It's true because things in such situations behave in such ways. I don't know why this is supposed to entail laws-as-habits. — Michael

If there are no real tendencies or habits that govern things in such situations, then what constrains them to behave in such ways?

I'm not the one saying that physical laws are habits, so I don't know why you're asking me. — Michael

If laws of nature are not real tendencies or habits, then what are they?

If there are no real tendencies or habits that govern things in such situations, then what constrains them to behave in such ways? — aletheist

The fundamental behaviour of things is, by definition, fundamental. There is no further explanation.

If laws of nature are not real tendencies or habits, then what are they?

As I said in my first post, there is just the behaviour of things and our descriptions of such behaviour. There's no need to posit some extra thing which is the "law". If something is to be called a "law", then it's one of these things.

The fundamental behaviour of things is, by definition, fundamental. There is no further explanation. — Michael

You do not think that the remarkably consistent behavior of things calls for an explanation? If not, why not?

As I said in my first post, there is just the behaviour of things and our descriptions of such behaviour. There's no need to posit some extra thing which is the "law". If something is to be called a "law", then it's one of these things. — Michael

You do not think that questions like why things behave as they do and why this behavior is so consistent are worth exploring? We should just accept them as brute facts and not inquire further?

The fundamental behaviour of things is, by definition, fundamental. There is no further explanation. — Michael

But who gets to decide when something is fundamental? If we just said that it's a fundamental law that a computer turns on when the power button is pressed, we'd be wrong, since it clearly isn't a fundamental law in the sense you're getting at. It can be explained further, and thus better, than just stating that it's a brute fact and moving on.

The fact is that what you are claiming to be fundamental is perhaps not; or, if it is, there still remains the question of why it is fundamental in the first place. "It just is" is perhaps even more mysterious than "something else made it this way", but it tries to pretend to be anti-mysterious and obvious to escape any worrysome metaphysical issues that arise when people start thinking.

For as much crap that is thrown at theists for using god-of-the-gaps reasoning, popular scientists are disappointingly inept at answering this question and instead tend to pretend it doesn't exist, or use fortune telling reasoning to assert that the answer will be elucidated later on.

Whatever is the fundamental behaviour is fundamental. What I'm saying is that it's a mistake to think of laws of nature as being something that isn't the behaviour (or a description of said behaviour).

You do not think that the remarkably consistent behavior of things calls for an explanation? If not, why not?

...

You do not think that questions like why things behave as they do and why this behavior is so consistent are worth exploring? We should just accept them as brute facts and not inquire further? — aletheist

Because the fundamentals are, by definition, fundamental. You might want to say that these laws-as-habits are fundamental (else I guess you'll have to explain why these habits are the way they are and why they apply to the physical things they do?), but I think it far simpler to just accept the behaviour itself as fundamental.

Behaviorism was dominant back in the day, in large part because the mind was seen as unable to be studied scientifically. But clearly people don't just "behave" in mechanical processes and impulses. There's a mind behind it all.

Similarly, you wish to argue the nominalist position that natural laws are simply descriptions of behaviors. But where does causality come from? When two hydrogen atoms and an oxygen atom bond and become H(2)O, we can make a description of this phenomenon. But this description doesn't cover all the bases. Why does hydrogen bond with oxygen? And why does it bond in some instances, but not others? The element of contingency here leads me to believe that there is legitimately something relevant that "decides" what is going to happen.

So, if A causes B, why does A cause B?

For the record, I am skeptical of laws of nature. I prefer dispositions and powers. Laws of nature are mathematical abstractions based upon these things.

Because the fundamentals are, by definition, fundamental. — Michael

But how do you know that the observed behaviors themselves are fundamental, rather than manifestations of something else that is even more fundamental? In other words, how can you tell when to stop looking for a further explanation?

... I think it far simpler to just accept the behaviour itself as fundamental. — Michael

Of course it is simpler to settle for calling it a brute fact, but that does not make it rationally justifiable, let alone correct. Where would science be today if Newton had shrugged his shoulders because falling from trees is merely what apples happen to do?

For the record, I am skeptical of laws of nature. I prefer dispositions and powers. Laws of nature are mathematical abstractions based upon these things. — darthbarracuda

I think that what you call dispositions and powers - i.e., what I call tendencies and habits - are the laws of nature. Mathematical abstractions are what we use to represent them, perform calculations in accordance with them, etc.

