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• Wednesday, June 25, 2008 06:13 AM

  Questions

  jazztao wrote:

  However, I doubt very much that the questions "why are we here?" and "what was there before there was something?" will ever be vanquished from the human experience.

  I don't either. I simply don't think they can ever be answered, which is why science didn't prosper and move from strength to strength until it began to ignore all 'why' questions. E.g. we never ask 'Why do stars shine?' we ask HOW they shine. The latter let to more productive and fruitful approaches of research and discovery of nuclear fusion in stellar cores.

  Also people may not like the feasible answer, such as there may not be any "purpose" to why we are here. We may just "be here" with no point or purpose. It may then ultimately be up to us as sentient beings and orphans in a purposeless cosmos to craft our own purpose as opposed to looking for it on high.

  That mystery, though it shall remain a mystery, is not unworthy of exploration or discourse.

  I know and can appreciate that, as I initially began taking courses in theology and philosophy at a Catholic university, before I switched to pure science (astronomy-astrophysics) at a public one, working with some of the best stellar astrophysicists and astrometists, dynamicists.

  You choose not to entertain these questions and that's fine, but to suggest that they are not valid questions I think is incorrect

  I simply think the questions are a waste of time. I pursued them - while doing philosophy- at great length. It never got anywhere and one merely returned to the same point in and endless loop. Then, my attention shifted to science and I began to appreciate the positivist approach, as in quantum mechanics, wherein we do not ask 'why' electrons behave as probability waves in atoms, or how the exp (iEt/h) factor figures in the Schrodinger equation - we simply accept these in terms of the theory's predictions as a prescriptive template.

  And no - again, I do not say the "higher questions" are "invaid". I simply say they were (and remain) unproductive for me. As for others, as I said, I suspect the questions, on account of the entry of the Godel Incompletenes theorems at various levels, lead to excess self-reference, and that is why one gets endless loops and no clear progress.

  If one questioner could just provide the n-s conditions for his claim, or the underpinning of his quest, then much of this could be rendered more legitimate as a useful pursuit. As opposed to mere speculations that never produce results.

  —droogoy Read droogoy's other letters
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