Ultimate question: Why anything at all?

chiro

Here is a question for you: if you haven't observed something yourself, does that mean it doesn't exist?

bohm2

You might want to look at post 180. The authors in those links make the same point you are arguing for, I think. From one of the links in post 180:

Diffy

Of course not. But follow my logic here.

If no one has seen something does that mean it doesn't exist?

Of course not, it just means that there isn't a lot of evidence for it existing, is there?

Take any point in history. Moon Landing.

Is it possible that the shuttle carrying them could have crashed?

Yes. We know it is possible because we have observed other shuttle's crash.

Is there a possible reality where the first voyage to the moon with N. Armstrong, crashed?

Yes.

Has anyone observed a reality where this is the case?

No.

So is there strong evidence that this reality exists?

No.

So if there is no strong evidence that all these other realities exist, are we not just looking at the possibility of our reality existing versus nothing?

In my opinion there is just as much evidence supporting the idea that if "reality happens" (whatever the hell that means) that it can only happen in ONE possible way. And it is the way we are experience our world, right now. As there is evidence that reality could happen in any other possible way, where we are all fish, or where the earth is a cube, or where Gandhi invented the Apple computer.

I'm not an expert, nor have I studied philosophy so forgive me if I make no sense.

chiro

I'm not really saying this from a philosophic view per se (although I'm sure these concepts are in philosophy and are in debate).

All I'm saying is that what we observe is somewhat very narrow when you consider what is to be observed out there if you look at the universe as a whole and consider how much we have not observed not necessarily even through "time" as it were, but also through space.

There is a lot of evidence for patterns in a wide variety of contexts that include the major sciences like biology, chemistry, physics, psychology and the like so the ideas of absolutely anything happening whenever it wants has evidence against that.

However with that being said, it is important to realize that what we observe is just an absolutely tiny and dare I say, almost insignificant part of what is out there waiting to be observed.

A simple mathematical description of this is to consider the subset of all observations that correspond to our own (call it A) where A is a proper subset of U.

If we forget this, we are likely to draw inferences on U only with A in such a strong way that we conclude that A represents U more than it should.

The best way IMO to handle something like this, is just to remember that when we are doing inferencing in any general situation we have two errors.

The first error is that we make a positive inference given that the result is negative and the second is that we make a negative inference given that the result is positive.

When you initially accept that A is a rather small subset of U, then the consideration of the above errors is a lot easier and one can then work backwards from being "super pessimistic" to "more optimistic" as new stuff comes in to make the picture that little bit clearer.

It's not that we know nothing absolutely, but that we don't know that much relatively but then again organized knowledge discovery as we know it for our current period of time is not that long.

FreeMitya

I'm OK with whatever inspires people to think.

chiro

Ditto.

audioloop

well said !

chiro

With regard to why good exists, it's like anything else: you need to a duality to put one thing in perspective.

Good needs to be relative to "not good", nothing relative to "not nothing" and everything else along the same lines.

One can not even analyze, compare, and contrast something let alone to do any kind of analysis on something that has no dual or complement: it's impossible.

Analysis needs a way to make some kind of comparison, and without that comparison there is no way of analysis across the board.

With regards to the mind comment, one thing you might want to do is instead of asking "why" the mind exists, instead ask what would happen if it didn't exist: what would be the alternatives if something did not exist?

This kind of approach that you have tried is basically the hammer and nail situation where if you have a hammer, you treat everything as a nail to hammer in.

The alternative approach is to think about the situation where you didn't have a hammer and then think about what the consequences of such a thing should be instead of intrepreting the nail, screw, or whatever to be in the context of holding a hammer.

Mathematicians do this all the time but in a slightly more subtle way with proof by contradiction, which I think is probably the most important logical principle that has ever been written down.

To prove something, we assume that the opposite is true and try and show that a flaw exists in this model or argument.

Mentally the distinction between this approach the hammer/nail approach may be subtle but it's very far reaching when it comes to general analysis because the person with the hammer is going to miss the whole picture and only get the pixel while the proof by contradiction guy is forced to think about the whole picture (even if done at parts at a time) and if the proof by contradiction guy can't find a fault in the argument, then they are forced to re-evaluate their conclusion.

bohm2

This was another interesting argument by this author. He considers 3 possible universe views:

1. Null Possibility
2. All Worlds Hypothesis (e.g. Multiverse)
3. One particular universe

He then argues that option 1 seems less puzzling than option 2 which is less puzzling than option 3:
Why Anything? Why This?
http://spot.colorado.edu/~heathwoo/phil3600/parfit.pdf