Why try to explain the unexplainable?

Question

A lot of the questions that show up here are about trying to break open some or other old idea that seems unfounded and trying to 'explain' it in terms of something else that is also unfounded, but perhaps feels more satisfying. In culture, there is the tendency to explain a lot of unknowable things with ideas about God. But it all just seems like question-begging, and frankly, I feel just as hungry (or not) afterwards.

What is it that drives people to come up with yet more and more explanations that are not actually founded on anything? What stops us from just admitting, "That's all the farther" and moving on to something useful?

When I started learning about computer programming about 45 years ago, it came after some learning about electronics. So I can say that I do understand transistors, gates, CPUs, memory, network communications, databases and so on. As I write software now, I know 'enough' about the mechanics of computers and systems that I feel no need to pry in to quantum electrodynamics or string theory when I write a web application. I am satisfied about the foundation I am building on.

But some people apparently feel a terrifying gulf underneath their existence and are frantically churning out bricks and mortar to construct something to hold their lives up. Why? It's not going anywhere. Why this angst?

Answer 1

That gulf you point out is called existential angst. It's there for everyone, but some people build blinders into their lives so they (hopefully) won't have to see it

One of the unbridgeable 'facts' of human life — right there along with death and taxes — is uncertainty. Things fall apart, the center cannot hold, etc, and we are often peculiarly unable to see it coming or do anything about it. Within particular, defined arenas we can compartmentalize that uncertainty: as you say, you've compartmentalized your programming skills so that uncertainty in the fundamentals of computer design won't impact your work, and that's great. But we can't compartmentalize everything that way. All sorts of things can happen:

• Natural disasters (fires, tornadoes floods…)
• Human made disasters (mass shootings, wars, drunk drivers, climate change, economic collapse…)
• Personal disasters (infidelity or divorce, drug-addicted children, victimization, debilitating injuries…)
• Diseases (plagues, cancers, genetic diseases…)

If you're fortunate, none of these will ever happen to you, and you'll go through life paying your taxes until death comes calling. If you're not so fortunate, well… then you'll have existential crises to face, and you'll feel that urge for a higher order of answers. Often the mere anticipation of these unpredictable events will lead people to existential angst and a wider search for meaning, but a lot of people choose the ultimate form of compartmentalization — telling themselves: "That stuff will never happen to me" — and effectively try to run out the game on pure luck.

Most of philosophy, religion, and other attempts to 'understand' the world are really efforts to understand our relationship to the world: to understand how we can gracefully and coherently cope with the weird curveballs that life can throw at us. They are attempts to deal, without either panicking or avoiding the potentialities of real life.

Answer 2

This is a psychology question but it’s because we have an agency bias. For some reason, an explanation that involves the actions of an agent feels more satisfying than the actions of a mindless process.

This is ultimately the reason why people believe in god, spirits, or some other unknown world where a being is involved. It is more satisfying to think that some being exists for no reason rather than the universe or some other fundamentally mindless process existing for no reason.

This is likely due to evolutionary reasons since assuming an agent behind things happening was probably useful for survival. Thinking that a lion is causing a rustle in the wind may give you more time to run away and survive. This is just a theory though: I don’t think anyone knows for sure why we have this bias.

Answer 3

Why try to explain the unexplainable?

First, most of the time, we don't know that the unexplainable is unexplainable. We just explain what we think is explainable (putting aside for a moment the many charlatans who operate in this neighbourhood).

The motivation to explain is most plausibly the culturally determined realisation of a genetically determined capacity. We clearly have the capacity to try and give the apparent reason that we did something. This is probably the result of our capacity to introspected. To give X as the reason that justifies that we did Y, we only need to be intuitively aware that in our own mind, X seems to imply Y. Thus, our logical capacity allows us to make explicit the reasons that we seem to have.

It is then at least very plausible that social life may in some historically determined situations make elaborating on our reasons valuable. This was at least clearly the case in Ancient Greece, beginning some time before Aristotle's time. Whatever the reasons for that to happen, it worked remarkably well. Philosophers would sometimes try to find the reasons that things are as they appear to be, and this provided some impetus for the analytical tradition of Western Philosophy, which in its turn very plausibly helped the scientific idea to develop. The many impressive successes of science then further contributed to increase the cultural value of explanation.

There are many threads in this very complicated development, for example the idea of academies in Ancient Greece, or the historical development of the administration in some countries, and the accumulation of capital in economically developed countries etc., but the idea now seems entrenched in our culture that it is valuable to explain things.

This relative success may have given ideas to the charlatans preying on gullible people by peddling spurious explanations, including for, and perhaps particularly for, the unexplainable. Who is ever going to prove you wrong?

Answer 4

The difficulty with this question is drawing the line between questions we haven't found the right way to solve, and questions that are genuinely intractable.

For example, we've been trying to figure how how brains work, and how consciousness arises in them, for a long time. We know a lot about how individual brain cells work, and we know that various regions of a brain have specialised functions, but there's a huge gap between those two areas of knowledge, and we don't understand consciousness well at all.

Consciousness remains in the realm of philosophy and psychology, because we don't understand its biology. But it doesn't seem like something we should give up on understanding, does it?

It's hard to decide a problem is definitely intractable. We also tend to feel it's wrong to tell people not to think about things that interest them. So some people try, for a while, to deal with insoluble problems. This does not seem like a major problem.

