(November 13, 2021 at 3:50 pm)slartibartfast Wrote: Thing for me is you stop after asking What. You can keep asking Why.
Your example:
Q: What makes the sky blue?
A: Blue light is scattered more than red light and the sky appears blue during the day.
End of enquiry.
Q: Why is the sky blue?
A: Blue light is scattered more than red light and the sky appears blue during the day.
Q: Why?
A: As white light passes through our atmosphere, tiny air molecules cause it to 'scatter'. The scattering caused by these tiny air molecules (known as Rayleigh scattering) increases as the wavelength of light decreases.Violet and blue light have the shortest wavelengths and red light has the longest.
Q: Why do violet and blue light have the shortest wavelengths?
A: Our eyes are capable of discerning bands of differences in wavelengths as colors. The names of colors are kind of arbitrary.
Q: Why do humans have this ability?
A: It gave us an evolutionary competitive advantage in low contrast situations, by improving our cognitive ability and allowed us better identification of safe and not so safe things
Etc... you get the idea...
Yes, the “Why” type of questions create a cascade.
It leads to maximum information extraction and then at some point, the human can no longer answer.
This question can be interpreted in 2 different ways:
Q: Why do violet and blue light have the shortest wavelengths?
Color interpretation is one thing. That is done by the human brain.
But why a certain photon has wavelength X, well, it is what it is.
You can perhaps explain the source of the light (the Sun).
Another thing that I wanted to mention is that a god is not going to know everything, even if jews qualify their god as omniscient.
If you ask him why he exists, or how he exists, he would not know.
Existence is simply existence. There is no reason behind it. I don’t think there is a process that turns nothing into something.
