Why does anything exist? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why does anything exist?

#231

Post by aeonik » Fri, Aug 12, 2022, 6:01 PM UTC

mannykannot wrote: post #228

aeonik wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think if we found the beginning causal chain, then that would be falsifiable... theoretically. Assuming God = Beginning of the causal chain, Finding this prime mover becomes a tangible physical hypothesis. I don't think most religious people would agree with this definition of God though. Also, if the information needed to confirm the beginning of the causal chain is locked behind an Event Horizon, then I don't kno…

My apologies; I misunderstood your previous post. Nevertheless, let's suppose there is a falsifiable prime mover, and we have somehow discovered it. Being falsifiable, however, means we can ask what made it true rather than false, so the regression does not stop. Rather ironically, the "there must be a prime mover" argument for God can only avoid being blatantly arbitrary, tendentious and self-serving by saying God h…

I think I see what you mean.

To rephrase what you are saying for my own brain: An original causal event may still have dependencies that aren't necessarily bound to it in time or space. And these dependencies may have their own structure that are suspectable to infinite regress.

Perhaps an example of this is how all the fundamental constants have very specific values that are required aprori for anything to happen in the first place.

Re: Why does anything exist?

#232

Post by smitty1e » Fri, Aug 12, 2022, 9:11 PM UTC

kbelder wrote: post #229

smitty1e wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do we know anything, and how do we deem the human mind a suitable tool for ascertaining the result? At some point I understood that faith is orthogonal to the mind, and the tension was lowered.

Fine, but don't go into conversation and state your object of faith is a fact.

I repeat:

> faith is orthogonal to the mind

Conflating the two is intellectually dishonest, in addition to commonplace.

Re: Why does anything exist?

#233

Post by crdrost » Fri, Aug 19, 2022, 9:38 PM UTC

nathan_compton wrote: post #70

crdrost wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I had to skim through it as well. I think the author probably has written something that has passed peer review, but has either written so many such things that he has gotten sick of terseness and getting to the point, or so few things that he has not learned to value it in the first place? Like the writing is not god-awful like a lot of the crackpot takes, but it's definitely tortuous. As a theory goes, I don't…

Why believe anything about this question at all? I feel quite strongly that the proper mental posture towards many questions is "I don't have a very compelling reason to hold a strong opinion on that." This feeling it buttressed by the fact that there are a great many tractable scientific and philosophical mysteries which are as yet unresolved. It seems premature to tackle this particular one, perhaps because I funda…

Sorry that I'm not seeing this until 8 days later, haha.

What I will say is that this particular question is a sort of meta-question. So the underlying question is "Why is there something rather than nothing?" and the basic standpoints are:

- Theistic: This question is meaningful/answerable, but the answer strains our comprehension ability. Creatio ex nihilo, somehow the somethingness comes out of the nothingness, and our ability to understand is not altogether there.

- Scientistic: This question is meaningful and has an ordinarily-intelligible answer, "because of Something with a Capital S."

- Atheistic: This question is not meaningful and therefore cannot have an answer.

- Agnostic: I don't have enough data yet to judge whether this question would be meaningful, or whether it at least in principle has an answer.

Because we're not asking "what is the answer to 'why is there something rather than nothing?'" but rather asking "is that a meaningful/answerable question in the first place?" the agnostic is in an unusually difficult position that does not obtain in other sorts of agnosticism. The problem is that it does not seem prima facie like this is a more unusual question than any of the other ones we ask on a normal basis. It doesn't have any complicated words, it does not appear to be self-referential, no word is being used twice (and therefore not in a way that might set it into two different contexts so that it has two different meanings)... the only thing that is different is that this question has somewhat of a larger scope than we are conventionally used to.

So normally the agnostic is free of the "burden of proof" and can "cop out" but in this case the agnostic finds themselves needing to justify a bit why this particular usage of those words might be problematic for deciding whether the question is likely to be answerable.