The problem over laws seems to start simply because talking of "laws of nature" suggest an analogy with human laws. So particle A acts like it does because it knows it should follow some general rule. Which is obviously a silly kind of metaphysics - unless you are a Whiteheadian panpsychic I guess.

So the real tension would be over the source of exceptionless necessitation that the notion of universal laws imply. Are laws perfect eternal forms? Or are they approximate and history-derived habits? And the wrangling goes on because they do seem to be a bit of both.

I side of course with the view that the laws of nature are emergent regularities or states of generalised constraint that develop from a history of free interactions. So that is the Peircean story of reality as a habit. In this view, laws would seem to evolve with time. The rules today could become something different tomorrow. It is all quite loose and rather contingent.

However I don't thing that is the whole story because - as now being expressed again in ontic structural realism - mathematical physics also shows that there is a rather Platonic influence on the course of physical history.

There are structural attractors which give the Universe a pre-destined outcome - the symmetries of particle physics being the prime example of a logical necessity that impinges on development. So the force of necessity is not simply an evolutionary accumulation of certain accidents that creates limits (much like mountains randomly arise to block winds and channel water flows in a landscape).

It is reasonable to argue that the permutation symmetries of the standard model would be logically true even if materially there never was any universe. Well, perhaps I wouldn't go that far - as permutation symmetries still rely on something "material" to permute. But still, as a mathematical form, the standard model seems to lie in wait, lurking in eternal Platonia, as something that would have to manifest by force of logical necessity, imposing itself on mere historical contingency as soon as any contingent history of free material action got going.

So there is a genuine tension because two important factors appear to be in interaction. The Universe is more than just a contingent habit - an accumulation of events. There was a structural attractor in the shape of symmetry that always lay in the Universe's future. And yet it still requires that history of all kinds of shit just trying to happen for the eternal patterns to be made manifest as the limits on being.

Which is another way of justifying my claim that reality in the end has to be based on effective physics. The interaction between radical freedom (or material contingency) and radical constraint (or Platonic symmetry) is understood by us as the clash of two species of absolute - pure possibility vs pure necessity. And then the actuality which we inhabit is then the average of these two aspects of nature. Existence is always a mixture, an equilibrium state.

But overall - from the cosmological perspective now afforded us by science - we can see that we are in the middle of an actual transistion in terms of that balance. The Big Bang stands at one end of the spectrum in being a vanilla quantum fireball - radical freedom. The Heat Death is the other end of the spectrum in being the broken-down classical realm of crystallised symmetry.

So in terms of law - as the accumulation of increasingly specific constraints on freedom - it is only by the end that the Platonic forms will be crisply fixed. The latent mathematical structure is what existence is being shaken down towards (although with even the end state - a future as de Sitter universe composed purely of event horizons and their residual black body fizzle of radiation - that approach to the limit is only effective, in the manner illustrated by random sphere packing and the impossibility of reaching actual crystalline perfection in a world that has to employ freely-permuting material parts).

In summary, laws are kind of hybrid like this. They mix the Platonic and the accidental, the eternal and the historic. So that is the reason why they are effective, yet not then actually "just a habit". There is also the fact of structural attractors that (from our point of view) pre-determine the outcome. There is also something mathematically fundamental in play - except it really calls to materiality from its future, not sets the direction from its past, and acts top-down in constraining fashion, not bottom-up in a constructive one.

The road to entanglement had nothing to do with analyzing some lifeless equations. It was the result of extraordinary intuition by Bohm and Bell followed by some fascinating creativity by Aspect which ultimately resulted in confirmation experiments by Aspect and others. The equations are simply some symbolic representations of the quality of the minds of these scientists and are confirmed by repetition. — Rich

You are factually wrong on this. Einstein discovered entanglement by analysing Schrödinger's equation.

But of course quantum mechanics is not the only physical theory full of surprises. Einstein's general relativity implied several novel phenomena, such as time dilation, gravitational red-shift, black-holes, the big-bang, and the cosmic microwave background. He reailsed early on that general relativity predicted gravitational waves, which took 100 years before they were observed.

As I mentioned, each of these phenomena alone refutes your misconception.

So, if as you claim, physical laws merely describe repetitious events, rather than capture and reveal the structure of Reality, then please explain how it is possible that these laws reveal novel features of Reality. — tom

Agree. It is an indisputable fact that through mathematical physics, many things have been discovered which could never have been foreseen by any other means. That is the basis of Eugene Wigner's famous essay The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences.

