Is there any way to escape an endless loop of "why"? Like when I was a kid I constantly asked my parents how something works and then it went to why something works. After they responded then it went to another why that went deeper and so on and so on. Similarily we can endlessly ask 'why' on matters like oughts of with what hand should I hold fork or on which hand should I wear a watch etc. So is there a way to escape it? Something like fact about ourselves comes to mind (i.e. because I want to do so) but that seems trivial or problematic in some areas (morality).

With matters of etiquette, such as which hand to use for the fork, or matters of personal preference, such as which wrist to use for one's watch, I don't think "Why?" questions are intellectually substantial enough to be worth asking more than once or twice. But philosophical and scientific questions are intellectually much more substantial, much deeper. There it makes excellent sense to keep asking "Why?" questions for as long as those questions remain well-posed. You're right that we don't want a loop -- a circle -- of "Why?" questions, because in that case a question reappears after it has already been adequately answered. But a loop is different from a regress of questions, which may be finitely long or indefinitely long. On whether an indefinitely long regress is always something to avoid, see this SEP entry .

Many theists appeal to certain facts about the world (objectivity of morality, laws of nature, existence of the universe) and infer that these facts must be grounded in God. One response that I found common to atheists is to argue that these facts are rather brute and need no explanation beyond themselves. My question then is this: What makes a particular fact a brute fact? To put it more specifically, are there any criteria for what would make a certain fact brute and also for what would make a certain fact necessarily grounded on something else?

As I understand it, the distinction between brute facts and other facts is that a brute fact has no explanation (not simply an explanation we fail to know) whereas any other fact has an explanation (even if we don't know the explanation). Contingent facts could have been otherwise: they could have failed to be facts. Noncontingent facts couldn't have been otherwise: they couldn't have failed to be facts. Given the history of scientific explanation, I see no reason to accept the existence of brute contingent facts. Many contingent facts that seemed to resist explanation were later explained. I see no reason to think that many of the facts that now seem to resist explanation won't themselves later be explained. One way for every contingent fact to have an explanation is for there to be an endless regress of contingent facts. I see nothing wrong with such a regress. Assuming that the existence and nature of our universe are both contingent, they would be explained by an endless regress of contingent...

Can we perceive the natural laws, which have shaped our ability to perceive?

I'm not sure I would use quite the verb "perceive" to describe our cognitive grasp of natural laws, but I don't see any reason why we can't discover at least some natural laws, including those that have shaped our ability to perceive (or discover). That is, I don't see any reason why a natural law's having shaped our ability to perceive should make that natural law especially hard for us to discover. It's not as if we should think of natural laws as having purposely shaped our ability to perceive in order to keep themselves hidden from us.

Representation of reality by irrational numbers. In the world there are an infinite number of space/time positions represented by irrational numbers. I should think that all these positions are real, even though they cannot be precisely described mathematically. Does this mean that mathematics cannot fully describe reality? What are the philosophical implications of this?

I would question your assumption that positions, magnitudes, etc., whose measure is irrational "cannot be precisely described mathematically." Consider a simple-minded example: In a given frame of reference, some point-particle is located exactly pi centimeters away from some other point-particle. I think that counts as a precise mathematical description of the distance between the two particles, even though it uses an irrational (indeed, transcendental) number, pi, to describe the distance. It's true that any physical measurement of that distance -- say, 3.14159 cm -- will be precise to only finitely many decimal places and therefore will be only an approximation of the actual distance. But the description "pi centimeters apart" is itself perfectly precise, despite the irrationality of pi.

It seems to me that most theories involve postulated objects, and then various laws that describe how those objects must or can relate to each other. So, you might postulate an id, ego and superego, or genes, or electrons, protons and protons, etc. It also seems to me that there are at least two types of "simple" when talking about explanations. There's a brevity "simple" -- like a maths proof or a piece of computer coding with minimal steps. And there is also an ontological "simple" -- an explanation relying on as few postulated objects as possible. If it's true that there are at least these two types of "simple", well, does that render parsimony often difficult to apply, if you're committed to it as a good rule of thumb when deciding what to believe in? One candidate theory could be ontologically complex but brevity-simple, whereas the alternative theory might be ontologically simple but convoluted. Here are some things that worry me: (1) does appealing to deities lead to simpler explanations that...

Good questions. The philosopher David Lewis (1941-2001) rightly insisted on distinguishing two kinds of ontological simplicity or parsimony: quantitative and qualitative. Quantitative parsimony concerns the sheer number of postulated entities; qualitative parsimony concerns the number of different kinds of postulated entities. Lewis argued that only qualitative parsimony matters. It's not the sheer number of (say) electrons but the number of different kinds of subatomic particle posited by a theory that makes the theory parsimonious or not, compared to its rivals. (Maintaining this line required Lewis to treat "the actual world" as an indexical phrase and to hold that each of us has flesh-and-blood "counterparts" in nondenumerably many other universes.) All else being equal, then, theories that posit deities are qualitatively less parsimonious than theories that don't, because (I take it) deities are supposed to be of a different kind entirely from the phenomena that they're invoked to explain....

