Re: Why does the universe exist?

[David Macy <***>]

Hey Glen,

    With the mood I've been in here the last couple of days, I actually
enjoyed this posting.  It sounds like you have some familiarity with some
existential funk (it's a type of music).  I guess I wanted to take a shot at
responding.

Do answers satisfy?  I guess it depends.

Among those answers which I find immanently unsatisfying are those
answering, "why life (or organisms) on earth" with "because of transpermia"
or some other such thing.  The answer answers nothing about the nature or
real origin of life, it merely defers it to a more distance origin.

What's that bit about the Chinese answering a question with yes, no, and mu?
Where mu means the question makes no sense, re-ask the question.

Practicality!  Yeah.  I like practical too.  I also like art.  I think art
is very practical.  It practically keeps me sane at times.

I also like building useful, convenient things with hammers, saws, and maybe
a chisel.  It's much like being a five year old again.  It's a nice way to
dispel existential funk by being even funkier.

I read an author once who said at the core of each of us is a paradox.  The
paradox takes the form of a question.  The question becomes the journey that
defines our lives.

I like Rosen's question.  Entirely his own.  Perhaps entirely each our own.
What is life?  So far I've liked the answers he arrived at.  I've yet to
detect any blatant inconsistencies at least.

But of what use is it?  Well hell man, he couldn't do everything by himself!


David



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "glen e. p. ropella" <***>
To: <***>
Sent: Thursday, July 21, 2005 4:06 PM
Subject: Re: Why does the universe exist?


> 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
> M: 503-971-3846                        http://tempusdictum.com