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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Whining-Based Communities - Less Wrong
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I am interested in how this infinite recursion manages to complete in finite time.
Would you prefer "unboundedly recursive"? So on any given occasion it will only recurse to a finite depth, but there's no bound on the depth of its recursion?
That's fine, but I've never seen a "pass the recursive buck" scenario that actually did work by requiring only a finite recursive depth on any given occasion. It always degenerates into an infinite hierarchy of ordinals that you can't describe without creating a new hierarchy on top.
Well, I mean yes there are programming exercises for computing the Fibonacci numbers; I'm referring to when this trick is tried in epistemology or logic.
I have in mind a scenario something like what Dennett describes in Consciousness Explained: we imagine that our awareness of our own thoughts is in some mysterious way infinitely recursive, because when we go looking for a bound on how many times we can repeat the step of becoming aware of the previous level of awareness, we don't find one; but the bound arrives exactly whenever we care to stop looking. There's no bound on how often we can reflect on the way we're deciding a particular question and decide if that, in turn, is rational, but there will have to come a point at which you have to stop recursing if you want to actually decide the base question.
There again, it may be a mistake to look for a sensible meaning in Annoyance's usual vague crap.