The equations are simply some symbolic representations of the quality of the minds of these scientists and are confirmed by repetition. — Rich

That is much more a description of your own point, repeated ad nauseam. The equations under discussion make predictions which no mind could have envisaged, and, in fact, still can't. As for David Bohm, I don't know why you're citing him, as he doesn't accept 'entanglement' at all, but proposed 'Bohmian mechanics' as an alternative.

The problem over laws seems to start simply because talking of "laws of nature" suggest an analogy with human laws. So particle A acts like it does because it knows it should follow some general rule. Which is obviously a silly kind of metaphysics - unless you are a Whiteheadian panpsychic I guess. — apokrisis

That is Nancy Cartwright's point - that the concept of 'laws' doesn't really make sense without God.

I side of course with the view that the laws of nature are emergent regularities or states of generalised constraint that develop from a history of free interactions. So that is the Peircean story of reality as a habit. In this view, laws would seem to evolve with time. — apokrisis

But you did say already:

Chaos is more subtle than that. It does have characteristic organisation. — apokrisis

So if it has any organisation whatever, then it's not strictly speaking chaos, in the sense envisaged as 'primordial chaos'. I think you're speaking here of 'chaotic systems', but any chaotic system you can study, does of course exist against the background of a laboratory and is contained by some boundary. The 'primordial chaos' doesn't exist against the background of any organisation whatever. Or - does it? So where does that order come from? How do you get 'order for free'? That's the million dollar question.

So if it has any organisation whatever, then it's not strictly speaking chaos, in the sense envisaged as 'primordial chaos'. — Wayfarer

But that's the point. Any attempt to envisage chaos leads to discovery that it has some structure. Any notion of a big great mess still has emergent statistical order - or a lack of order that is precisely defined.

The 'primordial chaos' doesn't exist against the background of any organisation whatever. — Wayfarer

And now you are recounting my usual arguments for vagueness as what we would really mean by primordial chaos. So I do grapple with the standard models of randomness and chaos so as to understand what a "truer unboundedness" would look like - hopefully mathematically as anything less is not worth the effort.

The chaos, the crystal's chance path, during the formation of snowflake fractals is comfortably situated in the context of our orderly stable lawful universe. IOWs it is not chaos all the way down. It is chaos embedded in order.
Moreover the law ‘every snowflake is six-sided’, which emerges due to symmetry/equifinality, is fully determined by underlying more fundamental laws, such as the laws which dictate what binding angles are permissible for water molecules.

My point is: sure you can watch some pretty amazing things emerge in nature by a combination of law and chance/chaos, but this does not tell us that chaos can explain the natural laws.

The standard interpretation of Peirce's cosmology is that the initial state was a chaotic mix of chance and reaction in which anything was possible but nothing persisted, hence nothing was actual. The tendency to take habits was one of those spontaneous occurrences at first, but its very nature was to persist and reinforce itself, so it did. Then other things began to take habits, and that is how matter eventually came about, with the "laws of nature" serving as its habits. These are much more consistent than habits of mind - hence why nature is often much more predictable than human behavior - but they are not completely exceptionless, since objective chance is still active in the world. Peirce was not convinced that all of the discrepancies in our measurements are due to error; rather, things really are not quite as exact as our equations seem to indicate.

Toward the end of his life, Peirce seems to have adopted a more theistic cosmology in which God is indispensable as Ens necessarium, necessary Being, to account for the order that we now observe. God conceived an inexhaustible continuum of possibilities, and then chose which of them to actualize. Spontaneity is thus a manifestation of divine freedom, rather than objective chance.

The chaos, the crystal's chance path, during the formation of snowflake fractals is comfortably situated in the context of our orderly stable lawful universe. IOWs it is not chaos all the way down. It is chaos embedded in order. — Querius

What do you think I was saying? The only subtlety is that that I add that the chaos is "embedded in the order" all the way back to the start. Which is what a logic of vagueness would be required to model. Things have to begin with the unexpressed potential for chaos~order as the yin yang synergistic outcome. And so now we have a third thing to label - unexpressed potential. Which is what I am calling Vagueness, or Anaximander called Apeiron, Peirce called Firstness (as well as vagueness), etc.

Moreover the law ‘every snowflake is six-sided’, which emerges due to symmetry/equifinality, is fully determined by underlying more fundamental laws, such as the laws which dictate what binding angles are permissible for water molecules. — Querius

Hah. Snowflakes are a little more complicated in fact. Water molecules actually have to bend more than they want to as their "natural angle" is not exactly that of a hexagonal symmetry. So they are an example of top-down causality or constraint producing the simplified regularity required for the very expression of the hexagonal order that comes to historically dominate the accidents (the accident that is the attachment of further water molecules).

