
We can imagine a great variety of possible Universes that could have existed, and yet the only way … [+]
Throughout history, there have been two main ways humanity has attempted to gain knowledge about the world: top-down, where we start with certain principles and demand logical self-consistency, and bottom-up, where we obtain empirical information about the Universe and then synthesize it together into a larger, self-consistent framework. The top-down approach is often credited to Plato and is known as a priori reasoning, with everything being derivable as long as you have an accurate set of postulates. The bottom-up approach, contrariwise, is attributed to Plato’s successor and great rival, Aristotle, and is known as