Re: Monotheistic religions and Time

[Simon_Jester]

The problem this raises for me is that it's hard to know when you have a Genuine Natural Law, an irreducible fact about reality, and when you have a "natural law" that is merely a special case or simplified version of the real facts. There's no way to tell the difference except to hope that someone gets lucky and spots an inconsistency in the existing "laws" that offers deeper insight*.

That's an important issue, but also one which is independent of the matter at hand. For what we were discussing were not the proper procedures of scientific investigation, but rather
-- If we knew a fundamental law of nature, could we answer why it's true?
which is quite different from
-- How can we be sure that what we think of as the laws of nature really are such?
If the reality is independent of our knowledge of it, so are they. And thus, I don't see how the latter issue reduces my attempted proof.

So all I can say to that is: very well, it is indeed hard to know Genuine Natural Law. But our epistemological difficulties have no apparent bearing on the fact that if there is such a thing, then a straightforward explanation of why it's true can be provided (for both alternative conceptions of 'natural law').

Granted. However, in this case we can't count on anything we now know being a Genuine Natural Law, including things that just about anyone familiar with them would call a "natural law" (such as, say, the Einstein field equations). Things that by the regularity criterion are natural laws (again, such as the Einstein field equations) need not be Genuine Natural Laws (much as Newton's Law of Gravity meets the regularity criterion quite well up to fairly nitpicky levels of precision, over many phenomena, and yet is not a Genuine Natural Law, being merely a simple special case of the Einstein field equations).

I was originally inspired to bring all this up because I was trying to show that "why are the natural laws we know as we know them?" is not a trivial question.* The fact that the Ultimate Natural Laws, which we do not necessarily know, would render this question trivial is irrelevant to what I was originally trying to get at, though it is interesting that you've managed to demonstrate it.

Come to think of it, it may help to explain a certain chunk of silliness found in fundamentalism. They think they really have found the Ultimate Natural Laws; is it any wonder they regard detailed questions about how those Laws came to be to be silly and irrelevant at best and an annoying distraction from what really matters at worst?

*Not necessarily important, but nontrivial.
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So while your proof does indicate that one can have an irreducible fact about reality such that asking why it is so is a question guaranteed to have no answer... it doesn't leave us with any promising way to identify which facts qualify.

I have indeed failed to provide such answers, but in my defense I have neither promised nor even attempted to do so.

True. However, because of this thing not present in the theory, there will never come a point at which the "why" question becomes demonstrably trivial in a natural-law worldview. Not even if there is a point at which it does become trivial- we won't really be able to tell.

[Kuroneko]

Granted. However, in this case we can't count on anything we now know being a Genuine Natural Law, including things that just about anyone familiar with them would call a "natural law" (such as, say, the Einstein field equations). ...

Of course we can't count on it with certainty. It would be silly to even try to 'repair' that particular trait, because doubt is very foundation of science.

I was originally inspired to bring all this up because I was trying to show that "why are the natural laws we know as we know them?" is not a trivial question.* The fact that the Ultimate Natural Laws, which we do not necessarily know, would render this question trivial is irrelevant to what I was originally trying to get at, though it is interesting that you've managed to demonstrate it.

Alright, but I don't see that as what the original debate was about. Knobbyboy88's position was that the naturalistic worldview had nothing to say about why the (actual) natural laws are as they are, that the question is simply ignored. That's quite different from merely being uncertain about the particulars of the answer.

True. However, because of this thing not present in the theory, there will never come a point at which the "why" question becomes demonstrably trivial in a natural-law worldview.

I don't think that's quite right. It is already demonstrably trivial because the argument only depends on some natural law; what we're never quite sure about is what they actually are. But again, you're recasting the whole issue into one about certainty, which is not what it was about.

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As to your question about our knowledge in particular, I think that essentially asks why scientific laws are successful. The answer to that is either (a) because its laws are approximations to the actual laws, or (b) because they have evolved to be successful, with the scientific process analogous to natural selection. Or some mixture of both.

