Originally posted by Kelp(p)
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We like to ask "why". We naturally seek answers to the question. Eventually, we reach fundamental things to which the question of 'why' has no answer (or no obtainable one). Those fundamental things are brute facts.
There's another way of looking at it, though, and this other way is what Searle has in mind. A 'brute fact' to him, as best I can tell, is something that is true objectively. Whether or not there is snow on a mountain is true regardless of my perception. Yes, there are physical explanations that give us a reason for why there is snow, but those explanations, rooted in laws, are fundamentally brute in nature. Even if we grant a creator deity of any kind, we still end up with the fundamental laws of physics in existence. We may never find out 'why' that deity made the laws the way they are, but the laws are such all the same. They "just are".
Does that help?
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