Stepping back from the physical questions, we can also wonder why generalization works in general without reference to a particular physical model of the world. And we find, much like you have, that generalization works because it is contingent on the person doing the generalizing.
In philosophy we talk about this through the problem of induction, which arises because the three standard options for justifying its validity are unsatisfactory: assuming it is valid as a matter of dogma, proving it is a valid method of finding the truth (which bumps into the problem of the criterion), or proving its validity recursively (i.e. induction works because it’s worked in the past).
One of the standard approaches is to start from what would be the recursive justification and ground out the recursion by making additional claims, and a commonly needed claim is known as the uniformity principal, which says roughly that we should expect future evidence to resemble past evidence (in Bayesian terms we might phrase this as future and past evidence drawing from the same distribution). But the challenge then becomes to justify the uniformity principal, and it leads down the same path you’ve explored here in your post, finding that ultimately we can’t really justify it except if we privilege our personal experiences of finding that each new moment seems to resemble the past moments we can recall.
This ends up being the practical means by which we are able to justify induction (i.e. it seems to work when we’ve tried it), but also does nothing to guarantee it would work in another universe or even outside our Hubble volume.
Stepping back from the physical questions, we can also wonder why generalization works in general without reference to a particular physical model of the world. And we find, much like you have, that generalization works because it is contingent on the person doing the generalizing.
In philosophy we talk about this through the problem of induction, which arises because the three standard options for justifying its validity are unsatisfactory: assuming it is valid as a matter of dogma, proving it is a valid method of finding the truth (which bumps into the problem of the criterion), or proving its validity recursively (i.e. induction works because it’s worked in the past).
One of the standard approaches is to start from what would be the recursive justification and ground out the recursion by making additional claims, and a commonly needed claim is known as the uniformity principal, which says roughly that we should expect future evidence to resemble past evidence (in Bayesian terms we might phrase this as future and past evidence drawing from the same distribution). But the challenge then becomes to justify the uniformity principal, and it leads down the same path you’ve explored here in your post, finding that ultimately we can’t really justify it except if we privilege our personal experiences of finding that each new moment seems to resemble the past moments we can recall.
This ends up being the practical means by which we are able to justify induction (i.e. it seems to work when we’ve tried it), but also does nothing to guarantee it would work in another universe or even outside our Hubble volume.