[Simon_Jester]

I was originally inspired to bring all this up because I was trying to show that "why are the natural laws we know as we know them?" is not a trivial question.* The fact that the Ultimate Natural Laws, which we do not necessarily know, would render this question trivial is irrelevant to what I was originally trying to get at, though it is interesting that you've managed to demonstrate it.

Alright, but I don't see that as what the original debate was about. Knobbyboy88's position was that the naturalistic worldview had nothing to say about why the (actual) natural laws are as they are, that the question is simply ignored. That's quite different from merely being uncertain about the particulars of the answer.

Wait... I think I'm confused.

If I understand you right, you set out to prove that in the ultimate conclusion of the naturalistic worldview, after all questions that can be asked within the worldview are answered, then the question "why are the laws as they are?" becomes irrelevant. However, if so, then I'm not sure how your argument has anything to do with Knobbyboy's complaint that the naturalistic world view does not address the question, because we're almost certainly not at that ultimate conclusion.

Am I missing something here?

True. However, because of this thing not present in the theory, there will never come a point at which the "why" question becomes demonstrably trivial in a natural-law worldview.

I don't think that's quite right. It is already demonstrably trivial because the argument only depends on some natural law...

Could you expand on that?

[Kuroneko]

If I understand you right, you set out to prove that in the ultimate conclusion of the naturalistic worldview, after all questions that can be asked within the worldview are answered, then the question "why are the laws as they are?" becomes irrelevant.

No. It is already irrelevant under the naturalistic worldview, because there is nothing to do except what science is already doing: trying to find out the actual laws of nature. There is no special philosophical problem, not just in the negative sense of neither it nor its alternatives addressing it, but rather that it is addressed straightforwardly. All further work on the matter is scientific, rather than philosophical.

Could you expand on that?

For example, under the second interpretation of 'natural law', the answer to the question you ask above is that they're necessary, and the raw regularist interpretation has a trivial loop of explanation. Whether this answer is correct is dependent only on whether the naturalistic worldview is correct.

[Darth Wong]

I was originally inspired to bring all this up because I was trying to show that "why are the natural laws we know as we know them?" is not a trivial question.*

But it has an entirely different sort of problem: the fact that it necessarily creates an endless loop. If one refuses to accept that anything at all can simply exist and have a certain nature without some prior explanation, then that prior explanation must surely have its own prior explanation, which must in turn have its own prior explanation, ad infinitum.

Come to think of it, it may help to explain a certain chunk of silliness found in fundamentalism. They think they really have found the Ultimate Natural Laws; is it any wonder they regard detailed questions about how those Laws came to be to be silly and irrelevant at best and an annoying distraction from what really matters at worst?

Even fundamentalists are generally befuddled and became very evasive when you simply turn the tables on them and ask "why does God exist", especially if they just spent ten minutes attacking the notion that the universe can simply exist a priori. The best they can do is declare that God does not have to follow natural laws, at which point you can ask them precisely which natural law states that the universe cannot exist a priori, and to explain how it states this.

True. However, because of this thing not present in the theory, there will never come a point at which the "why" question becomes demonstrably trivial in a natural-law worldview. Not even if there is a point at which it does become trivial- we won't really be able to tell.

It does not become trivial, but it does become irrelevant. Remember that theories are judged by their accuracy, not by their ability to answer any arbitrary question you throw at them.

[Simon_Jester]

I was originally inspired to bring all this up because I was trying to show that "why are the natural laws we know as we know them?" is not a trivial question.*

But it has an entirely different sort of problem: the fact that it necessarily creates an endless loop. If one refuses to accept that anything at all can simply exist and have a certain nature without some prior explanation, then that prior explanation must surely have its own prior explanation, which must in turn have its own prior explanation, ad infinitum.

Perhaps I did not make this clear:

I believe that the chain of explanations for explanations for explanations has to terminate somewhere. What I do not believe is that the request for one more link in the chain is automatically invalid- unnecessary, very possibly, but not a question so deeply flawed that it's inherently wrong and foolish to ask.

