Found, just now, by me, after using the expression in the comments to the voter ID post, just below this one.
The "See also" section of the Wikipedia entry is a source of delight: "Cartesian theater, Cosmological argument, Discworld, God of the gaps, Kurma, Matryoshka doll, Münchhausen trilemma, Primum Mobile." I clicked on Münchhausen trilemma, because it was the least familiar. I'll just show you the illustration:
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Ha! And I just heard Dick Gregory mention blacks as turtles :
"Hard on the outside, soft on the inside, but willing to stick it's neck out."
Synchronicity, or something,...
The awesome Sturgill Simpson
Real country music.
As Glenn Reynolds says, "It's Potemkin Villages all the way down".
Real county music that references reptile aliens ...
I first encountered the phrase "Turtles all the way down" at Lem's place. Just a few days ago. I wonder if Dr Suess had that in mind when he wrote Yurtle the Turtle.
"Yertle the Turtle" is at the Wikipedia link.
"Turtles all the way down" is something I first encountered when Susan McClary was a guest professor at Cal. Naturally, she approved.
I had a Yurtle the Turtle footstool as a child. I wonder if my mother still has it?
"The eponymous story revolves around Yertle the Turtle, the king of the pond. Dissatisfied with the stone that serves as his throne, he commands the other turtles to stack themselves beneath him so that he can see further and expand his kingdom. However, the stacked turtles are in pain and Mack, the turtle at the very bottom of the pile, is suffering the most. Mack asks Yertle for a respite, but Yertle just tells him to be quiet. Then Yertle decides to expand his kingdom and commands more and more turtles to add to his throne. Mack makes a second request for a respite because the increased weight is now causing extreme pain to the turtles at the bottom of the pile, as well as hunger. Again Yertle yells at Mack to be quiet. Then Yertle notices the moon rising above him as the night approaches. Furious that something "dares to be higher than Yertle the King", he decides to call for even more turtles in an attempt to rise above it. However, before he can give the command, Mack decides he has had enough. He burps, which takes away Yertle's throne and tosses the turtle king off the turtle stack and into the mud, leaving him "King of the Mud" and freeing the other"
Yertle the Turtle doesn't really fit the "turtles all the way down" meme.
Here's a teacher's guide for presenting "Yertle the Turtle" to kids.
Question whether it's indoctrination or a good lesson in critical thinking and the appreciation of art.
Question whether it's indoctrination or a good lesson in critical thinking and the appreciation of art.
Seems like indoctrination. Dr Suess wouldn't approve. "Kids can smell a moral a mile away," I think he said. Better to just read it to them and let them figure it out.
"Yertle the Turtle" isn't the same philosophical problem as "Turtles all the way down," but I bet the imagery came from the turtle myth/turtles all the way down idea. Why turtles? Why not one of his imaginary characters or some other animal?
Discworld is a fascinating series of 40 fantasy books by an English writer, Terry Pratchett. Quite a few have been made into movies, e.g. Going Postal, Hogfather, and The Colour of Magic. Clever fun for the whole family.
Is it just me, or does that use of "eponymous" just clank?
Isn't there a religion that believes that the world sits on a turtles back?
I first heard the phrase in Jonah Goldberg's column about his father's death.
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/214710/hop-bird/jonah-goldberg
Sounds like he was a good guy.
Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead tried to settle the trilemma, at least in the case of mathematics, by logical proofs of the axioms of arithmetic. The published their arguments in a monumental tome cheekily title Principia Mathematica, which was also the title of Newton's foundational work on motion and gravity.
It was a monumental book and a monumental failure. Kurt Gödel shot Russell down with his theorems of incompleteness, which demonstrated that the Principia implied that some arithmetic statements are simultaneously both true and false.
There's a little story, a conundrum really, which is often used to illustrate the paradox: In a certain town there is a barber. According to the ordinances of that town the barber shaves everyone who does not shave himself. So who shaves the barber?
Bertrand Russell lived a long and fruitless life. Brilliant as he was he always spend his strengths barking up the wrong tree.
Not only is Bertrand Russell connected to Münchhausen trilemma by way of trying to eliminate it. He's also intimately connected with the "turtles all the way down" meme.
The first time I came across that phrase it was in the introduction to the first edition of Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time. In that introduction the author relates an anecdote about Russell giving a public lecture about modern astronomy (well, modern for the 1920's)
He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise." The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?" "You're very clever, young man, very clever," said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down!"
xkcd.com/1416
There really isn't a trilemma. We first concede that we can never establish absolute truth, then we get to work with methods two and three:
2 -The regressive argument, in which each proof requires a further proof, ad infinitum (i.e. we just keep giving proofs, presumably forever)
3 -The axiomatic argument, which rests on accepted precepts (i.e. we reach some bedrock assumption or certainty)
We drill regressively until we hit some barrier, like Quantum Mechanics, then declare some postulates, like maybe four, IDK. Now we are on bedrock, we build there, all the while, scientists are chipping at the bedrock looking for new turtles.
Climate Science uses method one, the circular argument. The Hockey Stick is right because our theories predict it. Our theories are right because the Hockey Stick proves them.
Steven Hawking said that physics has gotten boring since they found the Higgs. He bet $100 that they wouldn't. He didn't want to find that turtle. Now of course, people are looking under it for more turtles, and if we ever run out of them, well, physics will be boring.
A test.
What's going on here.
I only get 7 Deadly Sins, 7 Wonders of the world, maybe 7 Seas, not sure, and 7 Dwarfs. Or it refers to the song, "49 Reasons"
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