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> (And note that "something" and "nothing" in that sentence are terms of art with more precise meanings than the colloquial ones.) Bingo. You are using a much

> (And note that "something" and "nothing" in that sentence are terms of art with more precise meanings than the colloquial ones.) Bingo. You are using a much more specific definition than I was. As the other person commenting said - I was rather hoping you would grasp the spirit of my point rather than zoning on the rather hastily chosen examples. But let's stick with that for a moment. I picked "Why is there something rather than nothing" because it's often used as the poster-child of unanswerable yet important questions. You have to understand it in that spirit and interpret "everything" and "nothing" in the broadest possible terms. I wasn't claiming anything about the cosmology or quantum fields - I'm saying that "when you take into account everything science will ever be able to touch - there will be something that remains unknowable. (you'll find that at least since Kant, this is a fairly uncontroversial viewpoint within Epistemology and the Philosophy of Science) I think maybe the reason you struggle to appreciate the value of philosophy is because you use the irreducible wiggle room that is always present in language to frame discussions in such a way so that philosophy is always at a disadvantage. You're straw-manning rather than strong-manning my points and you seem very keen to frame me as some anti-science merchant of woo. (A characterisation which anyone that knows me would have highly amusing) I am a huge believer in the scientific method and it's primacy. But I don't believe anyone with any degree of reflection can maintain the view that every fact about reality will one day fall to science.

lisper 3y ago
> You are using a much more specific definition than I was. But this is exactly the problem. If what you meant to ask was, "Why do quantum fields exist" why didn't you just say that? Instead you asked, "Why is there something rather than nothing" which is a vaguely defined open-ended question with a lot of emotional appeal but no intellectual substance, i.e. typical of those parts of contemporary philosophy that are not part of science. > when you take into account everything science will ever be able to touch - there will be something that remains unknowable Yes, that's true. But it's not clear that what remains unknowable actually matters. We may never know why quantum fields exist, but so what? We can know that they were not created by a personal God who loves us and wants us to be happy or any such nonsense. We can know that our lives are finite and there is no afterlife and so we have to be judicious in how we spend our time, and so wondering why quantum fields exist might not be the most important problem for us to be addressing. It's enough to know that they exist, and that they behave according to simple mathematical laws. > I don't believe anyone with any degree of reflection can maintain the view that every fact about reality will one day fall to science. We know with absolute certainty that this is the case because (tada!) science can demonstrate this (e.g. the halting problem) so we have to make our peace with the fact that there are things we cannot know. But I see no reason to believe that any question that doesn't fall to science will yield to philosophy.

lisper 3y ago

> You are using a much more specific definition than I was. But this is exactly the problem. If what you meant to ask was, "Why do quantum fields exist" why didn't you just say that? Instead you asked, "Why is there something rather than nothing" which is a vaguely defined open-ended question with a lot of emotional appeal but no intellectual substance, i.e. typical of those parts of contemporary philosophy that are not part of science. > when you take into account everything science will ever be able to touch - there will be something that remains unknowable Yes, that's true. But it's not clear that what remains unknowable actually matters. We may never know why quantum fields exist, but so what? We can know that they were not created by a personal God who loves us and wants us to be happy or any such nonsense. We can know that our lives are finite and there is no afterlife and so we have to be judicious in how we spend our time, and so wondering why quantum fields exist might not be the most important problem for us to be addressing. It's enough to know that they exist, and that they behave according to simple mathematical laws. > I don't believe anyone with any degree of reflection can maintain the view that every fact about reality will one day fall to science. We know with absolute certainty that this is the case because (tada!) science can demonstrate this (e.g. the halting problem) so we have to make our peace with the fact that there are things we cannot know. But I see no reason to believe that any question that doesn't fall to science will yield to philosophy.