Once you reach the last link, of course, there is no answer to the question "why is this true?" other than "that's the way it is." But it's difficult, if not impossible, to know when you've reached that point, when you have an Ultimate Explanation and not just an ordinary explanation, something that might very well have an underlying cause of its own. So I don't fault people for wanting another link, even if I myself am inclined to shrug and say "this is probably the last link."

Side note: This does not justify confident insistence that there must be something wrong because the next link hasn't been presented. I'm not saying it does.

Even fundamentalists are generally befuddled and became very evasive when you simply turn the tables on them and ask "why does God exist", especially if they just spent ten minutes attacking the notion that the universe can simply exist a priori. The best they can do is declare that God does not have to follow natural laws, at which point you can ask them precisely which natural law states that the universe cannot exist a priori, and to explain how it states this.

Yes. This is because you're asking someone who's probably got very poor mental agility a question that they normally don't consider, because it's out of bounds to them. That was kind of my point: that they consider "God exists... (stuff)" to be the Ultimate Explanation for Everything, a thing which does not need any explanation of its own.

The reason they don't questions about "what's the explanation of the Ultimate Explanation?" as gracefully as, say, Kuroneko is all a function of mental agility and training in logic.

[Surlethe]

Even the act of making a chain of inference to begin with relies, as Kuroneko previously pointed out, upon the use of some logic. Logic is itself a property of the universe: we believe that logic is true not a priori but because it is a useful tool in constructing scientific models. Any ultimate proof that "natural laws" are necessary truths must appeal to some element of logic, which is, so to speak, a natural law in its own right. Ultimately circular, that is.

[Darth Wong]

Indeed. One could say that the whole notion that a universe should follow any rational rules at all is actually an inference based on the observed behaviour of our universe, which appears to be rational. In another universe, it would be silly to talk about what causes what, because causality requires a rational universe. The entire notion of cause and effect in fact requires a rational universe.

Perhaps I did not make this clear:

I believe that the chain of explanations for explanations for explanations has to terminate somewhere.

Why should it?

In fact, why must there be an explanation for anything? Science can be summarized in one word: DESCRIBE. Not "explain why", but DESCRIBE. The entire scientific method, and all of its achievements, are due to the fact that certain philosophers finally realized that you won't get anywhere asking open-ended questions which, almost by design, can have no ultimate answers. Instead, they seek only to create descriptive models: an endeavour with parameters which permit actual achievement.

What I do not believe is that the request for one more link in the chain is automatically invalid- unnecessary, very possibly, but not a question so deeply flawed that it's inherently wrong and foolish to ask.

Why is it not foolish to ask an unnecessary question? In fact, the entire concept of Occam's Razor is that the unnecessary concept is foolish.

[Simon_Jester]

Indeed. One could say that the whole notion that a universe should follow any rational rules at all is actually an inference based on the observed behaviour of our universe, which appears to be rational. In another universe, it would be silly to talk about what causes what, because causality requires a rational universe. The entire notion of cause and effect in fact requires a rational universe.

Fair enough. Since we appear to live in one, it seems reasonable for the philosophy buffs to argue on the assumption of rationality here. Not required, but reasonable. Asking "why can't objects exist and not exist at the same time?" surely has no answer; asking "why do only the objects that exist exist and not other objects that, by all appearances, are consistent with the rationality of the universe?" might or might not.

Perhaps I did not make this clear:
I believe that the chain of explanations for explanations for explanations has to terminate somewhere.

Why should it?

Because the alternative is the exact kind of infinite loop you were just talking about, where we wind up with an infinite loop of things that happen because of other things that happen because of other things that happen... indefinitely.

I believe that this is absurd; I was under the impression that you felt the same way. At some point, I would expect a fully knowledgeable person to have to say "this just exists; there's no reason for it" or "this just is a fundamental law of nature." Therefore, if we construct a chain of explanations that begins "I observe phenomenon A because of detectable effect B, which is guaranteed to happen because of physical law C describing event D, which is in turn guaranteed to happen because of principle E that is a special case of general underlying theory F..." sooner or later the chain terminates and you run out of new things to tack letters to. You get to L or Q or Z or whatever, and that last explanation just is the way things are.

