This, also:
http://www.astro.iag.usp.br/~janot/aga0316/artigos/DEFINING%20%20LIFE.pdf

So life can be defined as a natural kind, and yet that is not an implicit theory of essence? Ah, how you Fregean scholastics love dancing on your pinheads.

And how you hang on to your outmoded logic of essences.

Can we do better than just trade insults? I put the case that biology succeeds despite not having a hard definition of the essence of life. And further that this is a case in point of the philosophical notion that such essences are fraught. This is not to say that seeking to set out the various items at the boundary of the living and the non-living is not a worthwhile exercise.

What counts is not whether a prion is alive or no; but getting an accurate description of what it does.

Take a look at this:

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/1349/wittgensteins-mysticism-or-not-

A fine example of how we can get on doing things without having explicit, hard definitions of essences.

By the definition of the term itself: the smallest structural and functional unit of an organism. With this definition, if we were to ever find simpler organisms than our currently known cells, then these would also be called cells I think. — Samuel Lacrampe

I think that definition of "cell" is outdated, and maybe based in misunderstanding. Isn't there many smaller active units within the cell?

Human beings formulate laws, and we don't know for sure whether those formulations reflect actuality in any absolute sense. — John

Yes, so you agree with me, human beings create laws. You can call it "formulate" if you like.

I think you are quibbling over different senses of "follows". Nature either invariably and absolutely acts in accordance with laws, or follows laws, or it doesn't. In either case what those laws are, where they "come from"; what their ontological status is; is a whole other (I would say ultimately undecidable) question. — John

Unless you can demonstrate that there are some laws which are not created, or formulated, by human beings, (perhaps they were formulated by God?) then you should accept that it is very clear that nature does not follow laws. Nature existed long before human beings, and "follows" implies necessarily, posteriority. If you think that I am quibbling about senses of "follows", and believe that there is a sense of "follows" in which the thing being followed is not prior to the follower, then please explain

Yeah I admit I don't understand what the term "semiosis" means (process that involves signs?). — Samuel Lacrampe

There must be data which allows it to persist improvements made. Fire doesn't have that. Plenty of non-living things do, so the feature is not sufficient.

- Either a being is a living being or a non-living being. It cannot be both.

Cannot agree with it. The line is fuzzy, so something can be questionably on either side.

- There exists an instance where a being is clearly labelled as living and another instance where a being is clearly labelled non-living: e.g. a dog and a rock.

Don't understand this one. A rock is not a dead dog, and would a dog not qualify as life if I could not produce a dead one?
If you mean a dog is living compared to the rock, the label seems to have already been applied for the rule to have meaning, so it does not help narrow the essence you seek.

For any rule, it seems to take little effort to conceive of an exception. The conclusion seems to be a theory that avoids strict rules.

I put the case that biology succeeds despite not having a hard definition of the essence of life. — Banno

Definitions are never going to be hard if they have to track the crossing of some critical boundary. It is always going to be the case that the line between non-life and life is going to look hazy under the scientific microscope.

So that is why your problem with metaphysical essence is so misguided. You think the essential difference has to be marked on reality as some binary borderline. On this side life, on the other side, not-life. And the arbitrary nature of such lines on a map are obvious.

So yes, biology succeeds because it finds the essential in generalties - the constraints that speak to global or top-down formal/final causes.

You are imagining the search for essence to be the search for local material/efficient causes - the usual atomist/reductionist approach to understanding "the real". And that then leads to a crazy "natural kinds/rigid designator" style essentialism. That is what promotes the argument that the stuff on one side of a material border must be "non-living", the other side "living", thus provoking a metaphysical implosion and logical crisis.

But once you accept that generals are real, formal and final cause exist, existence itself is simply a state of constraint on foundational vagueness, then the problem of "essence" goes away. We know we are trying to talk about different kinds of hylomorphic substances - different forms of material constraint. So it something globallly functional rather than locally material that we mean to pick out as defining the boundary between living and non-living matter.

So that is why the semiotic approach to definition works. And is the one that theoretical biology keeps picking out, as your reference confesses...

One working definition of ‘life’ that has become increasingly accepted within the origins-of-life community is the ‘chemical Darwinian’ definition. A careful formulation (Joyce, 1994a;b) is: ‘Life is a self-sustained chemical system capable of undergoing Darwinian evolution.’

So life is different in that it localises formal/final cause. It is organismic in being able to remember the negentropic shape that is its entropic advantage.

