Post by Deleted on Jul 18, 2019 16:36:28 GMT -5
io9.gizmodo.com/8-great-philosophical-questions-that-well-never-solve-5945801
After reading "8 Great Philosophical Questions," I thought it would be great to discuss one or more of them. I only took one philosophy class in my life, but it opened up a new way of thinking for awhile. We have many intelligent posters on TRF and I'd like to hear some of your ideas.
I would like to begin with Number 1, Why is there something rather than nothing?
"Our presence in the universe is something too bizarre for words. The mundaneness of our daily lives cause us take our existence for granted — but every once in awhile we're cajoled out of that complacency and enter into a profound state of existential awareness, and we ask: Why is there all this stuff in the universe, and why is it governed by such exquisitely precise laws? And why should anything exist at all? We inhabit a universe with such things as spiral galaxies, the aurora borealis, and SpongeBob Squarepants. And as Sean Carroll notes, "Nothing about modern physics explains why we have these laws rather than some totally different laws, although physicists sometimes talk that way — a mistake they might be able to avoid if they took philosophers more seriously." And as for the philosophers, the best that they can come up with is the anthropic principle — the notion that our particular universe appears the way it does by virtue of our presence as observers within it — a suggestion that has an uncomfortably *tautological ring to it."
*This is an example of tautology, because the adverb "personally" repeats the idea already expressed in the single word "I". ... In the realm of logic, a tautology is something that is true in all circumstances. A common example of a logical tautology is the following: The dog is either brown, or the dog is not brown.
After reading "8 Great Philosophical Questions," I thought it would be great to discuss one or more of them. I only took one philosophy class in my life, but it opened up a new way of thinking for awhile. We have many intelligent posters on TRF and I'd like to hear some of your ideas.
I would like to begin with Number 1, Why is there something rather than nothing?
"Our presence in the universe is something too bizarre for words. The mundaneness of our daily lives cause us take our existence for granted — but every once in awhile we're cajoled out of that complacency and enter into a profound state of existential awareness, and we ask: Why is there all this stuff in the universe, and why is it governed by such exquisitely precise laws? And why should anything exist at all? We inhabit a universe with such things as spiral galaxies, the aurora borealis, and SpongeBob Squarepants. And as Sean Carroll notes, "Nothing about modern physics explains why we have these laws rather than some totally different laws, although physicists sometimes talk that way — a mistake they might be able to avoid if they took philosophers more seriously." And as for the philosophers, the best that they can come up with is the anthropic principle — the notion that our particular universe appears the way it does by virtue of our presence as observers within it — a suggestion that has an uncomfortably *tautological ring to it."
*This is an example of tautology, because the adverb "personally" repeats the idea already expressed in the single word "I". ... In the realm of logic, a tautology is something that is true in all circumstances. A common example of a logical tautology is the following: The dog is either brown, or the dog is not brown.