Not being fully knowledgeable, I'm not going to be able to spot that point reliably if I ever get there, but that's a practical issue.

In fact, why must there be an explanation for anything? Science can be summarized in one word: DESCRIBE. Not "explain why", but DESCRIBE. The entire scientific method, and all of its achievements, are due to the fact that certain philosophers finally realized that you won't get anywhere asking open-ended questions which, almost by design, can have no ultimate answers. Instead, they seek only to create descriptive models: an endeavour with parameters which permit actual achievement.

I would argue that once these descriptive models are in place they do explain, if not "explain why." Light is explained quite well by the complex of wave theories running from Fresnel up through Maxwell, and explained still better by the quantum electrodynamics of the mid-20th centuries. We've gotten to where virtually any question about light that anyone can ask can be answered by a mathematical description that invokes underlying effects to tell the questioner where the observed effect is coming from.

If that's not an explanation, then I don't know what is.

The only question all this does not answer is "why does it obey those rules and not some other rules?" applied to the best currently existing theory.* There's no obligation for there to be an answer to that single question; I'm just reluctant to dismiss it as automatically dumb simply because I don't expect it to be answered.

*And the best theory (quantum electrodynamics) does answer that question for simpler, earlier theories such as Maxwell's classical electromagnetism.

What I do not believe is that the request for one more link in the chain is automatically invalid- unnecessary, very possibly, but not a question so deeply flawed that it's inherently wrong and foolish to ask.

Why is it not foolish to ask an unnecessary question? In fact, the entire concept of Occam's Razor is that the unnecessary concept is foolish.[/quote]

[Darth Wong]

Indeed. One could say that the whole notion that a universe should follow any rational rules at all is actually an inference based on the observed behaviour of our universe, which appears to be rational. In another universe, it would be silly to talk about what causes what, because causality requires a rational universe. The entire notion of cause and effect in fact requires a rational universe.

Fair enough. Since we appear to live in one, it seems reasonable for the philosophy buffs to argue on the assumption of rationality here.

But not elsewhere. Since you are asking for an external reason for the nature of the universe, it must be pointed out that you cannot assume there is a such thing as reasons outside of this universe.

Not required, but reasonable. Asking "why can't objects exist and not exist at the same time?" surely has no answer; asking "why do only the objects that exist exist and not other objects that, by all appearances, are consistent with the rationality of the universe?" might or might not.

Actually, the two questions are of exactly equal validity. Perhaps that is where your problem lies: on some level, you are relying on emotion to determine what is or isn't a reasonable question. Why is the latter question reasonable while the former is not? Both question the nature of the universe, as if the universe must justify itself.

Perhaps I did not make this clear:
I believe that the chain of explanations for explanations for explanations has to terminate somewhere.

Why should it?

Because the alternative is the exact kind of infinite loop you were just talking about, where we wind up with an infinite loop of things that happen because of other things that happen because of other things that happen... indefinitely.

Wrong. There are two alternatives: 1) The infinite loop, and 2) That the chain is unnecessary beyond the nature of the universe. That is what we're talking about, right? You appear to believe that the nature of the universe itself cannot simply be considered an observation, hence requiring no justification or explanation? Or are you just saying that we should keep searching for more and more elegantly unified theories, which is what scientists are already trying to do? What does your demand for "metaphysical weight" mean, then?

I believe that this is absurd; I was under the impression that you felt the same way. At some point, I would expect a fully knowledgeable person to have to say "this just exists; there's no reason for it" or "this just is a fundamental law of nature." Therefore, if we construct a chain of explanations that begins "I observe phenomenon A because of detectable effect B, which is guaranteed to happen because of physical law C describing event D, which is in turn guaranteed to happen because of principle E that is a special case of general underlying theory F..." sooner or later the chain terminates and you run out of new things to tack letters to. You get to L or Q or Z or whatever, and that last explanation just is the way things are.

Why are we even arguing, then? You seem to accept that at some point, the chain ends with "that is just the nature of things", yet you had previously appeared to argue that this is an inadequate answer.