Non-living matter does not have this internal model of itself. Non-living matter is regular and self-similar only due to global information, or pan-semiosis.

Dissipative structures do seem lifelike. A tornado seems to chase its way across a plane of temperature gradients, sustaining its vortex by "eating" the differences. Physico-chemical nature is ruled by all sorts of such growth and entropification processes. They have common forms - like vortexes and fractals. And they have a generic purpose - as encoded in the Laws of Thermodynamics. So - like even fire - they are sort of life-like ... in being pan-semiotic, or constrained in a global fashion by formal/final cause. But then the ability to internalise this kind of information - form a self-organising model of "self" - marks a functional crossing of a boundary.

But again, if we are to put this under a microscope - ask about life as a natural kind - then we have to actually understand the question we want to ask from nature's own point of view.

The whole point is the functional "having of a self-describing model" - the internalised information that is captured by a whole array of semiotic machinery, but principally genes, neurons, words (and now numbers). So life is semiotic modelling - internally generated constraints over less constrained non-living physico-chemical entropic flows. And now at the material borderline things look hazy because life only needs a stochastic cut-off point between what it - it itself - defines as living vs non-living, self vs non-self, regulated vs haphazard, meaningful vs meaningless.

That is, in being a system able to interpret the differences that make a difference, the system defines its own border of indifference. We humans can stick life under a microscope and complain that this borderline looks hazy to us. But so what? In the "mind" of the organism, it has set its own probabilistic threshold in terms of what is "good enough" as the constitution of its material/efficient self. It has an idea of its formal/final essence. And that is what it is busy living out as an entropic process.

So essence is use. ;)

It is just that life is in fact defined by making essence personal. Essence for the physical world is its global identity in terms of formal/final cause. And essence for the biological world is information that is internalised to "a self". It is a local capacity to add constraints or bounds on entropic activity.

I personally don't feel much need for "essence" as a term. It suffers from the substantive confusion I outlined. Substance was a theory of metaphysical hylomorphism - a "four causes" story about how formal/final cause acted to constrain material/efficient degres of freedom. But then along came atomistic reductionism - in competition with Platonic religious spiritualism. That produced the familiar modern confusion of a sustance dualism.

Folk had to pick a side. Either reality was just material/efficient cause, or there was this other mystic stuff call formal/final cause. And Fregean logical atomism picked its side, pretty soon ran into a ditch, and was left to walk away from its own smoking wreck, muttering bitterly about nothing being certain except that if logical atomism couldn't make metaphysics work, that proved no-one could make it work.

Meanwhile Peirce had already sketched out a much bigger four causes metaphysics that explained the hylomorphic divide in terms of semiosis. Instead of a mind-matter divide, he provided a sign-matter bridge. And now modern thermodynamics is cashing that out in information theoretic terms. We can actually make scientific measurements on both sides of the sign-matter division in terms of entropy or fundamental degrees of freedom.

And as I've pointed out, definition is theory plus measurement. Definition can be precise to the degree we can make exact measurements of what we claim to be believing. The metaphysics of the modern information theoretic approach at last does give us a fundamental measurement basis. And so biology -
already a very recent discipline - has started to really move in the last 30 years.

I had to grit my teeth in order to work my way through that post, Apo.

So essence is use. — apokrisis

So if we set aside for the moment your misguided assessment of modern logic, do we actually disagree on anything of substance with regard to what one does with definitions? It appears that we both reject the classical definition of essence as setting out necessary and sufficient conditions, and that we both prefer to speak in terms of what is done with the definiendum.

The difference seems to be that you continue to call this use, the "essence", while I don't.

I had to grit my teeth in order to work my way through that post, Apo — Banno

That is really interesting information Banno - rolleyes....

The difference seems to be that you continue to call this use, the "essence", while I don't. — Banno

Thanks for again illustrating the narcissistic essence of life and mind. Whatever else you don't know, you know you are right and all that remains to be determined is how everyone else is wrong. Anticipation-based world modelling in a nutshell.

Get back to me if you have some more interesting reply to my arguments than that. Clue: four causes.

So its not worth trying to find a point of agreement. A shame.

Definitions are never going to be hard if they have to track the crossing of some critical boundary. It is always going to be the case that the line between non-life and life is going to look hazy under the scientific microscope. — apokrisis

Small steps, then - in this, is it that there is a distinction between the living and the non-living, and our task is to identify it; or is it that what we are doing is settling on when we might best use the words "living" and "non-living"?

