Comment by wccrawford
15 years ago
"O'Reilly is correct that these questions can only be addressed by mythmaking, religion or philosophy, not by science."
... My jaw is on the floor. It drives me nuts when people go from 'We can't explain that yet' to 'The only explanation is God.'
The tides are incredibly complex when you insist on 'why' all the way back to the beginning of the universe. Everything is!
>He doesn't care how the tides work, tell him why they work. Why is the moon at the right distance to provide a gentle tide, and exert a stabilizing effect on earth's axis of rotation, thus protecting life here? Why does gravity work the way it does? Why does anything at all exist rather than not exist? O'Reilly is correct that these questions can only be addressed by mythmaking, religion or philosophy, not by science.
Science doesn't really aim to answer the 'why'-questions, but rather the 'how'-questions. The scientific method boils down to falsifying hypothesis, and it's a lot easier with 'how does the tide work?' than 'why does the tide work (the way it does)?'.
Science can't say anything about 'Why does anything at all exist rather than not exist?', because there is no way to test any of the answers. So it's left to mythology, religion or philosophy to answer.
> Why is the moon at the right distance to provide a gentle tide, and exert a stabilizing effect on earth's axis of rotation, thus protecting life here?
A possible answer to this stems from the anthropic principle. We evolved in a place with a moon because the moon helped us evolve. We don't see no moon because complex life such as us would not have developed without it. A stable rotation and gentle tide are conducive to the evolution of complex organisms; tides were instrumental in getting life out of the seas and onto land.
"Why is the sun the way it is?" can be answered similarly. A smaller star has too small a habitable zone where liquid water can exist. A larger star would have burned out sooner than the 4.5 billion years it took to develop sapient life. A double star has a much smaller set of stable planetary orbits. That the sun is an appropriate star for our life on earth is not divine providence or an enormously unlikely coincidence; it's the result of a universe-wide scenario of statistical multiple endpoints.
it's the result of a universe-wide scenario of statistical multiple endpoints
totally agreed with you up to that point which I have hard time understanding.
so you say universe is kind of fractal and we happen to be in the right place on that fractal, where all the ingredients come together?
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This is a good example of why (how?) language is so weird. Maybe I am just satiated, but for an inquisitive mind, to me "Why is the moon in the sky?" and "How is the moon in the sky?" parse out to be semantically equivalent. Science (astronomy) does try explain how (why?) we exist and under what circumstance the universe came into existence (if it did).
They are actually quite different.
'How' asks about the current state of things and how they are possible.
'Why' asks about the past, and how the current state of things came to be.
Depending on interpretation of the question, 'why' can be a lot more philosophical than 'how'.
I interpret this sort of question not as asking for a further step in a causal chain, but rather as demanding a teleological explanation where none is available.
While I disagree with almost everything Chomsky says about everything, and I think it was meant to be somewhat sympathetic, it's really unfair to propose an affinity between Chomsky and O'Reilly in this manner. What the hell.
Equally unfair is Norvig calling Chomsky a mystic for his invocation of Plato. Chomsky is a rationalist, not a mystic.
"... My jaw is on the floor. It drives me nuts when people go from 'We can't explain that yet' to 'The only explanation is God.'"
Philosophy does not imply God.
And it drives me nuts when people don't see that many important questions cannot even be expressed within the framework of science.
"And it drives me nuts when people don't see that many important questions cannot even be expressed within the framework of science."
care to substantiate?
That anything at all exists has to be accepted as a given.
"God" (in its various versions and revisions around the globe) is just an anthropomorphized version of the previous proposition.
I mean "God" in this context, of course.
People tend to map a lot of other stuff onto it.
>That anything at all exists has to be accepted as a given.
Boy do I have news for you!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solipsism
This view is compatible with solipsism.
Assuming solipsism (however absurd it may be), both me and the universe do exist.
What science often does is that it responds to a "why" question by an analysis of the phenomenon and presenting its causes in some lower-level terms. But, from a certain viewpoint, that is not a satisfactory answer.
Take physics, for example. It can tell you why some objects behave the way they do by telling you there are certain particles, interacting forces, etc.. In this way you can explain, say, the photoelectric effect.
But it isn't really an answer to the "why" question, is it? It just pushes the question one level lower. Why are there such and such particles and forces? Why the constants? The very nature of these answers is descriptive. It is a description of how the world works, not why it works that way.
Maybe asking "why" in this ultimate manner is an ill-posed question - but that's not the deal here. It just doesn't seem that science in its current form, unlike religion or philosophy, could ever even attempt to answer it.
Don't get me wrong, I'm strongly atheistic myself, but there are some inherent limitations of scientific exploration and clarification with respect to the answers it can provide.
> My jaw is on the floor. It drives me nuts when people go from 'We can't explain that yet' to 'The only explanation is God.'
I don't think anyone mentioned God, and, to be fair, the problem of what exactly constitutes reality and what would be the best ways to imitate it is quite complex. We, as a species, have been trying to find the rational answer to this problem for at least 2,500 years (since the pre-Socratics), but as far as I know we haven't come to any definitive answer, we don't even know if there is such an answer.
I think the whole point of that part of the article is that the only answer that could satisfice O'Reilly and viewers is that of religion, and Norvig says Chomsky has a philosophy "(some would say religious belief)" i.e. some unscientific belief that "language should be simple and understandable", which is balderdash to claim that is a religious viewpoint, in my opinion.
There are several ways one could model language, from a top down purely statistical approach that Norvig likes, something in the middle which Chomsky proposes, to a bottom up neural model of chemical interactions. There are advantages and disadvantages to each method for many different reasons.
> There are several ways one could model language, from a top down purely statistical approach that Norvig likes, something in the middle which Chomsky proposes, to a bottom up neural model of chemical interactions.
Yeah, I was just trying to take a step back (and maybe I was too OT, I agree), but at some point we should start asking ourselves more fundamental questions. Anyway, this discussion is way over my head, I'm just glad that HN users think there's an answer for everything, is like Godel or Kant have never written anything in their entire lives.
And why exactly are myths, religions or philosophy better at answering questions than science? What’s the justification for that claim?
> And why exactly are myths, religions or philosophy better at answering questions than science? What’s the justification for that claim?
Science assumes that there is a "justification" (for language, the universe, you name it). A true philosopher always begins by asking himself if there is such a thing as "justification". Just think about it, science has helped us put a man on the Moon and create the Tsar bomb, but it isn't able to answer Epimenides's "All Cretans are liars" paradox, a 2,500 years-old problem.
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"God" did not appear in the quotation.
Some questions are metaphysical, not because they are complex, but because they are ill-posed and not subject to falsifiable experimentation of observation.
BTW, a lot of real-world phenomena, like some large events of history or sociology or macroeconomics, fall into the same category of scientific unapproachability, due to practical limitations of our civilization and any plausible future civilization.