I would argue that once these descriptive models are in place they do explain, if not "explain why."

And I would say that "how" and "why" are essentially identical when we seek solutions with scientific rather than "metaphysical" weight. But when you ask "why", you appear to be asking for something more: you are implying that a simple mechanistic "how" answer as provided by science (which simply accepts the nature of the universe as an observation) is inadequate.

[Simon_Jester]

Fair enough. Since we appear to live in one [rational universe], it seems reasonable for the philosophy buffs to argue on the assumption of rationality here.

But not elsewhere. Since you are asking for an external reason for the nature of the universe, it must be pointed out that you cannot assume there is a such thing as reasons outside of this universe.

Assume in the sense of believing it must be true? No. Assume for the sake of argument, with an eye toward an eventual proof by contradiction? Yes.

That's the real goal of making the implied assumption "other rational universes could exist" so as to ask "why this rational universe and no other?" Ideally, I'd want to be in a position of saying "no other rational universe can exist, given constraints that I know must be true in the sense that 2+2 must equal 4." The closer I can come to that, the more I understand the universe.

And the way you get there is by closing off chunks of the set of all imaginable universes, by proving that they aren't rational after all.
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Not required, but reasonable. Asking "why can't objects exist and not exist at the same time?" surely has no answer; asking "why do only the objects that exist exist and not other objects that, by all appearances, are consistent with the rationality of the universe?" might or might not.

Actually, the two questions are of exactly equal validity. Perhaps that is where your problem lies: on some level, you are relying on emotion to determine what is or isn't a reasonable question. Why is the latter question reasonable while the former is not? Both question the nature of the universe, as if the universe must justify itself.

Is it only permissible to ask questions about things that are in some sense "required" to justify themselves? As opposed to asking questions for the hell of it, or in the hope that thinking about the matter might prove enlightening?
________

Perhaps I did not make this clear:
I believe that the chain of explanations for explanations for explanations has to terminate somewhere.

Why should it?

Because the alternative is the exact kind of infinite loop you were just talking about, where we wind up with an infinite loop of things that happen because of other things that happen because of other things that happen... indefinitely.

Wrong. There are two alternatives: 1) The infinite loop, and 2) That the chain is unnecessary beyond the nature of the universe. That is what we're talking about, right? You appear to believe that the nature of the universe itself cannot simply be considered an observation, hence requiring no justification or explanation?[/quote]Oh, come on; you're smarter than this.

The "nature of the universe" you're talking about is itself the product of high-order explanations. Look up in the night sky and you see little dots of light; that's not the nature of the universe except in a very simplistic Stone Age sense of the term. Figuring out that those dots are distant stars is an explanation for why the dots don't seem to move. Figuring out nuclear physics tells you why those distant objects are giving off so much light that you can see them from that far away.

The nature of the universe is not merely your observation of dots of light in the sky, it's the nuclear physics- which is not an observation in its own right: there is no place in the universe you can look and see the Laws of Nuclear Physics floating in the sky for you to transcribe to your notebook. You have to figure them out yourself.

If anyone is going to understand the world above a Neolithic level, they're going to wind up operating at some level of abstraction. How many levels there are to go through depends on the subject, but it's never going to be zero unless you can find a part of the world that is exactly as our monkey-senses and monkey-instincts make it out to be, which isn't likely. So there will be a series of nested theories, models, explanations, whatever you want to call them, running from the stuff we can perceive directly up to the real stuff underlying those perceptions.

Given a chain of explanations from the stuff directly in front of your nose back to some set of fundamental statements about reality, I've been trying to say all along that the chain has to stop somewhere. As Kuroneko explained quite well, when you find the final set of explanations you know the real nature of the universe, and no further explanations are called for or even possible.

Until you get there, further explanations are at least worth looking for. And looking does not imply an infinite regress of reasons: the fact that I think there might be one more layer of abstraction does not mean I think that there are an infinite number of layers.
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Or are you just saying that we should keep searching for more and more elegantly unified theories, which is what scientists are already trying to do? What does your demand for "metaphysical weight" mean, then?