The first is what I would call looking for an essence; the second, looking at use.

The first, obviously. Clearly there is a distinction between living and non-living, and being good philosophers, we have a desire to determine this distinction

Logically, we will never be able to agree "on when we might best use the words" until we determine that distinction.

I think that definition of "cell" is outdated, and maybe based in misunderstanding. Isn't there many smaller active units within the cell? — Metaphysician Undercover

It is possibly an old definition. At any rate, it is the simplest thing that I know to be living with certainty, and so it is a starting point in the discussion. As we get closer to the essence, maybe the title of the simplest living thing will shift.

To use the words means being able to cash them out as acts of measurement. So it is a semiotic coupling of models and measurements, concepts and percepts, intepretants and signs.

If I use the word "cat" successfully - in ordinary language - it means we agree on some interpretation of a sign. And if there is semantic vagueness, I could draw you a picture of my conception, or point to some "actual cat" - perhaps point to that lion sitting over there on a mat, and say "except a lot smaller and friendlier, without the mane, etc". A whole lot of further measurables to constrain your state of conception.

So on what side of the concept-percept or model-measurement divide does the semantic essence reside? Is it the theory that defines the cat, or the acts of measurement? Or the two functioning reliable/usefully/pragmatically together - over time? That is, the formal/final cause - as captured by the model - is coupled to the material/efficient cause, as captured by the acts of measurement (or the physical fact of "the sign of the thing" being triggered, so to speak).

So we start in good Peircean fashion with an epistemology that is personal and covers pragmatic ordinary language use. We all have our private interests and can define our languages of thought. When I see cats in a "perceptual fashion", I might have all sorts of feelings of cuteness and loveableness. But you might look at them with fear, loathing or even indifference. We each come at the world through our own lens of self-interest, our own story of individuated self and private arrangements of purposes or desires.

But when semiosis, through the syntactic machinery of speech, lifts such mindfulness to a communal level - humans as socially constructed creatures - then of course private meanings have to be now shaped by some common purpose (a group or cultural identity). And that means they must have a common form - the constraint of a common response to hearing a word like "cat" used "the right way".

So there is an ideational essence of catness - the one that functions at the cultural level of mindfulness to act as the tacit model of what sufficiently conforms to our contraints-based definition of "a cat". And yes, that definition certainly seems hazy. It sort of includes quolls ... or tiger-cats. But that is no big deal. That is how constraints are meant to function - limiting the variety of semiotic interpretation to the point of indifference.

There might still be further differences if we were to get out our metaphoric boundary atomising microscope - like the three-legged cat - but they don't in fact make an essential difference. At least within some community of ordinary language speakers (as opposed to the good folk running the local cat fanciers show who reject both the quoll and the three-legged critter you turned up with at the competition).

So right. That establishes the epistemological side of the argument for "essences" as being the information that constrains interpretive uncertainty. And clearly such definitions of essence are loaded with self-interest. That is why they speak to formal/final cause as it plays out in minds. The essence includes our reason for looking at the world in some particular way. It is not necessarily a fact of the thing, just necessarily a fact of the pragmatic relation - the fact that speaking this way achieves a (communal) purpose in terms of interacting with the noumenal world (the thing that is resistant or causally "other" to our wishes - the material/efficient causes that we are seeking to control, in short).

If you are with me this far - grind, grind, grind - then you will have already remembered how Peircean metaphysics then flips epistemology into ontology.

If we now want to answer scientific/metaphysical strength questions about natural kinds or essences - talk about the facts of the thing-in-itself, with no distorting human lens of self-interested speech - then we have to have a model of how the physical world is itself a mind doing semiosis. We have to be able to find a way to model formal/final causes "for real". And that is when we start to focus on how nature is in general a self-organising entropic habit. It is modelling itself into existence via acts of measurement.

So now the essence of a cat is whatever a cat genome says it is. To the degree the genome cares about the details. Then the essence of this cat here is whatever its neural or other developmental information has to say about the matter - to the degree that information sweats the fine print. Is the three legged cat still a cat? As far as the three-legged cat is concerned, probably yes. And probably functionally for other cats who come across it.

And then - if we can keep careful track of the information that stands for what is essential and necessary in terms of some individuated identity, not merely accidental or arbitrary differences that don't make a difference - we can cross the boundary between life and non-life to continue to put a finger on natural kinds or essences when talking about non-living systems, like weather patterns, plate tectonics, or stars.