Answer 5

Your question, as evidenced by your example of yourself as a programmer, is asked from the perspective of an engineer. The goal of engineers is to build things that work and last; their approach to science is a very pragmatic one. The main criteria for any knowledge is its usefulness. All an engineer needs to know about anything is that it works, and you describe that stance very succinctly.

Philosophy is about the opposite of engineering. It does not have a pragmatic goal — all it seeks is gaining insights. Somebody in pursuit of new insights will not stop asking just because existing knowledge is sufficient to build stuff.

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Besides, your premise is utterly wrong: That a question has been pondered for thousands of years without a result does not mean at all that it is unanswerable. At the dawn of mankind, almost nothing was understood beyond a purely pragmatic level, and everything was attributed to the divine. That state of affairs lasted from the emergence of the homo sapiens until maybe Buddha or ancient Greece, perhaps about 298,000 years (add a few hundred thousand years if you attribute that kind of thinking already to homo erectus.).

We have obviously made great progress after initially wondering about these things for a few hundred thousand years. If we are happy with our modern, technology-driven and -driving society we may actually be glad that some people didn't stop asking these questions.

Answer 6

In my experience, people do not try to explain the unexplainable. If they know a thing to be unexplainable, then most people tend to just mentally mark it as such and move on. What people do attempt is to explain and explore the edges around what is known and what is not known, in an attempt to further their knowledge.

There was a time when electricity was "unexplainable", but people became interested in learning more about it. As our collective knowledge spread into the previously unknown, it eventually reached the explanations, and then we have continued to question even further. So, generally, it is people being curious and perhaps having a bit of hubris, which has encouraged our explorations in to knowledge.

Of course, it would be a bit too generous to say that this is always the case. There is the other side of the coin where a person believes a thing to be true or untrue, contrary to some other party, and they have determined to find proof of their position so that they might be vindicated for holding their belief. This, too, can at times be effective, since even with less admirable incentives we might still increase our knowledge. It is just a slower process and more prone to reaching into the unexplainable. Even so, the seeker is still explaining more and more things and probably does not believe that the thing itself is unexplainable.

I do want to point out, though, that there are many things which a person, such as yourself, might believe to be unexplainable or unknowable, but which are, in fact, quite knowable. You mentioned beliefs about God, which I think is apt. I would say that while there are necessarily some things about God, assuming such exists, which we could not possibly know, there are things, at least in certain contexts, which we can know, at least as well as we can know anything. The problem that you might have noticed is that when people debate whether or not there is a god, they typically do so poorly, by debating the existence of god directly, rather than debating the point of actual divergence in their beliefs. People don't just believe or disbelieve God in a bubble or as a choice they just made one day. They do so because of what they believe about the fundamentals, which they almost never debate. This is what actually makes the argument go nowhere. Each side believes the other side to be acting from something unknowable, but thinks his own side to be knowable, but they often fail to realize it.

Answer 7

A lot of the questions that show up here are about trying to break open [...]

Finally, I can use my favorite quote from The Dark Tower book:

"To break is divine" - Ted Brautigan, The Dark Tower

I want to offer a more positive motivation for the desire to explain: For some people, trying to explain things is fun and an enjoyable activity. From my personal perspective, I became a research scientist because I love puzzle-solving and I grew up in an environment that supported my curiosity. I am confident that the same is more or less true for my colleagues and peers.

To reference another piece of media, my favorite scene in the recent movie Oppenheimer was the first successful test of the atomic bomb. The first reaction of the scientists to the massive and devastating explosion was to smile. That little smile of satisfaction that: "Yeah, we got it right! We solved the puzzle!" And I felt that.

Answer 8

Your question is a mix of many questions, many levels.

Para 1

The first paragraph is the essential wish to know and is famously answered in te first line of Aristotle's metaphysics:

All men by nature desire to know...

I've heard it even stronger

Man IS a desire to understand

From this pov your question Why do men seek to know could as well be Why do men feel attracted to women (at least in some contexts)?

Well that's the way it is! And pursuing it is a contradiction of the question itself!!

Para 2

The second para is I suspect your real question: Why do ppl do bad philosophy?

But isnt that how everything human is?

• good law — justice — and bad — legalism
• good politics — statesmanship and bad — politickong
• good music and bad
• good oarents and not so good
• good religion that redeems and bad that enslaves
• Likewise there is philosophy and philosophology

I think you're familiar with Ecclesiastes

Para 3

Your 3rd paragraph is at a much finer grained level, what I will call strategic ignorance. Of which there are 2 variants:

• Good strategic ignorance
• Bad strategic ignorance.

Can these multiple levels be put together into a larger framework?

Philosophy, Science, Technology

I find Gurdjieff's 3-fold classification of philosophy, theory, practice useful. A more modern version would be philosophy, science, tech/engineering.

• Technology/engineering practice is understanding at our level, as how to more than what is
• Science/theory is in terms of laws, the more quantitative, the better
• Philosophy is an exploration of all possibilities

Clearly getting lost in philosophy or even theoretical considerations will not allow you to finish your website project.

And yet if you would like to explore how one could perform an order of magnitude better than you are currently doing, you have to step back from your immediate project and ask theory/philosophy questions. What in CS is called paradigm questions.