"Suppose you ask your friend Naomi to roll a die without letting you see the result... Having rolled the die Naomi must write down the result on a piece of paper (without showing you) and place it in an envelope...

So some people are happy to accept that there is genuine uncertainty about the number before it is thrown (because its existence is ‘not a fact’), but not after it is thrown. This is despite the fact that our knowledge of the number after it is thrown is as incomplete as it was before."

• Risk Assessment and Decision Analysis with Bayesian Networks, Norman Fenton and Martin Neil, Chapter 1

The increasing entropy rule seems irrelevant, as planet Earth is not a closed system.

With the information age the world looks uglier, dirtier, more corrupt, scheming, mostly because the malicious was hidden from us before.

Nassim Taleb, Twitter

"Why are you in the hospital?" - "Because I was injured when a car hit me."

"Why did the car hit you?" - "Because the driver was drunk and I was standing at the intersection."

"Why was the driver drunk?" and "Why were you standing at the intersection?" and so on and so forth.

Every "why" question about something occurring in the natural world is answered by going one (or more) levels down in the granularity, describing one high-level phenomenon via its components, typically lower-level phenomena.

This isn't unlike deriving one corollary from another. You're climbing back* the derivation tree towards the axioms, so to speak. It's the same in any system, the math analogy would be if someone asked you "why does this corollary hold", which you'd answer by tracing it back to the nearest theorem. Then "why does this theorem hold" would be answered by describing its lower-level* lemmata. Back we go, ever towards the axioms.

All these are more aptly described as "how"-questions, "how" is the scientific question, since what we're doing is finding descriptions, not reasons, in some sense.

Of course you could just solve such distinctions via dictionary and then in daily usage use "why" and "how" interchangeably, which is fine. But it's illuminating to notice the underlying logic.

Which leaves as the only truly distinct "why"-question the "why those axioms?", which in the real world is typically phrased as "why anything at all?". Krauss tries to reduce that to a "how" question in A Universe From Nothing, as does the Tegmark multiverse, which doesn't work except snuggling in one more descriptive layer in front of the axioms.

There is a good case to be made that this one remaining true "why"-question, which does not reduce to merely some one-level-lower description, is actually ill-formed and doesn't make sense. The territory just provides us with evidence, the model we build to compress that evidence implicitly surmises the existence of underlying axioms in the territory. But why bother with that single remaining "Why"-question when the answer is forever outside our reach?

*(We know real trees are upside down, unlike these strange biological things in that strange place outside our window.)

"Why" usually resolves to "how" (if not always (in the physical world), with one notable exception).

The situation is far worse than that. At least a compiled program you can: add more memory or run it on a faster computer, disassemble the code and see at which step things go wrong, rewind if there's a problem, interface with programs you've written, etc. If compiled programs really were that bad, hackers would have already won (as security researchers wouldn't be able to take apart malware), drm would work, no emulators for undocumented devices would exist.

The state of the mind is many orders of magnitude worse.

Also, I'd quibble with "we don't know why". The word I'd use is how. We know why, perhaps not in detail (although we sort of know how, in even less detail.)

But, as compiler optimizations exploit increasingly recondite properties of the programming language definition, we find ourselves having to program as if the compiler were our ex-wife’s or ex-husband’s divorce lawyer, lest it introduce security bugs into our kernels, as happened with FreeBSD a couple of years back with a function erroneously annotated as noreturn, and as is happening now with bounds checks depending on signed overflow behavior.

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