this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2024
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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Reasons are a human invention to help make sense of the world. If you want to base everything on logical grounds you will run into two things mainly:

  1. Limits of knowledge. Knowledge is always incomplete, as more of it opens up more questions. There are things you intuitively know are good, but can't prove why they are.

  2. Systemic limits of logical reasoning. A sufficiently powerful and consistent formal system (such as formal logic) is incomplete, it cannot prove its own correctness. (Gödel's incompleteness theorems)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Yeah, but it is better to give a valid reason, as opposed to "because", right?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Can you give a reason though? I guess a child haven't asked you an endless chain of whys yet. By the end of which you can't say 'why' just that 'that's how it is', you've reached the limit of knowledge.

Of course when available knowledge is preferable.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Epistemologically, "that's how it is" is too declarative for that which we don't know.

Being asked an endless series of questions for me is going to end with "I don't know".

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)
  • Why don't you know?

  • I don't know.

  • Why don't you don't know why you don't know?

...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

if you really want to play this game:

  • that's how it is.
  • why is that how it is?
  • because that's how it is.
  • why is it because that's how it is?

You're in the same boat.