[antonvs]

Science answers "why" questions all the time.

We know the answer to why uniform radiation propagates due to an inverse square law. We know when and why conservation laws exist. The are many, many examples of this.

Examples like these refute your claim about the limits of science.

Claims like yours are common, though - you're probably just repeating what someone else has told you, perhaps without thinking very deeply about it.

This position seems to have arisen as a result of some of the limits of science that were encountered last century. The "shut up and calculate" mentality was a kind of reaction to the philosophical problems with quantum mechanics. But the defensive reaction that "science is just about theories that make predictions" is incoherent.

If it were really true, then science would be utterly dependent on philosophy to come up with new theories, because a prediction-generating machine isn't going to help you with that.

Ironically, the very people who make these claims would be the last to accept that progress in science is utterly dependent on philosophy - but that's the consequence of their own attempt to make a sharp delineation between, essentially, thinking and just crunching numbers.

[berndi]

I'm having a hard time understanding your post -- my depth of thinking may well not be on par with yours. Its obvious that science as a whole explains a hierarchy of phenomenona, with a given phenomenon (like radiation propagation) often being explained ("why does it happen in this specific way") by a more fundamental theory that provides an overarching account of a set of phenomena.

The point is that every update of a scientific theory shifts old "why" questions to new ones. Science will not ever and does not aim to provide an answer to the ultimate question of why anything exists at all or why a given theory of everything applies rather than another (indeed, string theory for example posits a possible, if not actual theory of everything).

In this sense, in the scientific study of consciousness, we do not aim for an ultimate account of why the laws of nature give rise to consciousness. Instead, it is about explaining a natural phenomenon within a theoretical framework that allows us to make predictions with respect to experimental outcomes.

[antonvs]

> The point is that every update of a scientific theory shifts old "why" questions to new ones. Science will not ever and does not aim to provide an answer to the ultimate question of why anything exists at all

I don't see how any of that is relevant.

The examples I gave are so definitively answered that we can derive the relevant laws mathematically, and prove that they must apply in all universes with the necessary properties. I've provided such a derivation in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27336901

There are many other examples along these lines in science.

Even if scientists tomorrow decided that some variant of string theory is a more accurate model of the world than quantum field theory, it wouldn't affect these answers.

There's no aspect of the explanations of inverse square laws or conservation laws that have had their answer undermined by updates to a theory, or are less explanatory because we e.g. don't know the origin of all existence.

Science has definitively answered "why" questions in those cases, and many others.

[ganzuul]

There is a logical answer to the question of why there is something rather than nothing, but interpretations of it are varied. If you accept that consciousness (hard) is a natural phenomena then it is much less of a leap. However, you do lose the ability to conclude with certainty that your individual consciuosness did _not_ instantiate the entire universe, which tends to lead to a very self-centered path of inquiry which often only skirts around the main issue. If you are further attached to the logic of the Law of the Excluded Middle, then megalomania is always close at hand and probably the reason why this knowledge isn't shouted from the rooftops.

This idea has been around for thousands of years and is similar to the central teaching of Advaita Vedanta. Indeed, we are continuing a truly great tradition of inquiry in our natural philosophy of science.

[amelius]

> Science answers "why" questions all the time.

Nope, science is just shifting the perspective.

There is a nice video of Feynman about it, appropriately titled "Why":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36GT2zI8lVA

[antonvs]

> Nope, science is just shifting the perspective.

That's an incorrect assertion based on cherry-picked evidence.

The Feynman video is a perfect example of this. He gives examples of cases where deep "why" answers aren't easily found. But those examples don't cover the entire field of science.

All you need to refute cherry-picked examples is a single counterexample. I've provided two counterexamples. I've also provided a derivation for one of them, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27336901

The point is that science can and does answer "why" questions, and in many cases does so very definitively - so much so that we can predict behavior in other universes that we've never seen.

[pmoriarty]

"We know the answer to why uniform radiation propagates due to an inverse square law."

This is an answer to a "how" question rephrased (incorrectly) as an answer to a "why" question.

First, the "inverse square law" isn't a law in the colloquial sense (like a maximum speed limit law) where the universe is forced to obey it. Instead, "law" is just a conventional phrase indicating what the consensus among scientists is regarding certain observations.

So it's really an answer to the question of "how does [our current observations of how] radiation propagate?": "according to the inverse square law".

