How is anything? Why is anything?

[tau888]

I am going to present a kind of philosophical question to you that is probably unanswerable, but I have been thinking about it a lot recently and I'd like to see what others think of it.

How and why is anything even happening the way it is? In other words, how is the universe following these apparent "laws" consistently, all the time? What is enforcing this? Why does the universe have to follow these "rules"? Obviously our laws of physics are just descriptions of what the universe does, but you get what I mean.

Science allows us to understand the reasons why things work the way they do, but we cannot find out why things are the way they are. Particles follow these laws of physics, and always do certain things that we know will always happen. Known chemical reactions will always be predictable. Time always goes forward. There is a lot of chaos in the universe (the "chaos" probably follows logic too but we just don't understand it) but there is also a lot of very rigid and predictable things about it. But why is it rigid and predictable?

"That's just the way it is" isn't an adequate answer for me. WHY is it the way that it is? WHY wouldn't it be something else? What really is stopping matter from not following these "laws" of physics? Why couldn't an atom just disappear for no apparent reason? Or randomly turn into something else? Or why couldn't gravity just randomly stop working? What is stopping this from happening?

It makes me feel as if the universe is like a program that must obey its "code", and it cannot deviate from it because the program does not allow it to.

I'm an agnostic atheist, but I have a suspicion that something exists outside of the universe that does not operate on the same logic as the universe does. That has wild implications if true. Maybe I'll get into that in some other post.

[nobo]

My views are relatively nihilistic. Often times we can't even be certain what we do know is "the way it is." That isn't to say I don't think there is any reason to try to make the best attempt at scientific discovery we can, but the fact that our conclusions are not infallible seems pretty obvious to me as views of things change over time.

In any case, I don't think there is any grand unified reason. Things have a cause and effect relationship.

For example if I roll a marble and it goes acroll a table and fall off onto the floor, then roll another marble and a cat kicks it and it rolls to the other side of the table.

You can say "Okay why does gravity make it fall?" "Why does the cat want to push things off the table?" In my opinion they're not connected systems other than they occupy the same space and time. They have cause and effect relationships on each other.

So you keep going outward, "Well gravity happens because..." "Well why does that happen"

And you keep going outward to more systems that really aren't connected (in my view) other than proximity to each other.

Most of the universe seems to be vast nothing. Why does something ever happen? Idk, there is probably a good explanation for it, but its just a cat kicking a marble off the table.

[candycanearter07]

in my opinion, there is some greater reasoning, but it's beyond our comprehension. think of a compiled binary, or a public/private key, or even our own brain. there was originally some clear reasoning behind it, but it's nearly impossible to extract meaning out of the output, without significant effort, knowledge of the systems that went into that output, and TIME.

[tau888]

My views are relatively nihilistic. Often times we can't even be certain what we do know is "the way it is." That isn't to say I don't think there is any reason to try to make the best attempt at scientific discovery we can, but the fact that our conclusions are not infallible seems pretty obvious to me as views of things change over time.

In any case, I don't think there is any grand unified reason. Things have a cause and effect relationship.

For example if I roll a marble and it goes acroll a table and fall off onto the floor, then roll another marble and a cat kicks it and it rolls to the other side of the table.

You can say "Okay why does gravity make it fall?" "Why does the cat want to push things off the table?" In my opinion they're not connected systems other than they occupy the same space and time. They have cause and effect relationships on each other.

So you keep going outward, "Well gravity happens because..." "Well why does that happen"

And you keep going outward to more systems that really aren't connected (in my view) other than proximity to each other.

Most of the universe seems to be vast nothing. Why does something ever happen? Idk, there is probably a good explanation for it, but its just a cat kicking a marble off the table.

Yeah I don't think there is some grand equation or unified theory that explains everything. It's probably various different little systems that each do their own thing, or lines of code in a program (I promise this isn't the simulation theory, that theory is dumb imo). There really isn't any way of knowing anything at all for sure, science is just kind of an approximation of it.