I think that what you call dispositions and powers - i.e., what I call tendencies and habits - are the laws of nature. Mathematical abstractions are what we use to represent them, perform calculations in accordance with them, etc. — aletheist

I think we generally agree. Habits and tendencies arise from dispositions and powers - they are the "macro" scale "laws" while dispositions and powers form a network at the "micro" level. As such the macro-scaled habits and tendencies can change, similar to the Piercean tychism. How a system behaves is dependent not only on its constituent parts but also on the organization of these parts, which creates a causal web/network in which general behavior arises.

Useful mathematical equations are not actual laws of nature, but that simple fact does not tell us that there are no laws of nature. — Querius

It therefore remains that the question that the OP is asking cannot be answered until someone presents a concrete law of nature. If nature can be best described as tendencies or habits that are somewhat repetitive or habitual then that is all there is. Everything is subject to unexpected, ambiguous, unanticipated changes. There is no fully repetitious or predictable event and therefore no law that can precisely define such events. There is a huge gap between some theoretical notion of general behavior vs actual behavior as it unfolds.

To put it more concretely, the concept of a law of nature is rather elastic and loose, and really doesn't provide any additional insights into what is happening, though it is sometimes called upon to justify some pre-determined path of events. Under such conditions, I have no idea how to answer the OP other than to say, I guess not because I can't seem to find any law of nature anywhere, just some generalized habits which have no claim to irreducibly.

I like your circle metaphor. However, how does one get from “unlawfulness” to a (perfect) circle? — Querius

The circle simply illustrates the basic principle that a symmetry is defined by differences not making a difference.

Unlawfulness comes in once we start talking about symmetry in the sense of dynamical equilibrium states - or broken symmetries that can't get more broken and so ... become effective or emergent symmetries again.

And this is better illustrated by a gas of particles. At equilibrium, every particle is as likely going forward as going backward. So all action settles to a collective average.

But if you really want to get into it, you could consider the physics of Goldstone bosons - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldstone_boson - which are local spinless excitations resulting from global symmetry breakings.

The usual crude description of this is that this kind of irreducible excitation arises like the way a ball balanced on a Mexican hat. The ball has no choice but to roll down the slope (breaking its initial symmetry). But then nothing stops the ball rolling around in a circle in the trough of the hat. It makes no difference to the energetics of the system which way a broken field actually points. And so - being free - it must happen. The ground state becomes a new effective symmetry - the ball rolling around in the circle of the trough - which the world then reads off quantumly as a new degree of freedom or an actual particle.

Also I don’t see how the circle metaphor elucidates the existence of various fundamental constants, which could have been very different; see the multiverse hypothesis. — Querius

Are you talking about laws or constants? Or laws with different constants? That is, do you have a clear story on how they are the same or different kinds of things?

Personally I'm not a great fan of multiverses precisely because of the muddled thinking on these issues.

Consider again a circle and ask whether pi, as a constant expressing the ratio of radius to circumference in Euclidean space, could be different in a different universe? Doesn't pi have to be pi in all conceivable (flat) universes?

The constants of nature scale the actions of nature. So they put a ruler on the local degree of symmetry breaking. It should be no surprise if they turn out to be effective balances - themselves "geometric ratios" - as, for instance, string theory might suggest from the internal structure of compactified dimensionality.

Another simple analogy is random sphere packing - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_close_pack

You can take a bunch of balls and stack them carefully - with maximum order - and fill 74% of the available space with balls. So 26% always remains free space. But if instead you are only allowed to shake the balls into place - do things nature's way, the probabilistic way - then you can only get down to a 64% to 36% ratio of ball to void.

So naively, nature ought to be able to achieve its absolutely orderly ground state. But instead - there always being irreducible jitter - one would expect ground states to only be effective. They would reflect an average behaviour that emerges because freedom is as constrained as possible, and yet that average is itself based on a free symmetry.

With sphere packing, that emergently "grounding symmetry" is the ability of the balls to still slip about. If any balls happen to get stacked for an instant with ultimate crystalline regularity, that can't last long as the greater mass of balls will jostle them back towards the more typically random and loosely packed arrangement.

So in nature, you have to start with a global symmetry (that gets broken). But also end in a local symmetry that puts an effective limit on that breaking. Otherwise you really would end up with nothing rather than some fine-grain groundstate blur of action that is the thermal differences that can no longer create a real difference.