Future observations of radiation propagation might run completely contrary to those we've had up to now, and it is scientific explanations that will have to be modified to accommodate those observations.

But the inverse square law does not explain why radiation has been observed to propagate in this way.

For such an answer you'd have to resort to a much grander explanation of the universe, involving all sorts of other theories involving many other observations, back to the big bang, which is not yet fully understood and may never be (even if we assume that the big bang theory itself won't be replaced by some other origin theory in the future, and not to mention what happened "before" the big bang, which may be even more impenetrable still).

But even were there to be some comprehensive "theory of everything" (in the larger sense), that doesn't mean the why of it has been explained, as there'll still be open questions like: "why something rather than nothing?" or "why this universe and not another?"

"But," some may object, "I just wanted to know why radiation propagates as it does, not why there's something instead of nothing." Well, I'm afraid that science can't answer your little question without answering the big questions. Religion or philosophy might, but they're also seen as unsatisfactory to many, so such why questions might never be answerable to everyone's satisfaction.

Harder questions, like those about consciousness, are even less likely to be satisfactorily answered, as touching them immediately lands one in to the morass of assumptions, definitions, points of view, and perspectives.

Half the time people are completely speaking past each other because they've never agreed on or even stated what their definitions or assumptions are, so are going off about two or more completely different things. Consciousness itself is notoriously difficult to define, so when two or more people are talking about something that they "know it when they see it," they're bound to talk past each other half the time, whether they agree or disagree.

Some philosophers are better at setting the ground rules and making their fundamental assumptions and defintions explicit, but they're usually pretty balkanized, and you'll find plenty of other philosophers disagreeing with their assumptions and definitions.

I personally see little hope of this thorny problem ever being resolved to everyone's satisfaction, but there'll surely be plenty of arguing about it until the end of time.

[antonvs]

> First, the "inverse square law" isn't a law in the colloquial sense (like a maximum speed limit law) where the universe is forced to obey it. Instead, "law" is just a conventional phrase indicating what the consensus among scientists is regarding certain observations.

That's incorrect in this case. It's a hard requirement that can easily be mathematically derived, so easily that I'll do it here:

1. The surface area of a 3D sphere, 4πr^2, is proportional to the square of the radius.

2. Radiation from a point source that is evenly radiating outward is therefore spread out over an area that increases in proportion to the square of the distance from the source.

3. Therefore, such radiation must obey an inverse square law, in any universe in which the preconditions -even radiation from a point source through 3D space - are true.

> Future observations of radiation propagation might run completely contrary to those we've had up to now

That's provably not the case, and I've just proved it beyond doubt. From this proof, we know what kind of situations are subject to this law, and can even determine what kinds of situations might not be subject to it.

A similar point applies to conservation laws, such as conservation of energy and conservation of momentum. Noether's theorem shows us that such conservation laws must hold, again in any universe where the preconditions around differentiable symmetries hold.

With that in mind, I don't think the rest of your comment makes much sense. Not only does science answer "why" questions in many cases, it can answer them so definitively that we can apply that knowledge to other universes.

[chopin]

You just shifted the question from "Why do we have an inverse square law for radiation" to "Why do we live in a 3d universe".

Same goes for the Noether theorem. It shifts the question from "why do we have certain conservation laws" to "why do we have certain symmetries".

[antonvs]

> You just shifted the question from "Why do we have an inverse square law for radiation" to "Why do we live in a 3d universe".

That's not "shifting the question", that's a different question.

The point is that there is a meaningful sense, discovered by scientific study, in which we understand why there is an inverse square law for radiation.

If the examples I've given are not answers to "why" questions, how would you characterize them?

In any case, the idea that we can never know the answer to any "why" question because there's a causal chain that goes back to the creation of the universe is silly. We can understand the connection between parts of a chain without knowing where the chain came from, and that's exactly what science has done, so successfully that some people are now complaining that we don't know how the universe began.

Besides, the question of why we live in a 3D universe has a similar answer - see Max Tegmark's "On the dimensionality of spacetime": https://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/dimensions.pdf

Given that, where do you think "I've shifted the question" now? At some point, do you not recognize that the question being asked really has no meaningful relevance to the original question?

In fact, examples like these go beyond just answering "why" questions - they tell us that this universe, and even other universes with similar properties, couldn't be any other way!