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The Big Question

Silly Druid

Entry posted by Silly Druid in Philosophy

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Welcome to my blog. I'm going to cover a wide range of philosophical and scientific topics here, but don't expect walls of text, my goal is to make the entries brief and straight to the point. I welcome discussions and feedback in the comments, as well as suggestions what I should write about in the future. We'll start with the most important question in philosophy: Why does anything exist at all?

My answer to this question is simple: Because why not? In other words, there shouldn't be any arbitrary rules that would determine what exists and what doesn't. The only rule that I can accept is: What can exist, exists. So what does "can exist" mean? I think it means it must be logically consistent, because logically inconsistent systems can't exist for the simple reason that their nature is not well defined.

Do we have a language to describe logically consistent systems? Yes, we do. It's called mathematics. Which explains why the laws of our universe are mathematical in nature: Because all logically consistent (which means mathematical) objects exist, and our universe is one of them. But is it just a random one, or there's something special about it? I'll answer this question in next week's topic: The Anthropic Principle.

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Splashee

It is a big question for sure. But we can break it up into smaller questions, and maybe..... get by.

Watch a video by YouTuber Veritasium, called "Chaos: The Science of the Butterfly Effect". Just a quote from that video "But Newton himself was aware of problems that did not submit to his equations so easily". How to predict the weather? Patterns that cannot be predicted beforehand. Math doesn't help there. It becomes guess work.

Not saying it is impossible to solve, just.... It is quite a big task to try to just grasp.

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Silly Druid

@Starforce I agree it's all pure speculation, but that's what philosophy is about. I don't pretend to know the answers to such questions for sure, it's just how I think it is, and of course I may be wrong.

@Splashee I have to agree here as well. While in principle the universe in guided by mathematical laws, in practice its state can't be fully described or predicted. As described in the video you mentioned, even simple mathematical laws can lead to results that are very complex and sensitive to initial conditions.

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Octavian

@PawelS "Because why not" is as good answer as any :P 

also it reminds me of this

Spoiler

 

As for logical inconsistencies, I guess two inconsistent things can't exist together at the level of logic, so that's a good place to start for why things exist in an abstract sense. Ofc loads of inconsistent things exist in a non-abstract sense, like 'me' and 'my body' etc

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