So for you, as an instinctive reductionist, the issue is wherever does essence get to enter the picture? And for me, as a holist, the question is turned around so that it is wherever does essence get squeezed out? If we are now talking about ontology - the real world - what is it like for it to be at its least mindful or purposive, its most accidental or meaningless?

So we are chalk and cheese. My way sees nature as a unity. Even epistemology = ontology in rigorous fashion. Your way always leads to a division - and a division that doesn't even dare speak its own name at that. This is why your arguments always end up as muffled transcendence while claiming the cover of commonsense realism.

Look, he exclaims, the cat is on the mat. If everyone's head turns and nods in agreement, honour is then satisfied. Meaning is use. Syntax is sufficient to demonstrate coordinated behaviour. Actual private semantics be damned as unreachable metaphysics.

Philosophy by dog-whistle. It's just so seductively simple. And just so metaphysically wrong.

Cannot agree with it. The line is fuzzy, so something can be questionably on either side. — noAxioms

A thing can be on either side but not both at once. If p is true, then not-p is false, and vice-versa. This applies to all p, including the term "living" even if we have not found the essence yet. This means that the line separating the living and non-living things must a clear one.

Don't understand this one. A rock is not a dead dog, and would a dog not qualify as life if I could not produce a dead one?
If you mean a dog is living compared to the rock, the label seems to have already been applied for the rule to have meaning, so it does not help narrow the essence you seek. — noAxioms

I mean that a dog is clearly labelled as a living thing, and a rock is clearly labelled as a non-living thing. You misunderstand the point. It is that there are things that fit in each label.

For any rule, it seems to take little effort to conceive of an exception. The conclusion seems to be a theory that avoids strict rules. — noAxioms

What do you mean by rule? Essential properties? Can you prove that for any rule there is an exception? That statement seems to be a self-contradiction. Anyways, my argument proves that the essence exist, it does not attempt to find it.

I mean that a dog is clearly labelled as a living thing, and a rock is clearly labelled as a non-living thing. You misunderstand the point. It is that there are things that fit in each label. — Samuel Lacrampe

You pick two easy ones. Pick something on the line like a biological virus and a computer virus that does random signature changes. The label is not so clear. If one is life and not the other, what makes that distinction besides the bias that the biological one is a 'closer relative to me'?

Essence becomes use becomes measurement becomes agreement on a sign. Then throw in a language of thought.

thanks for your time, Apo.

"If we now want to answer scientific/metaphysical strength questions about natural kinds or essences - talk about the facts of the thing-in-itself, with no distorting human lens of self-interested speech - then we have to have a model of how the physical world is itself a mind doing semiosis."


There is disagreement within the semiotics community whether the field should include physiosemiotics and, by extension, pansemiotics (which would presumably include physiosemiotics and biosemiotics), or be limited to biosemiotics http://biosemiosis.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/re-pan-and-bio.html

Can you give me a general definition of "mind" which is consistent with "how the physical world is itself a mind" and the human mind? Presumably, this definition would be consistent with current work in physiosemiotics and psychosemiotics.

If we now want to answer scientific/metaphysical strength questions about natural kinds or essences - talk about the facts of the thing-in-itself, with no distorting human lens of self-interested speech - then we have to have a model of how the physical world is itself a mind doing semiosis. We have to be able to find a way to model formal/final causes "for real". And that is when we start to focus on how nature is in general a self-organising entropic habit. It is modelling itself into existence via acts of measurement. — apokrisis

Why would you want to practise metaphysics by modeling the physical world as a mind? With such an unreasonable starting point you have very little hope of producing a reasonable metaphysics. That's the sort of metaphysics which gives "metaphysics" a bad name, inclining people to disregard real metaphysicians.

I picked two easy ones on purpose, to show that there exists data on both sides. Your comment again misses the point of my argument that claims that the essence exists, not that it is easily found. I agree that it is hard to label things like viruses, but that is because the essence has not been found yet, not because it does not exist. And the essence must be clear because of premise 1.

I see what you're saying, but your proof is circular:

This may be the end result. But at least I think I can prove that the essence of life exists:
- Either a being is a living being or a non-living being. It cannot be both. — Samuel Lacrampe

That postulate presupposes the conclusion. Any proof based on this is begging.

Premise 1 is not based on the conclusion, but on the law of non-contradiction: the two propositions "A is B" and "A is not B" are mutually exclusive. This is known with certainty even if we don't know what A and B mean.

