Tegmark’s level IV multiverse is the only explanation I’ve ever heard for why there is something rather than nothing.
You can tell when something has been explained because it no longer has the same air of mystery that it did at the start. The Level IV hypothesis might very well be true, but it’s not an explanation.
Though beware the trap of thinking that things must have one explanation rather than, say, 562 partial explanations, 46 decent explanations, 8 good explanations and 4 truly thorough explanations, all useful and all at different levels of abstraction or organization. Seriously, humans really suck at remembering this when thinking about things removed from their day-to-day experience or where signaling games dominate, like psychology, philosophy, theology, politics, politics, politics, politics...
It’s unlikely that there are no few reasons much more powerful than all the rest, that everything is aligned exactly. So if one is tempted to explain using many weak reasons, or any reasons visibly weaker than other known reasons, that would suggest that the weak reasons are fake explanations obscuring what’s really going on, even if all of these reasons are true.
That’s a correct, non-obvious and useful consideration generally. Though in the situation I had in mind (explaining “akrasia”: the lack of a thing) there are many “explanations” that are truly useful explanations—just not uniquely powerful ones. And in (a model of) a complex system each (overlapping, continuous...) level of abstraction has its own set of ways to fail. (There’s probably some kind of relevant point exemplified by our back-and-forth here.) “Irrationality”, like “akrasia”, is another lack-of-thing with enticing “explanations”, and “rationality” is a thing.
It’s funny that the ideas humans spend most of their time thinking and debating about are implicitly ideas about thinking and debating and yet they never really get around to thinking and debating explicitly about thinking and debating because the thinking and debating is actually about signaling object-level thinking and debating skills and not the less desirable meta-level ones. It wasn’t really until the Greeks’ development of rhetoric and logic that this trend was slightly reversed; now explicit meta-level reasoning has leaked down somewhat into modern-day implicit object-level reasoning, and explicit meta-level reasoning is a huge financial sector in the form of consultancy. But even so explicit meta-level reasoning is rarely seen in the wild.
You can tell when something has been explained because it no longer has the same air of mystery that it did at the start. The Level IV hypothesis might very well be true, but it’s not an explanation.
Though beware the trap of thinking that things must have one explanation rather than, say, 562 partial explanations, 46 decent explanations, 8 good explanations and 4 truly thorough explanations, all useful and all at different levels of abstraction or organization. Seriously, humans really suck at remembering this when thinking about things removed from their day-to-day experience or where signaling games dominate, like psychology, philosophy, theology, politics, politics, politics, politics...
It’s unlikely that there are no few reasons much more powerful than all the rest, that everything is aligned exactly. So if one is tempted to explain using many weak reasons, or any reasons visibly weaker than other known reasons, that would suggest that the weak reasons are fake explanations obscuring what’s really going on, even if all of these reasons are true.
That’s a correct, non-obvious and useful consideration generally. Though in the situation I had in mind (explaining “akrasia”: the lack of a thing) there are many “explanations” that are truly useful explanations—just not uniquely powerful ones. And in (a model of) a complex system each (overlapping, continuous...) level of abstraction has its own set of ways to fail. (There’s probably some kind of relevant point exemplified by our back-and-forth here.) “Irrationality”, like “akrasia”, is another lack-of-thing with enticing “explanations”, and “rationality” is a thing.
It’s funny that the ideas humans spend most of their time thinking and debating about are implicitly ideas about thinking and debating and yet they never really get around to thinking and debating explicitly about thinking and debating because the thinking and debating is actually about signaling object-level thinking and debating skills and not the less desirable meta-level ones. It wasn’t really until the Greeks’ development of rhetoric and logic that this trend was slightly reversed; now explicit meta-level reasoning has leaked down somewhat into modern-day implicit object-level reasoning, and explicit meta-level reasoning is a huge financial sector in the form of consultancy. But even so explicit meta-level reasoning is rarely seen in the wild.