/lit/ - Literature

>>18249942
me too, man. I kept talking with people on the internet, trying to understand how I can convince myself to get by with partial knowledge. For all the questions that humanity has answered (philosophy, science, humanities, etc.), we still struggle with basic ones. We still face the possibility of paradigm shifts in science. We still don't know how to live. We still don't know how to define the scientific method. Our best solutions to the AI problem is throwing more math at it and more supercomputers until it somehow "clicks" and becomes full-blown, conscious AI.

My question is (and I can't really define it, it's more like a feeling or push/pull):
>if philosophy and life is full of questions that have no final answer, then how can we rationally choose incomplete solutions and live with them?
Basically, in math we don't know whether we invent or discover it, or if realism holds and Plato was right, or if fictionalism or formalism works, or something else. Even basic logic is sometimes attacked.

Do you remember or use the basic and probably most important tool of mathematics: proof by contradiction? Some mathematicians refuse it. I refuse to use it too, it just feels wrong, it's like being given a thingamajig that confabulates dinglepops and you apply it but you're like "wtf am I doing man... it's alien". There's constructivism in mathematics that tries to replace proofs by contradiction. But it's even weirder than that... mathematicians still use proofs by contradiction, and it still works, and we still use the math to go to the moon, apply snapchat filters, and so on.

I'm trying to find an answer, anyone, pls respond. I feel like shit. I can't study anymore. When I read, I feel an air of pointlessness. Everything feels like a patchwork, guesswork or grasping in the dark. Sometimes it works. Sometimes you fail?