It is accepting formal and final cause as real at the cosmological level. Even if that is just the general desire for entropification served by the form of dissipative structure. And that does account for life and (actual) mind as biology is ultimately explained as dissipative structure.

I agree that pansemiosis is still a speculative thought. Does it add anything or systematise our thought in any new useful way? And clearly it is a big difference that the interpretance forming non-living being is information outside that being, not information internalised as a model.

So as I said about a tornado, it seems rather lifelike as it rages about a landscape. But it is being sustained by boundary conditions, not by any internal model that makes it a self with some degree of autonomy.

But on the other hand, it feels important to shake up physicalist ontology rather boldly - to show that it is just as weird to call physics a matter of "material" as it is to call it "deadened mind".

Premise 1 is not based on the conclusion, but on the law of non-contradiction: the two propositions "A is B" and "A is not B" are mutually exclusive. This is known with certainty even if we don't know what A and B mean. — Samuel Lacrampe

We've been over this in prior posts. Law of non-contradiction does not hold without a hard definition of the essence, so invoking the law presupposes the conclusion that there is such an essence. Dr Cleland brings the subject up using 'bald' as the example.

Yes, one could arbitrarily make up such a rule, and then be able to classify anything as life or not-life, but what has that proven? That is not the essence of life, it is just an arbitrary rule that sorts things into two buckets. It does not prove the existence of an essence.

Are you sure it's not more a matter of your desperately trying to avoid its conclusions? ;-) — Wayfarer

The issue I suppose is that there's no good grounds for discerning when semiosis does and does not occur such that such that I can be satisfied a sufficiently sophisticated artificial neural network doesn't constitute a self-organizing semiotic system.

Information acting intelligently is at the heart of my interest in comparing ANN's to biological life. DNA has the ability to intelligently build itself from the ground up as information existing in a physical form and manifests it's expressions (the meaning of it's data; the semiotic bit) through very direct physical/chemical interaction with it's environment. Conscious brains however don't have this ability; to DNA, a brain is an artificial computer that it constructed and maintains as a tool to process external stimulus for it's own benefit.

Apokrisis argument is that biological life perpetuates itself at the most fundamental levels by governing dissipative structures: intelligent data governing engines of the dissipation, but human minds themselves cannot readily be described as dissipative systems/structures. All the dissipative structure of human minds could be abstractly looped through the things minds do to keep their bodies alive, but it's all fed back into and reliant upon the dissipative engines governed by DNA, not the mind. We eat and breathe, but to a mind digestion and energy dissemination within the body (and eventually the brain) is automatic and inexorably governed by DNA and the intelligent expressions contained in it's data, not data contained in the mind.

I'm with Apokrisis that we're not about to stumble onto materials which are so perfect that intelligent computers just start building themselves out of it in a way that can compete with things like cell-division, but biological minds don't build their own housings either, only the software which runs on them constitutes the self-organizing property of human minds.

So my conclusion is that there's something inherently lacking in the semiosis + dissipative structure description of life as it applies to conscious minds. In human minds it appears to be strictly semiosis (interactions of data producing intelligence) which is their main feature, while actually governing the engines which resist thermodynamic equilibrium at a fundamental level is entirely left up to the genetic mind. A dissipative system is a great description of biological organisms because the description is true from a thermodynamic perspective, but all the interesting complexity still seems to be locked up in the semiotic bit. I want to understand how semiosis originates and sequesters dissipative structures toward it's own final causes in the first place, and so far the only explanation offered for this is that fundamental material instability/indeterminacy allows data to exhibit intelligent behavior. But how does data contain intelligence? That's what I'm focused on, and is the basis for my comaprison of learning artificial neural networks to human brains and intelligence, and to the anticipatory intelligence contained in genetic data (whose form is far more impressive because it is self-building in addition to self-organizing).

Yes, so you agree with me, human beings create laws. You can call it "formulate" if you like. — Metaphysician Undercover

If laws are purely formal, then they don't reflect anything real about nature. To my way of thinking, it would only be under this assumption that it could rightly be said that human beings "create" laws.

Unless you can demonstrate that there are some laws which are not created, or formulated, by human beings, (perhaps they were formulated by God?) then you should accept that it is very clear that nature does not follow laws. Nature existed long before human beings, and "follows" implies necessarily, posteriority. If you think that I am quibbling about senses of "follows", and believe that there is a sense of "follows" in which the thing being followed is not prior to the follower, then please explain — Metaphysician Undercover

That's a ridiculous claim: I don't need to demonstrate that laws are not formulated by humans; it is unarguably the case that they are. The metaphysical question is as to whether the laws we formulate reflect a reality which is independent of our formulations. You would need to show that our formulations don't reflect any such reality in order to prove that they are merely created by human beings.