[tau888]

in my opinion, there is some greater reasoning, but it's beyond our comprehension. think of a compiled binary, or a public/private key, or even our own brain. there was originally some clear reasoning behind it, but it's nearly impossible to extract meaning out of the output, without significant effort, knowledge of the systems that went into that output, and TIME.

I 100% agree with this. Science is just an attempt at reverse engineering the universe. We will never really know how it truly works, but we have solid explanations that work for us.

It's like if intelligent life developed in Conway's Game of Life. If they started doing science maybe they observe that gliders always do a fixed amount of steps, and always travel in 1 direction unless interrupted by another object. They could write laws that explain their universe, and it could work just fine. But it is possible that the actual laws of their universe could never be figured out by them, because it may not be obvious to them or it is on too small of a scale to be able to observe, so what they see are different functions which were created as a result of those rules.



So it is possible that our universe is just one hell of a cellular automaton, where some ridiculously tiny, even smaller than the smallest objects we know of, follow these simple rules, and on a larger scale create more complicated structures and "rules" that we think are the real ones.

[Melooon]

As far as I know the "why" question is a uniquely human invention on Earth; why do we want to know! and why don't we know! If people are part of the universe then surly we should already know ourselves, but apparently we don't?

That's a silly situation to be in; but I suppose asking "why" is also one of the rules of the universe, like physics and cat kicks.

I don't personally believe in the infinite looping-we are tiny theory; and conway's game of life was created to prove if self replicating robots could be built on Mars, rather than answer philosophical questions. However I do like the "why" question because it answers something similar - "why" is an attempt at greater complexity, and the one trend I can see on Earth is a trend from simplicity to complexity. I think its fair to assume that this is not the only planet where that trend is the case (why would we be an exception to a rule!).

So why are things getting complex? (that's basically another version of your question) I don't have an answer to that one; and I'm not sure I ever will (I'm not sure any human ever will) - but its fun to participate in it 

[Monoki]

I’m a man of faith. So the easy answer for me is that someone is keeping it together.

I find science fascinating. The amount of things that could go wrong if something didn’t work the way it does is truly staggering. And yet things stay together in spite of all the “what if’s”. Something outside of human logic truly has to exist that is keeping the universe together. I don’t think we’ll ever fully understand it. But there’s peace in knowing it won’t totally fall apart.

[tau888]

I’m a man of faith. So the easy answer for me is that someone is keeping it together.

I find science fascinating. The amount of things that could go wrong if something didn’t work the way it does is truly staggering. And yet things stay together in spite of all the “what if’s”. Something outside of human logic truly has to exist that is keeping the universe together. I don’t think we’ll ever fully understand it. But there’s peace in knowing it won’t totally fall apart.

Right? The very nature of the way the universe came into existence is against its own logic (something cannot arise from nothing), and therefore there must be something outside of the universe that caused it to happen. Whatever that thing is, we will never know.

The thought that there is some kind of system or realm beyond this place is scary. Imagine how alien a planet from another solar system is. Now imagine how alien something entirely outside of anything we know of that exists. We don't even know if there's gravity, time, space, the concept of "being" and "not being", literally anything. We don't know. We may never know.

[randomtangent]

i guess it's due to heaps of events within the formation of the universe itself... but really, it's something we don't understand, at least yet.

humans aren't necessarily limited to knowledge, it's our current knowledge that limits us. that being said, humans do tend to advance too, albeit slowly.

[tau888]

i guess it's due to heaps of events within the formation of the universe itself... but really, it's something we don't understand, at least yet.

humans aren't necessarily limited to knowledge, it's our current knowledge that limits us. that being said, humans do tend to advance too, albeit slowly.

I personally believe that we will never know, because it's likely physically impossible. Although it would be incredibly fascinating if we ever did figure it out.

The human spirit is near unstoppable and eternally curious though, and if there is a viable way to explore or learn about whatever lies beyond the universe, I think we'll eventually find it.