/sci/ - Science & Math

It's over

>>10902085
>They aren’t the basic building blocks.
They are, for all practical purposes. You don't see quarks floating around by themselves.

>How is it not?
Because, as I said right fater that, even idealism needs assumtpions. So this kind of infinite regress happens in non-materilistic doctrines as well, since you can keep questioning the basic principles and reduce them to other principles (as you can reduce protons to smaller particles).

>We can still examine them.
And that's exactly the problem, since it leads either to infinite regress or to navel gazing. If you try to prove the assumptions, it's infinite regress; if you don't try to prove them, you're just trying to justify them with rhetoric which is navel gazing.

>We are examining the merit of these basic principles.
And how do you go about that? Exactly what makes idelaism better than materialism or vice versa? You don't even need to believe in materialism to do science. Science is all about "doing" things regardless of the ultimate metaphysical principles we use to justify those operations. So long as experiments confirm the correctness of the predictions based on some theory, the theory is fine, it doesn't matter what are its assumtpions. Metaphysics is a matter of personal taste with no bearing on the actual practice of science.