So snowflakes are a good example of an effective solution - a global equilibrium balance that reshapes the very stuff out of which it is being formed. What you call "fundamental" is what has got fundamentally pwned.

My point is: sure you can watch some pretty amazing things emerge in nature by a combination of law and chance/chaos, but this does not tell us that chaos can explain the natural laws. — Querius

Well it should be clear that "chaos" is a pretty bad word once you start to study the reality closely. Even when chaos theory became vogue in the 1980s, it was wildly misunderstood.

So of course I am talking about dynamical self-organisation. And chaos is the state of things when imagined with the fewest possible constraints. But you can't just have ... no constraints, or no boundary conditions.

So chaos doesn't explain natural laws - in the sense that order just emerges from disorder. That would be merely a reversal of orthodox fundamentalism or absolutism. Chaos is not the cause of all things, and order merely its effect.

My argument in favour of effective physics is instead that the chaos~lawfulness dichotomy would be a mutually-formative deal from the vague get-go. It is there as a relation in seed form even before anything "actually happens".

So it is the division that pre-exists the existence that manifests as a result of it being the case. It is the (triadic) relation that is fundamental (triadic as in its vague dyadic initial state, it of course has its whole future developmental history as a compressed axis of action and memory).

We have looked deep into the dark heart of "chaos" and found in fact precise mathematics. Order is inevitable even in chaos as chaos - to actually exist in a way we could then point back at - needs organisation or structure like any system or process.

Thus what I am talking about is an empirical discovery by science which is still recent enough not to have sunk in with that many people. But really, metaphysics should never be the same again.

You can look at the equation from now to doom's day and there is nothing about entanglement. It is a leap of creative intuition. Bohm describes the process quite meticulously in his essay on Creativity. In fact, the development of the concept of entanglement was quite a long one and involved several intuitive leaps. This process is fundamental to scientific discovery. I have no idea where you get the idea that by staring at a lifeless equations, out pops something new. It just emerges from the paper?

If you don't want to define laws of nature and enumerate examples, there is nothing to discuss. Should we move on to God, which may be somewhat more concrete?

God conceived an inexhaustible continuum of possibilities, and then chose which of them to actualize. — aletheist

But could God have had a choice if mathematical symmetries limited His options rather rigorously?

The tendency to take habits was one of those spontaneous occurrences at first, but its very nature was to persist and reinforce itself, so it did. Then other things began to take habits, and that is how matter eventually came about, with the "laws of nature" serving as its habits. — aletheist

What is missing here - from a modern hierarchy theory point of view at least - is that wholes simplify their parts so that they increasing have a better fit.

Like I said about the way snowflake symmetry has to bend water molecules to shape, the collective level of action acts as a literal shaping constraint on the spontaneity that is doing the reacting. It limits absolute freedom by imposing some common direction or character on all free action.

And this is why habits are absolutely real. They are the cause of regularity all the way down.

Peircean metaphysics certainly gets this irreducibly complex triadic relation. But a minor criticism is that it doesn't really foreground this further crucial wrinkle of the causal deal.

My argument in favour of effective physics is instead that the chaos~lawfulness dichotomy would be a mutually deal from the vague get-go. — apokrisis

Not sure what point you are making here. Chaos is a fully deterministic feature of some time-reversible dynamical laws. You can't have chaos without everything behaving lawfully.

Also, it is worth noting that chaos is a feature of classical mechanics.

Chaos is a fully deterministic feature of some time-reversible dynamical laws. — tom

You are confusing the models with the reality being modelled. The map you hold in your hand may be time-reversible, the territory it describes looks to be irreversibly dissipative.

But of course, your time-reversible laws don't take account of the material fact that energy is involved in there being a spatiotemporal process.

So we already know how our current best models of dynamics are incomplete. The motivating force of a matter field has to be inserted by hand still.

Any fool knows that deterministic chaos is reversibly deterministic, exactly as it says on the box. But any fool also ought to know that someone has to go out and make the acts of measurements to feed the hungry system of equations. And at that point, the harsh truth that observers are really involved in reality becomes more than just a sideline epistemic issue.

So just like QM and relativity, chaos theory also has its strong version of the "collapse" issue. That is how we know it to be a "fundamental" theory. We have talked the observables to death and now have to turn around and somehow deal with the still informal issue of the observer.