What demand? You're mistaking an attempt to identify something for a demand for it. As far as I'm concerned, metaphysical weight is a property of universal laws in their final form, whatever that form might be. Once you find the final form, any further digging is irrelevant; you have found THE reason why things are the way they are. That's what I mean by "metaphysical weight:" answers that aren't just valid observations, but that are good enough to satisfy a logician that you've nailed down what has to be true, not just what happens to be true.

But if you can't be certain that you've reached the final form, further digging may still be relevant, or at least a rational thing to try to do. Not everyone who tries to dig is a scientist, even if the non-scientists were practically guaranteed to get nowhere... which is not as much the case as one might think, as shown by the relatively new philosophical insights you've been throwing around over the past few years as a refutation of various old silliness.

Why are we even arguing, then? You seem to accept that at some point, the chain ends with "that is just the nature of things", yet you had previously appeared to argue that this is an inadequate answer.

I think we are arguing because you misunderstood my arguments aimed at Kuroneko as a sign that I believed an idea you thought was wrong and foolish. However, as far as I can tell from your attacks on this idea, I believe no such thing.
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And I would say that "how" and "why" are essentially identical when we seek solutions with scientific rather than "metaphysical" weight. But when you ask "why", you appear to be asking for something more: you are implying that a simple mechanistic "how" answer as provided by science (which simply accepts the nature of the universe as an observation) is inadequate.

Perhaps I should have made my opinion more obvious in my last post:

When one's understanding of a subject is complete, I believe* that "how" IS "why," and vice versa, for all purposes including metaphysical ones. "Why is the sky blue?" turns out to be a "how" question: how does light interact with air molecules to scatter blue light all over the place? The answer to that is an exercise in Maxwell's laws. Then you can ask a more abstract question: "why do Maxwell's Laws apply?" A hundred years ago the answer was "they just do, shut up and calculate." Today, the answer is an extended lecture on quantum electrodynamics.**

Even when faced with what appears to be a simple observational fact about the universe (Maxwell's Laws), "shut up and calculate" is not necessarily the final answer to "why do things work that way?" The kind of "why" I've been talking about is the sort whose answer will unpack into a "how" once you've got it figured out, much as "why does light do this?" unpacks into "how does light do this?" once you understand the theory of electromagnetism.

*And I'm pretty sure this places us in violent agreement...
**Or so I am given to understand, since my own physics education doesn't extend to QED yet. Check that with Kuroneko or Surlethe; they seems to have it down.

[Darth Wong]

Assume in the sense of believing it must be true? No. Assume for the sake of argument, with an eye toward an eventual proof by contradiction? Yes.

"For the sake of argument" is an intellectual exercise, but that doesn't mean it is automatically a sound philosophical question. In order to ask for the nature of anything external to the universe, it is necessary to first assume that such a thing is necessary and exists. The question necessarily relies upon an arbitrary assumption, which makes it philosophically weak.

That's the real goal of making the implied assumption "other rational universes could exist" so as to ask "why this rational universe and no other?" Ideally, I'd want to be in a position of saying "no other rational universe can exist, given constraints that I know must be true in the sense that 2+2 must equal 4." The closer I can come to that, the more I understand the universe.

THIS IS THE FUNDAMENTAL CRUX OF YOUR PROBLEM: you want a math-style proof of the universe. The problem is that mathematical proofs are only possible because mathematics is something that we created. We define the components and the terms, we define the rules, so we can generate perfect proofs. The universe is not like that at all: it is not a man-made intellectual exercise, but rather, a pre-existing system which we are trying to understand.

Logic itself always relies upon a starting point. As a general rule, you could take any logical argument and question its base premise, because 100% of logical arguments start from base premises. It is not a valid philosophical criticism of a logical argument to complain that it's possible to question its base premise. It is always possible to ask for more about a base premise.

And the way you get there is by closing off chunks of the set of all imaginable universes, by proving that they aren't rational after all.

