> Cosmology describes the big bang but it does not answer the question "why is it so?". Maybe there is no answer. Maybe it is not knowable. Maybe theoretical physics cannot have the total picture. These are all metaphysical questions that seem perfectly legitimate to me. If you are not allowed to ask or talk about these questions, I would say that you just accepted a religious faith. I am not trying to sell you anything except doubt and curiosity :)
I see no reason to assume that question is beyond the reach of empiricism, which has been (both by its own standard and by naive common sense) effective in a way that alternatives have not. Non-empirical approaches may be able to construct self-consistent theories, but there is an infinitude of self-consistent theories, the overwhelming majority of which are useless under naive common sense. I trust empiricism because I was able to get there in Neurath's boat fashion from the everyday naive common sense that we all live by in practice.
> You are implicitly making the strong claim that knowledge can only be attained through empiricism. This is clearly not the case. I know that I am conscious and I assume that you are, but I cannot use empiricism to test this hypothesis, not can you use it to verify that I am, indeed, conscious.
I don't accept your claim. To the extent that "consciousness" refers to something meaningful, it refers to something empirical. (At least, my experience - under formal empiricism, naive common sense, and along the path between them - is that theories that involved entities detached from empirical consequences were misleading, and less effective than theories that did without such entities).
I see no reason to assume that question is beyond the reach of empiricism, which has been (both by its own standard and by naive common sense) effective in a way that alternatives have not. Non-empirical approaches may be able to construct self-consistent theories, but there is an infinitude of self-consistent theories, the overwhelming majority of which are useless under naive common sense. I trust empiricism because I was able to get there in Neurath's boat fashion from the everyday naive common sense that we all live by in practice.
> You are implicitly making the strong claim that knowledge can only be attained through empiricism. This is clearly not the case. I know that I am conscious and I assume that you are, but I cannot use empiricism to test this hypothesis, not can you use it to verify that I am, indeed, conscious.
I don't accept your claim. To the extent that "consciousness" refers to something meaningful, it refers to something empirical. (At least, my experience - under formal empiricism, naive common sense, and along the path between them - is that theories that involved entities detached from empirical consequences were misleading, and less effective than theories that did without such entities).