Re: Why does the universe exist?

["glen e. p. ropella" <***>]

Steve Johnson wrote:
> I don't want to make light of these answers but they
> just move the philosophical conundrum one step up the
> ladder of infinite regress. We try to explain the
> Universe and we answer that it exists because of
> quantum froth or big bang or curled dimensions or what
> not so we have to explain that and so on.. 

But isn't this the way the scientific method _works_?  It seems to me 
like this is what we mean by progress.  One can always be a skeptic and 
skip to the end, so to speak, by asking the "final" questions.  But, if 
you give the method a bit of credit and ask questions like (e.g.) "What 
physiological processes correlate to spiritual contentment?" (or 
spiritual anxiety like that invoked by "Why do we exist?")  Then you 
devise a series of experiments like looking for glucose processing in 
the brain during certain emotional states of subjects or looking for 
hormones like oxytocin while a subject experiences a religious high.

You can _always_ leap around the results of these experiments and ask 
"why", like a 5 year old might.  And, in part, the fact that we can 
always leap around any answer to another question is part of why we've 
gathered all the knowledge we've gathered.  I.e. It's _supposed_ to be 
unanswerable.  The unanswerability is what keeps us plugging along like 
a mule pulling a cart because a carrot is hung in front of it.

Further, this harkens back to the push-pull processes that Dan invoked. 
 It's a natural part of our "pattern recognizers" that we actively 
_disambiguate_ everything... often taking things to an extreme binary 
(like making a crisp separation between positive and negative feedback 
or between "machine" and "organism").  So, it strikes me as a natural 
cognitive tendency to also develop a false dichotomy between the totally 
banal and the totally metaphysical.  But, in reality, the properties of 
those questions (and concepts) are not binary.  There is a banal 
component to "Why do we exist?" just as much as there is a mysterious 
component to "Dig a hole over there." (or any other banal act)

So, at the risk of stepping too far beyond my bounds, I would suggest 
that the particle zoo is not satisfying to you because it is not part of 
your banal vernacular.  It is eminently satisfying to bench quantum 
physicists because they can _use_ it, practically, to do work and get 
paid.  It will be unsatisfying to anyone else, either because they don't 
understand it or because it doesn't "speak to them"... My supposition 
would be that "speak to them" means "provides elements with which they 
can work, practically, with their hands, eyes, feet, and ears".

(There's also a "tired out" component to satisfaction -- a kind of 
satisficing.  Sometimes you study something just long enough so that you 
get tired out and that natural, physiological process allows you to die 
content. [grin])

--
glen e. p. ropella              =><=                Hail Eris!
H: 503-630-4505                       http://ropella.net/~gepr
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