alt Hacker News> Nobody can ever know an ultimate why, for obvious and well established philosophical reasons
Yes we can, you are just presupposing that philosophy is ultimately ineffective. For example Hegel gave a presuppositionless development of all metaphysics among other things. It’s not some kind of philosophical consensus that ultimate justification is impossible
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Philosophy can be perfectly effective as a tool of thought while still being unable to resolve self evidently unsolvable “ultimate questions”
Interesting word soup. Ultimately, no, you cannot build a valid representation of the universe from nothing and you need observation and validation. You can presupposition whatever you want when you are talking about unproveable models, but it says more about you than the universe. Until we have a reason to think that there is a "why", discussing what it is is completely unnecessary and futile because 1) it does not change anything about our understanding or the predictions we can make, and 2) it is not something we can observe, measure or prove.
Fractal Patterns in Reasoning – David Atkinson and Jeanne Peijnenburg
Abstract This paper is the third and final one in a sequence of three. All three papers emphasize that a proposition can be justified by an infinite regress, on condition that epistemic justification is interpreted probabilistically. The first two papers showed this for one-dimensional chains and for one-dimensional loops of propositions, each proposition being justified probabilistically by its precursor. In the present paper we consider the more complicated case of two-dimensional nets, where each ‘child’ proposition is probabilistically justified by two ‘parent’ propositions. Surprisingly, it turns out that probabilistic justification in two dimensions takes on the form of Mandelbrot’s iteration. Like so many patterns in nature, probabilistic reasoning might in the end be fractal in character.
https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/8961/1/Fractal_Patterns_of_...