No, that's how a mathematician would do it. The scientific method is an acceptance of the fact that the universe was not a man-made intellectual exercise. What you are looking for is impossible because we can only generate such perfect proofs in systems that we create and define, and the universe (never mind imaginary other universes) does not fall into that category. To say that this endeavour would increase your understanding of the universe is utterly ridiculous; it is nothing more than a waste of time based on the foolish notion that we can treat the universe as if we created it.

Not required, but reasonable. Asking "why can't objects exist and not exist at the same time?" surely has no answer; asking "why do only the objects that exist exist and not other objects that, by all appearances, are consistent with the rationality of the universe?" might or might not.

Actually, the two questions are of exactly equal validity. Perhaps that is where your problem lies: on some level, you are relying on emotion to determine what is or isn't a reasonable question. Why is the latter question reasonable while the former is not? Both question the nature of the universe, as if the universe must justify itself.

Is it only permissible to ask questions about things that are in some sense "required" to justify themselves? As opposed to asking questions for the hell of it, or in the hope that thinking about the matter might prove enlightening?

How the hell does that address the criticism that your two questions are logically of equal validity? Answer the damned point instead of trying to change the subject.

Wrong. There are two alternatives: 1) The infinite loop, and 2) That the chain is unnecessary beyond the nature of the universe. That is what we're talking about, right? You appear to believe that the nature of the universe itself cannot simply be considered an observation, hence requiring no justification or explanation?

Oh, come on; you're smarter than this.

The "nature of the universe" you're talking about is itself the product of high-order explanations.

Don't be a stupid asshole. The nature of the universe is not necessarily the product of any of our explanations: those explanations are only increasingly elegant and refined attempts to describe a set of behaviours we can observe. In fact, the universe is not necessarily the product of any explanations at all: even its rationality is only an inference from induction and observation.

Look up in the night sky and you see little dots of light; that's not the nature of the universe except in a very simplistic Stone Age sense of the term. Figuring out that those dots are distant stars is an explanation for why the dots don't seem to move. Figuring out nuclear physics tells you why those distant objects are giving off so much light that you can see them from that far away.

The nature of the universe is not merely your observation of dots of light in the sky, it's the nuclear physics- which is not an observation in its own right: there is no place in the universe you can look and see the Laws of Nuclear Physics floating in the sky for you to transcribe to your notebook. You have to figure them out yourself.

If anyone is going to understand the world above a Neolithic level, they're going to wind up operating at some level of abstraction. How many levels there are to go through depends on the subject, but it's never going to be zero unless you can find a part of the world that is exactly as our monkey-senses and monkey-instincts make it out to be, which isn't likely. So there will be a series of nested theories, models, explanations, whatever you want to call them, running from the stuff we can perceive directly up to the real stuff underlying those perceptions.

Don't patronize me, you long-winded gasbag. I am perfectly aware that direct observations can be modeled with unifying theories. What the fuck is your problem, exactly? Why do you feel the need to generate such absurd verbiage in order to say something which illuminates exactly nothing about this argument? Your problem is that you seem to misunderstand the fundamental nature of the universe: the nature of the universe is its observable behaviour; our theories are an attempt to describe that behaviour, but our theories are not the nature of the universe; the nature of the universe is its observable behaviour: nothing more and nothing less. It is an assumption even to think that there must be any kind of explanation for any of it: we only do this because it seems to work, which is a form of pragmatic philosophy.

Given a chain of explanations from the stuff directly in front of your nose back to some set of fundamental statements about reality, I've been trying to say all along that the chain has to stop somewhere. As Kuroneko explained quite well, when you find the final set of explanations you know the real nature of the universe, and no further explanations are called for or even possible.

See above.

Until you get there, further explanations are at least worth looking for. And looking does not imply an infinite regress of reasons: the fact that I think there might be one more layer of abstraction does not mean I think that there are an infinite number of layers.

The universe is not abstract. The layers of abstraction you speak of are actually attempts to create an increasingly elegant and/or unified model. It's like simplifying an algebraic expression. People want to simplify it to the fewest possible number of terms, but it doesn't mean we're learning "the true nature of the universe"; it means we're trying to make our model of it more intellectually pleasing.