RE: New guy with questions
January 25, 2014 at 8:48 pm
(This post was last modified: January 25, 2014 at 8:49 pm by orogenicman.)
(January 25, 2014 at 2:45 pm)MindForgedManacle Wrote: I think the reason why we ask 'why' is somewhat obvious: agency assumptions. We have this ingrained disposition towards attributing agency to things in the world. But of course, barring an infinite series, this is going to come to an end somewhere, probably ending in a brute fact.
I wouldn't suggest Krauss' "A Universe From Nothing" on this, to be honest. I think Krauss was playing a semantic game to get more book sales. And hey, I don't blame him. Publishers LOVE provocative titles; tends to get the books off the shelves. That's why we get things like "The God Delusion". But in Krauss' case he very clearly is being to fast and dirty with the word 'nothing', by which he just means quantum foam.
Perhaps you should read up on causality. David Hume's works iare always a good start here.
I doubt that anyone with half a brain would misunderstand what Krauss was saying when he used the word "nothing", particularly since he explained what he meant, though I could be wrong.
'The difference between a Miracle and a Fact is exactly the difference between a mermaid and seal. It could not be expressed better.'
-- Samuel "Mark Twain" Clemens
"I think that in the discussion of natural problems we ought to begin not with the scriptures, but with experiments, demonstrations, and observations".
- Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)
"In short, Meyer has shown that his first disastrous book was not a fluke: he is capable of going into any field in which he has no training or research experience and botching it just as badly as he did molecular biology. As I've written before, if you are a complete amateur and don't understand a subject, don't demonstrate the Dunning-Kruger effect by writing a book about it and proving your ignorance to everyone else! "
- Dr. Donald Prothero
-- Samuel "Mark Twain" Clemens
"I think that in the discussion of natural problems we ought to begin not with the scriptures, but with experiments, demonstrations, and observations".
- Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)
"In short, Meyer has shown that his first disastrous book was not a fluke: he is capable of going into any field in which he has no training or research experience and botching it just as badly as he did molecular biology. As I've written before, if you are a complete amateur and don't understand a subject, don't demonstrate the Dunning-Kruger effect by writing a book about it and proving your ignorance to everyone else! "
- Dr. Donald Prothero
