>[!quote] [Sturgill Simpson](https://genius.com/Sturgill-simpson-turtles-all-the-way-down-lyrics) >"So don't waste your mind on nursery rhymes >Or fairy tales of blood and wine, >It's turtles all the way down the line" **Turtles all the way down** is my personal shorthand for encountering an idea or practice that introduces infinite recursion. It is contemporary fairy tale/ism that describes how simple ideas are stacked or nested within each other. Or how one may continue to discover the same truth when searching inward or outward. I first encountered this phrase in the [Grateful Dead Annotated Lyrics](http://artsites.ucsc.edu/gdead/agdl/terr.html#terrapin), where David Dodd discovered a deep cross-cultural [[mythology]] in the use of the turtle to provide materiality to the notion of the earth hanging in space. This idea relates to Chis Alexander’s theory of **[[Concept of Centers|Centers]]**, or design elements and forms that inspire additional elements. Whereas the **Turtles** concept suggests backward inquiry, the **Centers** concept connotes forward progress, though the concept is often easily illustrated by reverse-engineering an existing design element. A similar idea is the alchemical principle of "As above, so below,"[^2] which has implications in [[Astrology|astrology]], and has been given some mathematical credibility in the discovery of [[fractal]] geometry, such as the Mandelbrot Set. This is consistent with the emerging science of [assembly theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_theory), "Life is stacks of objects [building](https://aeon.co/essays/time-is-not-an-illusion-its-an-object-with-physical-size) other objects that build other objects – it’s objects building objects, all the way down." In his summarization of **[[It from Bit]]**, John Archibald Wheeler opposes the notion of a "tower of turtles"[^1], that questions of existence is not an infinite regression and instead has a "very deep bottom." For Wheeler, the problem of existence is resolved through recognition of [[observer-participancy]] and the pursuit of a more complete [[Social Epistemology]]. His objection to the concept illustrates its prevalence in the [[Creative Tension]] of scientific discourse. [^1]: Wheeler, J. A. (2018). Information, physics, quantum: The search for links. _Feynman and computation_, pg. 310. [^2]: This is an adaptation of the "That which is below is like that which is above and that which is above is like that which is below to do the miracle of one only thing," from *[The Emerald Tablet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emerald_Tablet?wprov=sfti1#)*