The fundamental behaviour of things is, by definition, fundamental. There is no further explanation. — Michael

Which is why fundamental is a word that a process metaphysician would only use in quotes.

An ontology of self-organising habits sees everything as instead emergent. Instead of reality being constructed bottom-up from irreducible parts, it instead arrives at its own irreducible limits by way of a generalised constraint on free possibility.

Suppose that I am holding a stone. If I were to let go of it, then it would fall to the ground. This proposition is true, regardless of whether I ever actually let go of the stone. It expresses a tendency or habit - a conditional necessity - that really governs the stone's behavior in an inexhaustible continuum of possible cases, so it is not reducible to any actual occurrence or collection thereof. — aletheist

Yep. There was no comeback on that.

Michael wants to focus nominalistically on instances of behaviour, and yet at the same time, he accepts that the behaviour in question is exceptionless. If we let the stone go, there is zero expectation it will rise, let alone float. So we would have reason to talk about laws or habits of nature unless there were constraints defining the very freedoms we are pointing to.

We can call the behaviour of the stone an example of universal gravitational action because the stone apparently has many directions open to it, but moves - indeed accelerates - in always only the one. And if we have both freedoms and constraints, that is two things to talk about. You can't just label them the one thing of "instances of behaviour".

Does an ever-changing universe (cyclic or progressively expanding) have bearing on the idea that physical processes determine the laws and not vice versa? If the universe is ever-changing, and processes determine the laws, would that not necessarily result in ever-changing laws — contrary to what we find? — Querius

Do processes determine the laws, or are what we describe as 'laws' simply a generalisation of processes? And, if such processes, or laws, were constantly changing, could anything exist? I would have thought that there have to be 'islands of stability' for anything whatever to exist.

Habits is a way to understand nature other than laws.

I habitually wake up in the morning, however the time I awake constantly changes, and yes it is possible that I will not awake at all. Habits are not cast in stone, they are just highly probable with deviations. Habits provide some degree of stability while still allowing for enumerable possiblities.

As I have noted before, the perfect circle can be real, just not actual. — aletheist

The analogy referred to a spinning circle, and by this description, "spinning" implies necessarily that it is actual. Therefore the analogy refers to an actual circle, which according to your statement above, cannot be a perfect circle. However, the description in the analogy described the spinning circle in a way which could only refer a perfect circle. Therefore the situation described by the analogy is impossible, contradictory.

The analogy referred to a spinning circle, and by this description, "spinning" implies necessarily that it is actual. Therefore the analogy refers to an actual circle, which according to your statement above, cannot be a perfect circle. However, the description in the analogy described the spinning circle in a way which could only refer a perfect circle. Therefore the situation described by the analogy is impossible, contradictory. — Metaphysician Undercover

It's not that difficult.

If you want to talk about actual circles, then the form of a perfect circle represents their exceptionless limit. So it is what actuality can both aim for, yet never completely attain.

And yet by the same token, actuality can attain effective perfection if it gets close enough so that it makes no bleeding difference.

So if we grant actuality the purpose of being circular, it can get there as close as can possibly be measured. The very idea of "having a purpose" entails the further idea of "there being a point beyond which there wouldn't be continuing reason to care". Which is the pragmatic fact that saves us getting hung up on Platonistic paradox - ie: purposes can be satisfied, at least relatively speaking. :)

So pragmatic purposes already pre-suppose their limits because a purpose definitely conceived is one conceived in terms of what then counts as a matter of generalised indifference. Logic says eventually, a purpose gets satisfied and so further action in that direction becomes an irrelevance.

Which is what spinning a circle (or talking about rotational symmetry) illustrates. You can spin until you create a circle. But continuing to spin then doesn't make any actual difference. Once action has expressed its limit, further action doesn't change anything.

And that is the way to understand why nature develops lawful or habitual behaviour. In breaking symmetries, it eventually arrives back at symmetries. We exist in a Newtonian classical paradise of inertial freedoms because - in the end - the two principal symmetries of translation and rotation can't be washed away by any conceivable spatial action. And then relativity includes Lorentzian boosts in this picture - uniting the spatial story with the energetic or temporal one.

Finally along comes quantum mechanics to scale the actual size of the fundamental indifference our Universe displays. Our spatiotemporal geometry is effective or emergent. QM says here is the Planck ruler which we can use to measure the actual gap between what reality can manage to achieve and the classical perfection we might think it was always striving after.

