story. This time I'm in the kitchen with my father, an untrained but highly logical and intense intellectual adversary (I don't like this word because it has a negative connotation. Sparring partner might be more appropriate but wouldn't reflect the intensity with which we discuss.) We are discussing the Philosophy profession and he says that there aren't really new ideas. Everything is just regurgitation and re-framing of the old. An argument I've heard before. I had an inkling he was both right and wrong at the same time. (Those who know me well will say "not this again Joel".) Is something a new idea if it's 90% old, with 10% new? however that newness may occur whether it's an additional specificity, an original use of the analytical knife, a re-contextualizing of the idea? Is that new? I say yes because of The Infinity Hypothesis.

The Infinity Hypothesis is something I had been thinking about before reading this newest text. In fact, it something I've discussed with friends. I'm sure many others have thought about it as well. Yet the crystallization of it became clear for me upon reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Zen takes the time to spell out what I will encapsulate here. That those "hunches" Philosophers start of with are baby hypotheses that need time to be fleshed into fully grown hypotheses before being put up against tools and tests and analysis. And despite what Phaedrus thinks, we do gain knowledge from every hypothesis tested. Even when that knowledge is that the hypothesis is wrong. This is why Liam Kofi Bright's instinct that good philosophers are often "interestingly wrong" begins to hold up.

When it comes to knowledge, picture a planet. Call it Illevaihcam. Or Rides. Or Ossab. Whatever you like the name to be. On this planet there is a single bush with roots extending far across the planets surface. Currently, philosophy and science are obsessed with finding the bush and once grabbing a hold of a leaf on the bush trying to determine the rest of the bush and following the roots around the surface of the planet. But it's not a disservice to miss the leaf, or the bush, or the roots. In fact it's a service to miss. For if we were only repeating the same ideas, we would grab on to the same leaf or two. But this planet is vast and wide, and we want to get an accurate picture of the entire bush. So that person who you think is crazy is off digging nowhere near the bush trying to get at a root. If they miss that's OK. In fact, it's good for we now know not to look there again. But maybe they strike gold, or root, or whatever helps you make sense of this situation.

Now the analogy fails us. Because a planet is finite, but the search for knowledge is not. Even if we believe to have solved all of the riddles of existence, and facts of matter we will never be content. We will always be arriving at new ideas, just in case we missed something. Just in case we are missing an important root that shapes our fundamental view of the bush. This is The Infinity Hypothesis. The hypothesis that we will never run out of hypotheses, for we will always find new ways of combining, rearranging, looking at the world that will make us wonder. We will wonder if we missed something. And we will continue to search.