Not at all. It is an issue of not conflating the map with the terrain. Fluctuation is a statistical observation. It says nothing at all about WHY anything happens. Statistical observations have nothing to do with causation (“correlation is not causation”). The actual question would be “Why are quantum states fluctuating?”
Noooo. A “virtual particle” is not actually a particle at all. It is a chosen amount of energy to be treated as if it was a bundled up particle. Virtual particles are entirely conceptual, not real particles at all. I do that same thing with my “afflates”. I could validly call an afflate a “virtual particle” merely because it is treated like one. But I prefer to stay away from this kind of confusion. “Virtual” means “sort-of-like-but-not-really”, just like a “virtual reality game”.
“Why” questions are simply questions that ask what is the cause of some given event.
“Why did this happen?” means “what caused this to happen?”
Such questions assume that the event has a cause. Which is not always the case.
There are people – strictly speaking morons – who think that there must be a why behind everything.
These are pseudo-intellectuals who start with what they want to see rather than with what is already there.
Not every question is answerable. You must first ask: is there an answer to this question?
It is very wrong to say that science does not ask WHY questions.
It does. It is merely not obsessed with them (the way JSS is.)
If we try to understand “why” questions more generally, we can say that “why” questions are fundamentally questions that ask “how can we predict/derive an event based on/from events that preceded it?” Which reveals that there is not much difference between "why"s and "how"s. They are merely two sides of the same coin. This also means that science asks “why” questions all of the time contrary to what morons are claiming.
Can you name a single event that does not have a cause and do not say the universe because it is not actually known if it is eternal
So name something that happens within the universe that has no cause. I do not mean something that has a cause which is unknown
I will be very surprised indeed if you can genuinely answer this question
Whatever cannot be predicted at some point in time has no cause.
Very simple stuff.
The question of “does an event has a cause?” is a matter of personal judgment.
It’s no different from questions such as “does this or that person have cancer?”
You collect some amount of evidence and then you judge based on it.
The number of events we cannot predict is far greater than the number of events we can predict.
Unfortunately, people only focus on what is positive ignoring what is negative which leads to this delusion that predictable events are not only more numerous than unpredictable events but are actually the only kind of events there are.
Morons think that the universe works according to their expectations.
Morons expect causes to be everywhere, therefore, causes must be everywhere.
Morons downplay statistics and inductive/synthetic method of thinking in general.
Morons think there are absolutes (e.g. absolute certainty.)
Morons think that 100% certainty means “it’s going to happen”.
Morons think that only deduction has logically necessary conclusions.
Morons don’t understand what logical necessity is.
Morons don’t understand that inductive conclusions are also logically necessary.
Morons don’t understand that deduction is a superficial tip-of-the-iceberg form of reasoning that is built directly on top of the more fundamental form of reasoning that is induction.
Morons are superficial so they pay an excessive amount of attention to words thereby placing what is real far into the background.
I can go on if you want . . . there is a lot to say about morons.
The difficulty I [and others] have with explanations of this sort is that they are basically predicated on assumptions we are not able to grasp much beyond, well, assuming that what you say is true.
Now, how would any particular scientist or philosopher finally pin this down such that every and all scientists and philosophers would be obligated to concur?
Let alone being able to explain it to folks like me.
I’m not saying that what you are saying is wrong. Just that to me it is one more example of the gap between words and worlds.
The Big Bang either exploded into existence out of nothing at all or it’s Big Bangs all the way down or the Big Bang itself is not the explanation for existence.
I just suspect this is not something that is “easy to know”.
Here again we have a general description. Only this one is backed up by all that we have actually come to know about the laws of physics and the reliability of mathematics.
But: physicists continue to explore the extent to which there may or may not be a disconnect between the very, very small and the very, very large.
And one suspects that they are still a long way off from intertwining them into a theory of everything. One in which there does not appear to be a way in which to falsify it.
The rest [again] is this:
There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.