If the behavior of things is actually invariant in some fundamental sense and doesn't evolve, then it would seem the invariant behavior must be determined by something that is 'over and above' the individual things. Such a speculative entity is what we refer to as a "law of nature'; they do not consist in mere description. Even if the behavior of things is invariant over short or medium time scales but evolves over the long term and that evolution is ordered as opposed to totally arbitrary then it would seem that something must be determining the forms that evolution may take.

If the tendency of nature to form habits is universal, always and everywhere, then would that tendency not itself be a law of nature?

I would call it an observation that there seems to be habits in nature that change over time and between each repetition. Law, as commonly used, implies an invariance, which I don't subscribe to.

Which is what spinning a circle (or talking about rotational symmetry) illustrates. You can spin until you create a circle. But continuing to spin then doesn't make any actual difference. Once action has expressed its limit, further action doesn't change anything. — apokrisis

Wouldn't further spin increase the rate of spin? Do you think that the rate of spin is not an actual difference? If not, then there is no difference between spinning and not spinning either. Your statement seems to imply that there is no difference between a static circle and a spinning circle. But surely there must be, and if there is a difference between these two, then the rate of spin is also a difference which needs to be considered.

Yes, but logically speaking the possibilities are that the tendency of nature to form habits is universal and invariant or that the tendency of nature to form habits is not universal and invariant, no?

And actually prior to the logical possibilities regarding the tendency of nature to form habits are the logical possibilities that the behavior of nature is simply universal and invariant or that nature tends to forms habits and hence its behavior at the most fundamental levels evolves, or that nature at the most fundamental levels behaves arbitrarily and the fact that there are observations that seem to show the contrary is a matter of pure chance.

Yes, but logically speaking the possibilities are that the tendency of nature to form habits is universal and invariant or that the tendency of nature to form habits is not universal and invariant, no?

And actually prior to the logical possibilities regarding the tendency of nature to form habits are the logical possibilities that the behavior of nature is simply universal and invariant or that nature tends to forms habits and hence its behavior at the most fundamental levels evolves, or that nature at the most fundamental levels behaves arbitrarily and the fact that there are observations that seem to show the contrary is a matter of pure chance. — John

In hesitate to limit possibilities since there also seems to be more of them. Heraclitus declared all is in flux. In his own way, Bergson adopted a similar stance, using a more formal description. One could say that Heraclitus' view that everything is always changing, is a ubiquitous observation, I would agree. To call it a law, would contradict the observation so there is no reason to say so. It depends upon whether the universe is in continuous change, or to put it another way, does the pendulum really stop at apex at the point of reversal?

As for the fundamental level of nature, I believe it is intelligence that is always changing because it is learning.

Law, as commonly used, implies an invariance... — Rich

...and an invariance is a symmetry.

So everyone is talking about the same thing, sort of. But there is a historic division between those who think about nature in terms of self-immanence versus those who conceive of limits or constraints being transcendentally imposed (and freedoms as being transcendentally created).

Greek metaphysics started out with an immanent story - Anaximander's tale of the Apeiron. And Aristotle cashed that out in his four causes model of development. He understood causality as a matter of constraint. And so Aristotle was happy with a reality that largely lives by its habits, yet is still capable of spontaneous accidents. Things can happen that "break the rules" in a way that doesn't make a difference.

But even in ancient Greece, the alternative view was brewing. The Stoics adopted the atomistic view that chance was simply ignorance of the deterministic detail. Fate rules the future by force of necessity.

And so the debate went back and forth through metaphysical history. It turned out that - being simpler in eschewing formal/final top-down causality - a reductionist approach to lawfulness was the most pragmatically effective ... in looking at existence purely in terms of material/effective cause.

This was in particular the Newtonian breakthrough. The laws could be up there in the mind of God. Then down here on Earth, everything was some tale of impressed forces. A curious dualism crept in where science appeared to both need and eschew universal constraints.

But in practice, it was useful. You frame some Platonically invariant description of a symmetry relation - like change in motion being temporally proportional and directionally orthogonal to impressed force - and then you can get on down here on Earth measuring such changes as particular events and imputing the materiality of the effective cause needed to bring about those states of observation.

