You seem to be talking about "combinatorial explosion". It's a classic problem in AI, and I like John Vervaeke's approach to explaining how humans solve the problem for themselves. See: http://sites.utoronto.ca/jvcourses/jolc.pdf
No one has solved it for AI yet.
Thanks for the response! I took a look at the paper you linked to; I'm pretty sure I'm not talking about combinatorial explosion. Combinatorial explosion seems to be an issue when solving problems that are mathematically well-defined but computationally intractable in practice; in my case it's not even clear that these objects are mathematically well-defined to begin with.
The paper https://www.researchgate.net/publication/335525907_The_infinite_epistemic_regress_problem_has_no_unique_solution initially looks related to what I'm thinking, but I haven't looked at it in depth yet.
Okay that paper doesn't seem like what I was thinking of either but it references this paper which does seem to be on-topic: https://research.rug.nl/en/publications/justification-by-an-infinity-of-conditional-probabilities
I'd like to write a follow-up post or two to my original post, but I don't have a good sense of what the Lesswrong community mostly accepts / mostly rejects / has thought a lot about / hasn't thought very much about. Which of these topics feel novel enough to merit a post / which existing posts are well regarded for the non-novel topics?
Thanks!