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> no fundamental philosophical or existential questions would be resolved If you don't consider "does life exist on other planets?" to be a fundamental, existe

> no fundamental philosophical or existential questions would be resolved If you don't consider "does life exist on other planets?" to be a fundamental, existential question, can you share an example of what you do think is such a fundamental question? Finding life on Mars wouldn't necessarily resolve any fundamental questions, but it would open up a whole new realm of questions. Is it similar to life on Earth? How similar? Is there evidence for or against some form of panspermia? (at its most extreme, life arriving on Earth from outside the solar system, but this could also be life arising on Earth and being transported to Mars via impact ejecta, or vice versa) Also, lots of worthwhile science is done even though it doesn't have an immediate and obvious impact on everyday life. I can't think of any particular way in which the discovery of gravitational waves has changed my life, for example - but I recognize that the work that's gone into it has advanced human knowledge, and probably will indirectly benefit my life (or my descendants' lives) in ways I can't predict.

AndrewKemendo 7y ago
Sure: Is the concept of objective meaning valid in any possible universe? Is it possible for the universe to be a fully observed deterministic system? Is there a universal objective function motivating what we consider reality? Is it possible to determine with certainty the origins of what we can conceptualize as reality? Is it possible to forecast with mathematical certainty events in future time steps. Basically just off the top of my head my questions boil down to: Can laplaces demon actually exist, is there a resolution to the munchausen trilemma and is godels incompleteness theorem disprovable.
- JackFr 7y ago
  Well sure, I take your point. We live, we die. Science tells us how it all happens, but can never tell us why it happens at all. And yet despite the certainty of death, we, individually and as a group, seem to have an unquenchable desire to know more. To know is to grow, and this collection of processes we call life has never been seen off the planet so yeah, it'd be quite some growth.
- JasonFruit 7y ago
  Wow, you're really smart! I'm glad you're here to discuss things with us. That being said, for most people who aren't operating on your level, the fundamental existential questions haven't changed much in a few hundred years. "Are we alone in the universe?" is probably among the newest for us.
  - AndrewKemendo 7y ago
    I'm assuming you're being sarcastic. If so it's unfortunate that just answering honestly warrants such hostility.
    - kdmccormick 7y ago
      To say what I think JasonFruit is trying to say, but with less condescension: Your questions are valid and really interesting, but that doesn't make the questions of "Do other planets have life?" and "Where did life on Earth originate?" invalid or uninteresting. Personally I'm interested in all of them.
      - The_rationalist 7y ago
        Do other planets have life? Is a ridiculous question to ask, it is epistemologically one of the weakest hypothesis possible given the scale of the universe and the non singularity of what make earth the earth.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
- not_kurt_godel 7y ago
  > is godels incompleteness theorem disprovable Do you actually understand its proof? On what basis would it be disproven? It's really difficult for me to even conceive of what disproving it would even "mean" - you seem to think that it's somehow tied to whether the universe is deterministic, but it's not. A "disproof" would essentially break the very logical tools used to construct itself (since it is the nature of these that Godel's theorem concerns); it's like trying to drive further north than the north pole - there simply isn't a conceptual direction to go unless you completely redefine the meaning of "north". Edit: Also, Laplace's demon has likely been formally proven to be impossible: https://phys.org/news/2018-05-proof-reveals-fundamental-limits-scientific.html https://phys.org/news/2018-05-proof-reveals-fundamental-limi... Perhaps your apparent belief in Laplace's Demon combined with the comparison of this proof to Godel's Theorem is your motivation to suggest that it can be disproven?
  - AndrewKemendo 7y ago
    I agree with you that any progress in these areas would include breaking pretty much everything we "know." That's kind of the point though, current epistemology and computability questions basically stop with these irreducable theories. So we live with this irreducable uncertainty currently. I'm not proposing solutions or saying that there are errors with these proofs. Rather, when I finally understood them years ago it induced an existential crisis that I don't see any pathways to resolve. My hypothesis is that humans aren't capable of conceptualizing experiments or building tools that could approach the three most intractable problems in epistemilogy. Maybe we don't have the math to do it, or it's fundamentally intractable and it will never be resolved, I dunno. But those are much more interesting questions than "is there an amoeba on europa?"
    - not_kurt_godel 7y ago
      I think you'd probably be interested in Gerard 't Hooft's latest work: https://arxiv.org/abs/1405.1548 https://arxiv.org/abs/1405.1548 It's rather, shall we say, controversial (that is: widely rejected by his peers), but it's an attempt to construct a framework through which the laws of the universe can be interpreted as deterministic which leverages the sorts of epistemological concepts you seem to be interested in. (That being said: I personally find "is there an amoeba on Europa?" to be supremely interesting, but to each their own.)

