What means "why"?

[Tim R]

Have you ever wondered what it means to ask "why"?

What is it that we want to hear when we ask "why is this"? Do we want to know the "reason" for something, whatever that means? Or is it something else?

What is going on in the mind when we ask "why"? Where does it come from? What do we expect?

It's a form of question... a form of not knowing...  and being dissatisfied with not knowing. To ask is to cling. But to what?

Why do we create problems where there aren't any? Don't we have anything better to do??

[At awe]

They keep saying here that there is no reason . So “why?” becomes useless. It was my favorite question ?

[SilentTears]

Right direction! ?

[LastThursday]

Why are you asking this question?

[Tim R]

28 minutes ago, LastThursday said:

Why are you asking this question?

Same reason as you

[Someone here]

1 hour ago, Tim R said:

 Do we want to know the "reason"? 

Yeah. Why is asking for a reason. Look it up in the dictionary 

[Strangeloop]

Why we want a reason then?

What's the reason of asking the questipn"why?" The reason is to get the reason.

Then what is the reason used for? To rationalize? If that's the case then we could say the reason we ask for a reason is to have a reason for a reason.

[seeking_brilliance]

'why' works best when it's more of a mirror, not looking for some concrete concept to arise from the question. 

[Origins]

@Tim R yeah firstly let's go into what it is:

Firstly you just gotta think abstractly about the mental angle, because that's all it is, its a mental angle on the phenomenon you're processing, the same goes to how, what.

Why --> Representation of how (which then automatic intelligence detects the patterns of --- within that systems engineering, and within that great variability across the population)

What --> Recall, identification and differentiation

How --> Reverse engineering (systems engineering)

Secondly we've just got curiosity. It's not complicated. Minus curiosity you minus any care for why. The next question is why people are curious. Here curiosity can be a byproduct of say dopamine and an extrinsic byproduct to say some survival or higher need (i.e. social connections). 

All this stuff is pretty straightforward.