Natural Philosophy

164 readers

1 users here now

A community for anyone interested in big questions and meta-questions pertaining to the natural world. For the purpose of this community, natural philosophy encompasses philosophy of science and metaphysics as well.

For those of you on Matrix, there is a super-space which tries to aggregate scientific chat rooms and spaces at #science-space:matrix.org, including a room for philosophy of science and a physics space.

Moderation: Submissions and comments are moderated on a subjective case-by-case basis to facilitate and maintain a healthy, pleasant, and rewarding environment for anyone with a genuine interest in learning, participating, or merely lurking. Just to state some obvious (non-exhaustive set of) behaviours and content we won't have here: bigotry; hate speech; sealioning; strawmen; pseudo-/anti-science; dis-/misinformation. Additional context may be taken into consideration as well.

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

What are your thoughts on the problem of infinite regress? (en.wikipedia.org)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

4 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I think all of us here can agree that seeking to describe our universe in terms of laws and principles that allow us to make predictions about its dynamics is a worthy and fascinating pursuit. It is also undeniably valuable to any species that wishes to live and thrive in it.

However, us humans have developed this need to explain everything in terms of reasons for why things happen. What that means, exactly, varies between different contexts, but some interpretations are

reasoned (practical or theoretic) justifications for actions taken by an agent;
(primary) causes of events ("which of recent events was most necessary for this event to occur?");
teleological purposes attributed to objects or events which explains their behaviours or occurrences (e.g. involving attractors in complex adaptive systems);
sets of rules (dynamics) governing the evolution of systems which demonstrably gives rise to observed phenomena - the type of reasons most physicists are primarily concerned with.

There are a lot of finer distinctions to make - this was mostly off the top of my head. The point is: given any reason at all, one can always additionally demand a reason for that reason - but at which level in this hierarchy of explanations would you find the final, most fundamental and satisfactory explanation for why anything at all? Could such a level exist, or is the hierarchy infinite? Is the notion of what constitutes a 'reason' fundamentally anthropic, and is then requiring explanations for natural events a case of category error?

tl;dr: why, when and where is 42?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

If there is anything we can be sure of, it's that we perceive ourselves as existing. That makes empirical observation the best, and only, sanity-check.