AndrewKemendo 7y ago

Sure: Is the concept of objective meaning valid in any possible universe? Is it possible for the universe to be a fully observed deterministic system? Is there a universal objective function motivating what we consider reality? Is it possible to determine with certainty the origins of what we can conceptualize as reality? Is it possible to forecast with mathematical certainty events in future time steps. Basically just off the top of my head my questions boil down to: Can laplaces demon actually exist, is there a resolution to the munchausen trilemma and is godels incompleteness theorem disprovable.

JackFr 7y ago
Well sure, I take your point. We live, we die. Science tells us how it all happens, but can never tell us why it happens at all. And yet despite the certainty of death, we, individually and as a group, seem to have an unquenchable desire to know more. To know is to grow, and this collection of processes we call life has never been seen off the planet so yeah, it'd be quite some growth.
JasonFruit 7y ago
Wow, you're really smart! I'm glad you're here to discuss things with us. That being said, for most people who aren't operating on your level, the fundamental existential questions haven't changed much in a few hundred years. "Are we alone in the universe?" is probably among the newest for us.
- AndrewKemendo 7y ago
  I'm assuming you're being sarcastic. If so it's unfortunate that just answering honestly warrants such hostility.
  - kdmccormick 7y ago
    To say what I think JasonFruit is trying to say, but with less condescension: Your questions are valid and really interesting, but that doesn't make the questions of "Do other planets have life?" and "Where did life on Earth originate?" invalid or uninteresting. Personally I'm interested in all of them.
    - The_rationalist 7y ago
      Do other planets have life? Is a ridiculous question to ask, it is epistemologically one of the weakest hypothesis possible given the scale of the universe and the non singularity of what make earth the earth.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
not_kurt_godel 7y ago
> is godels incompleteness theorem disprovable Do you actually understand its proof? On what basis would it be disproven? It's really difficult for me to even conceive of what disproving it would even "mean" - you seem to think that it's somehow tied to whether the universe is deterministic, but it's not. A "disproof" would essentially break the very logical tools used to construct itself (since it is the nature of these that Godel's theorem concerns); it's like trying to drive further north than the north pole - there simply isn't a conceptual direction to go unless you completely redefine the meaning of "north". Edit: Also, Laplace's demon has likely been formally proven to be impossible: https://phys.org/news/2018-05-proof-reveals-fundamental-limits-scientific.html https://phys.org/news/2018-05-proof-reveals-fundamental-limi... Perhaps your apparent belief in Laplace's Demon combined with the comparison of this proof to Godel's Theorem is your motivation to suggest that it can be disproven?
- AndrewKemendo 7y ago
  I agree with you that any progress in these areas would include breaking pretty much everything we "know." That's kind of the point though, current epistemology and computability questions basically stop with these irreducable theories. So we live with this irreducable uncertainty currently. I'm not proposing solutions or saying that there are errors with these proofs. Rather, when I finally understood them years ago it induced an existential crisis that I don't see any pathways to resolve. My hypothesis is that humans aren't capable of conceptualizing experiments or building tools that could approach the three most intractable problems in epistemilogy. Maybe we don't have the math to do it, or it's fundamentally intractable and it will never be resolved, I dunno. But those are much more interesting questions than "is there an amoeba on europa?"
  - not_kurt_godel 7y ago
    I think you'd probably be interested in Gerard 't Hooft's latest work: https://arxiv.org/abs/1405.1548 https://arxiv.org/abs/1405.1548 It's rather, shall we say, controversial (that is: widely rejected by his peers), but it's an attempt to construct a framework through which the laws of the universe can be interpreted as deterministic which leverages the sorts of epistemological concepts you seem to be interested in. (That being said: I personally find "is there an amoeba on Europa?" to be supremely interesting, but to each their own.)