We say that streams follow their courses, and yet the courses are not prior to the streams, but are created and modified by them.

Apokrisis argument is that biological life perpetuates itself at the most fundamental levels by governing dissipative structures: intelligent data governing engines of the dissipation, but human minds themselves cannot readily be described as dissipative systems/structures. — VagabondSpectre

In my opinion, the best neuroscience model of the mind is Karl Friston's Bayesian Brain approach. And that does describe it as a semiotic dissipative structure - http://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/~karl/The%20free-energy%20principle%20-%20a%20rough%20guide%20to%20the%20brain.pdf

The mind as informational mechanism is all about reducing the uncertainty that a physical/material world has for an organism. So it is all about modelling that is intimately tied to physical regulation. And that is why a lack of such a tie makes artificial intelligence so impoverished - unless it is, as I argue, tied back into human entropic activities as yet a further level of semiosis.

my conclusion is that there's something inherently lacking in the semiosis + dissipative structure description of life as it applies to conscious minds. — VagabondSpectre

I agree and have often said it: what is missing is mind. Science as it is now practiced is constitutionally incapable of incorporating mind, having gone to great lengths to exclude it from its reckonings. So attempts to explain the basic nature of mind within the framework of science are invaroably procrustean in my view.

Science as it is now practiced is constitutionally incapable of incorporating mind, having gone to great lengths to exclude it from its reckonings. — Wayfarer

That's a bit harsh when science is all about placing empirical or observable constraints on metaphysical speculation. So the observer is included within the very epistemology of science - as the viewpoint which is to be constrained in some pragmatic/semiotic fashion.

So you are criticising that science does not explain mind. But science exists to shape the mind. It is the reasoning mind in action with the benefit of a sharper method of practice. You want mind incorporated as a scientific output, when it is instead incorporated as the input - a way to refine the modelling that minds are there for.

Now science can also produce theories of mind. A model of semiosis is a model of modelling. And forming a modelling relation with the world is what minds do. And it seems obvious that to be in such a modelling relation ought to feel like something. I mean logically, why would it not? Why would we expect being in a lived, intimate, modelling relation with the world to be simply zombie-style computation and not some particular expectation-driven point of view?

So sure, mind science isn't moving towards the discovery of some kind of "mind stuff that lights up with consciousness" - a good old reductionist story of a dualistic mental material with awareness as a property. But mind science already can give a quite reasonable semiotic explanation for "qualia" as what it is like to be in a modelling relation that forms signs of things.

CogSci had a computational or representational view of consciousness as some kind of data display or abstract symbol processing. But neurocognition has gone back to a more organismic or gestalt psychology understanding of mentality as being "ecological". This makes counter-intuitive but accurate predictions about modelling having the purpose of minimising the physical surprises that the world can impose on the mind, rather than the mind having some need to completely simulate the physical world as some mental simulacrum.

Minds are maps of territories, so they are all about turning messy reality into some simple arrangements of signs, like the lines on a scrap of paper that simply represent in compact fashion a way to get about with the least effort or even thought.

So in that sense, science is mind. It is map-drawing taken to another level of simplified habit. What you complain about as a bug - the vast reduction of information that science achieves in forming its models of the world - is its semiotic feature. To be more scientific is to be more mindful - if being a mind is about reducing the physical world's capacity to surprise or confound us to the bare minimum.

A criticism is not a 'complaint'. It's a criticism. >:o

If laws are purely formal, then they don't reflect anything real about nature. To my way of thinking, it would only be under this assumption that it could rightly be said that human beings "create" laws. — John

Right, the laws don't reflect nature, they reflect the inductive conclusions of human beings, therefore the correct interpretation is that human beings create the laws.

The metaphysical question is as to whether the laws we formulate reflect a reality which is independent of our formulations. — John

That's not a relevant issue, it's a misguided question. The laws are created as tools, they assist us in what we are doing. Would you ask the metaphysical question of whether hammers and saws, and other tools "reflect a reality which is independent of our formulations" of these tools? The laws, as tools are produced to aid us in our activities, so if they reflect anything, they reflect those activities. Doesn't it seem like nonsense to you to ask whether these tools reflect a reality which is independent from us, when they are produced for the purpose of being used as tools, by us?