So local observables came to stand as signs of global unobservables. The Lord or the Law of Gravity operated in mysterious fashion. But as Michael doesn't tire in saying, all we actually see right here and now is some behaviour, some event, which we read off in terms of an "unreal" universal abstraction. ;)

However the bigger picture of causality never went away. And following the thermodynamics revolution in particular, science has started again to think about causation in contextual or holistic fashion. We are getting back to self-organising immanence with our Big Bang cosmology and more thermally-inspired, condensed matter style, models of quantum gravity. Formal and final cause are back in the picture, along with the possibility of spontaneity or accidents as the class of physical behaviour that quantifiably doesn't make a difference.

That again is why it is irritating that you draw the wrong conclusion from quantum indeterminism. We can now measure "pure accidents" with complete precision. It is the law that there is an irreducible degree of lawlessness in the world. It is simply a corollary of the fact that classicality can fulfill its determinstic desires to the degree it makes any real difference.

Wouldn't further spin increase the rate of spin? Do you think that the rate of spin is not an actual difference? If not, then there is no difference between spinning and not spinning either. Your statement seems to imply that there is no difference between a static circle and a spinning circle. But surely there must be, and if there is a difference between these two, then the rate of spin is also a difference which needs to be considered. — Metaphysician Undercover

As soon as you break the symmetry of a circle - put a nick or a mark on its circumference - immediately you can see (from this imperfection) that it has some relative rate of motion (or rest).

So you are simply now describing the situation in terms that are crisply different - where the disc is semiotically marked and the symmetry quite radically imperfect.

A marked spinning disc can no longer be confused with a marked still disc ... unless - sneakily - its spins so fast that the mark becomes a grey blur, and we restore a symmetry because our eyes become indifferent to "the reality". (You see, as usual there is no escaping the logic of hierarchical order. Go to either extreme and it all looks the same again - just for exactly the opposite reason!)

There may be other logical possibilities than those I outlined. But if so, what are they? The point is that any universal invariance is going to be conceived as an overarching law, simply because it is universal and so is independent of any particular things or even the sum of particular things; any universal invariance would be a unifying behavior. Where does that unity come form? Not conceivably from the individual things that are so unified. This could be said to be so, even if the behavior of nature were universally utterly arbitrary and random; which of course it could not be, anyway, if it were to be intelligible at all.

But even in that extreme case the universal law would be that there can be no universal invariance. Could there then be local invariances? If so, why would they ever arise out of pure randomness? It would seem too incredible that the kind of invariance and ubiquitous natural cohesion that has been observed by humans over their history, with no reliable records of any natural transgressions (miracles or breakdowns of natural regularity) to be found, could arise by pure chance out of what is fundamentally utter randomness.

It is the law that there is an irreducible degree of lawlessness in the world. It is simply a corollary of the fact that classicality can fulfill its determinstic desires to the degree it makes any real difference. — apokrisis

I would say that there is aspect of quantum physics that need upon current observations, there is at this time a limit to precision and completeness of measurements (one can be more precise this if one wishes). I don't like embuing more into something than it is entitled to. Quantum physics is a new way of thinking about the behavior of fields and matter, but much is still left to be discovered and understood. It doesn't appear to be absolute or final, and it appears to be evolving. Beyond this, it appears to be practical for certain types of applications.

There does appear to be spontaneity in our lives but I would say it is peripheral to quantum theory, though one is free to speculate, as many do, the origination of this spontaneity which could very well undermine any possibility of a law.

Quantum physics is a new way of thinking about the behavior of fields and matter, but much is still left to be discovered and understood. It doesn't appear to be absolute or final, and it appears to be evolving. Beyond this, it appears to be practical for certain types of applications. — Rich

So what's new? Isn't science meant to be self-correcting inquiry in that fashion. You are simply now criticising science because it is in fact epistemologically modest and doesn't go about claiming ontic absolutism (those guys represent the modern religion of Scientism).

So science could only be failing in its goals in your eyes if you yourself are a supporter of an unreasonable level of ontic absolutism. (Just another bloody fundamentalist :) )

Not an absolutist. I am a philosopher who prefers precision to grandiose claims or overreaching descriptions. Just describe it as it is and be good with it.

But all your comments about quantum physics have been grandly sweeping and lacking in metaphysical precision. That is the substance of my complaint here.

And you have failed in particular to make it clear how the field's notable epistemic humility - the Copenhagen Interpretation for crying out loud!! - makes it guilty of over-reaching any descriptive account of the world.

Surely only a true scientist would accept a humiliation as complete as CI. :)