In his TV series "Genius," Stephen Hawking presented an experiment in which people decided to push a button in order to stop a rotating dial. They were hooked up to EEG at the time. The experiment indicated that people decided to push the button, and then about 1 second later they became aware that they made this decision. Hawking, however, interpreted the evidence differently. He claimed that people's "unconscious" mind made the decision. It seemed to me that Hawking made significant logical error: he conflated "consciousness" with "self-awareness." It seems quite clear (at least from anecdotal reports from people who have been in a life-threatening situation) that our conscious minds are capable of processing information and reacting to it with extraordinary quickness. it also seems that we would be at a serious selective disadvantage if we were self-aware during these episodes. Is this distinction "merely" a matter of semantics? In Hawking's show, it seemed like he was interpreting data in a...

Your question raises a number of philosophical and scientific issues. You'll find them expertly discussed in this short and reasonably priced book by Alfred R. Mele, one of the world's leading authorities on the topic: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/free-9780199371624. Enjoy.

My question is: does naturalism lead to scientific anti-realism? From a naturalistic perspective, there does not seem to be any Archimedean point from which to get an objective view - there is no ultimate meaning maker who can offer a “God’s eye view” of reality. Therefore, if one assumes philosophical naturalism, one must also deny the ability of science to provide objective information about the world. To quote Hannah Arendt, from a naturalistic perspective, “man can only get lost in the immensity of the universe, for the only true Archimedean point would be the absolute void behind the universe.” I really don’t see any way around this. Science, if understood as the pursuit of objective knowledge, can only stand on the shoulders of theism.

I confess I don't see a skeptical problem here. It's true that any perspective I could occupy, no matter how broad, will be my perspective when I occupy it. But that truth is just a tautology: it's implied by everything, including by theism as much as by naturalism. It makes no difference to either of those positions. Importantly, it doesn't imply that I can't achieve objective knowledge. From my perspective, elephants are bigger than mice: I perceive them that way. The fact that I perceive things that way doesn't imply that elephants aren't objectively bigger than mice, i.e., bigger than mice regardless of anyone's perception of them. Nor does it imply that I can't know that they're objectively bigger. To the objection, "But how can you know that you know this about elephants and mice?" one can reply with one's favorite theory of knowledge, which will explain how one knows anything, including how one knows that one knows that elephants are bigger than mice. In short, I don't see...

For years, scientists like Stephen Hawking have made claims, maintaining that the awesome, sophisticated creativity of the world around us can be interpreted solely by reference to physical laws such as gravity. But could Hawking's claim is be misguided? He asks us to choose between God and the laws of physics, as if they were necessarily in mutual conflict. But contrary to what Hawking claims, physical laws can never provide a complete explanation of the universe. Laws themselves do not create anything, they are merely a description of what happens under certain conditions. What Hawking appears to have done is to make a category mistake and to confuse law with agency. His call on us to choose between God and physics is a bit like someone demanding that we choose between aeronautical engineer Sir Frank Whittle and the laws of physics to explain the jet engine. The laws of physics can explain how the jet engine works, but someone had to build the thing, put in the fuel and start it up. The jet could not...

There's a lot going on in your question, and I doubt that my response will cover all of it. But I'll say, first, that it begs the question against Hawking to demand that he explain "the awesome, sophisticated creativity of the world" if by "creativity" you mean something beyond the everyday creativity acknowledged by both sides of the debate (such as the creativity of human agents). Hawking doesn't accept the assumption that (for example) the laws of physics are the result of someone's creativity. Second, Hawking would likely question your inference from the premise "All created things, such as the jet engine, require creators" to the conclusion "The laws of physics require a creator." The premise is true, but it doesn't imply the conclusion. Third, it's not clear from your description of Hawking's view that he alleges a conflict between theism and the laws of physics. Rather, if I understand your description, Hawking claims that theism isn't necessary to explain what we observe. Now, if...

Why do scientists seem to dislike philosophy so much? (For example Neil deGrasse Tyson, Stephen Hawking and Lawrence Krauss). Even Dawkins seems to have joined the club (which is odd given he now seems to spend most of his time making what seem to me to be fairly clearly philosophical arguments). Is it simply that they are using different definitions of the word than philosophy professors? Are they generally attacking just bad philosophy and taking that unrepresentative sample? Do they mean philosophy as in "that thing taught in philosophy departments" or some more abstract notion about the relations of ideas? I really don't understand what their problem is with philosophy (and why they don't define their terms)...

I'm not sure why Tyson, Hawking, Krauss, Dawkins, Coyne, Feynman, et al. , express so much contempt for philosophy. But my best guess is that they're ignorant -- unaware -- of what philosophy is when it's done well, perhaps because they received little or no academic training in philosophy when they were undergraduate students. (By the time they reached graduate school in the sciences, it may have been too late for them to get that training even if they had been interested in getting it.) I don't think they're using different definitions, at least not systematically. Krauss does claim that physics has redefined the words "something" and "nothing," but I think he's deeply mistaken (see Question 4759 ). In general, I find that when non-philosophers, including scientists, reason about philosophical issues, they do so sloppily: making elementary mistakes in inference, conflating concepts that ought to be kept distinct, and so on. That's unfortunate but not surprising, since reasoning well about...

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