Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
I hope it's not encouraged for third parties to jump into survey/top-level-question threads to tell responders how wrong they are. That would be a major deterrent from posting in those threads.
I don't remember exactly what I was originally going to say; but I hope that some of the following is relevant.
"Why does anything exist" seems like an obvious dead end. Something that doesn't exist can't be the cause of something that does, so if everything that exists (or existed in the past) needs a causal explanation, you just have an infinite regress. Figuring out what exactly one means by "exist" can be useful, but I can't see how that would point to anything like "the existence of God", rather than something like "the word means different things in different contexts, and in other contexts it doesn't mean anything".
Does reality follow orderly laws, or do we develop laws to model regularities in reality? A reality has to have some kind of consistent behavior for anything to inhabit and observe it, but ours is also full of disorderly and unexplained phenomena. From one perspective, we should expect to find ourselves in an orderly reality because it's a simpler hypothesis, and we should assign simpler hypotheses higher priority than more complicated ones. From another, we assume that our reality is orderly because it's a simpler hypothesis, and simpler hypotheses are easier to work with.
You say "nothing comes from nothing", but we generally don't think of math as "coming from" or "going" anywhere. It's just inherently, timelessly true, independently of any particular material reality. Iterative functions and sequences have initial values or states. The universal dovetailer function, after a sufficiently large finite number of steps, inevitably produces a finite universe containing you.
Are you not sure that other people have supernatural conscious existences? What would you consider evidence for or against it?
"Conscious" is also another word that seems to mean different things in different contexts, but that seems like a tangent. I don't know why creatures sleep or why we experience it the way we do.
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