Again, that is what makes Peirce such a splendid chap. He was on to the metaphysics of this in a big way. He managed to reduce the observer~observables dichotomy to a formal abstract model - his semeiotic relation. He came up with the right approach to quantum interpretation even before the quantum was discovered.

You can look at the equation from now to doom's day and there is nothing about entanglement. It is a leap of creative intuition. Bohm describes the process quite meticulously in his essay on Creativity. In fact, the development of the concept of entanglement was quite a long one and involved several intuitive leaps. This process is fundamental to scientific discovery. I have no idea where you get the idea that by staring at a lifeless equations, out pops something new. It just emerges from the paper? — Rich

Maybe you should read one of the most famous papers in the history of science.

http://www.drchinese.com/David/EPR.pdf

Read about how scientists make new discoveries. Einstein constantly illuded to thought experiments - alternatively described as creative imagination. Equations are nothing. It is the images it conjours up in the mind that lead to discoveries. Equations are dead, lifeless, purely descriptive. It is the creative mind that provides the new ideas. Bell also described his process.

Succinctly, scientists such as Bohm, who have life to the notion of non-local actions by the quantum potential, describes the process as seeking differences within similarities and similarities within differences. This is precisely the process I used in my computer science career. It is fundamental to creative thought.

Hah. ... So they are an example of top-down causality ... So snowflakes are a good example of an effective solution - a global equilibrium balance that reshapes the very stuff out of which it is being formed. What you call "fundamental" is what has got fundamentally pwned. — apokrisis

Sean Carroll in his book ‘The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself’, Dutton, 2016 writes:

A standard example given by proponents of top-down causation is the formation of snowflakes. Snowflakes are made of water molecules interacting with other water molecules to form a crystalline structure. But there are many possible structures, determined by the initial seed from which the snowflake grows.
Therefore, it is claimed, the macroscopic shape of the snowflake is ‘acting downwards’ to determine the precise location of individual water molecules.
We should all resist the temptation to talk that way. Water molecules interact with other water molecules, and other molecules in the air, in precise ways that are determined by the rules of atomic physics. Those rules are unambiguous: you tell me what other molecules an individual water molecule is interacting with, and the rules will say precisely what will happen next. The relevant molecules may indeed be a large part of a crystalline structure, but that knowledge is of precisely zero import when studying the behaviour of the water molecule under consideration. The environment in which the molecule is imbedded is of course relevant, but there is no obstacle to describing the environment in terms of its own molecular structure. The individual molecule has no idea it’s part of a snowflake, and could not care less.

<my emphasis>

Yet another reason not to be a big fan of Sean Carroll. :)

But anyway, the facts are that isolated water molecules have a bond angle of 104.4 degrees, yet the symmetry of the snowflake demands they get comfortable with the new number of 120 degrees.

I mean do you (or Carroll) believe that even the water molecules, or the nucleons of which they are composed, have some absolute fixed shape rather than an effective shape - one that is a holistic dynamical balance or some general average? C'mon.

I've been telling apokrisis the very same thing for some time now, to no avail. It's quite clear that this notion of top-down causation is completely ungrounded. It's nothing more than fantasy.

It's quite clear that this notion of top-down causation is completely ungrounded. It's nothing more than fantasy. — Metaphysician Undercover

A neutron when separated from an atom has a half-life of about eleven and a half minutes. It decays into a proton, an electron and a neutrino. However, once inside the nucleus of an atom, a neutron is highly stable, with a half-life in the millions or billions of years. Its integration into the higher order intelligibility of the atomic nucleus changes its properties. The higher order reality has modified the lower order constituent.

Why would you say that the difference in stability of the neutron is a function of the atom, rather than a function of the relationships between the parts of the atom?

I think it makes the case for 'top-down' causation very eloquently. Were you a classical atomist, who believed that the fundmental constituents of the world really were point-particles, then the fact that such a purported 'point-particle' relies on its context would, I think, greatly weaken your case.

So you now agree that relationships themselves have causal status when we talk about the reality of things.

Gentleman, our work here is done!

God conceived an inexhaustible continuum of possibilities, and then chose which of them to actualize. — aletheist

But could God have had a choice if mathematical symmetries limited His options rather rigorously? — apokrisis

Assuming omnipotence, as Peirce did, the only thing that could have limited God's options were God's own previous choices, including the creation of those mathematical symmetries.

Assuming omnipotence, as Peirce did, the only thing that could have limited God's options were God's own previous choices, including the creation of those mathematical symmetries. — aletheist

But it is one thing saying God could choose to create a world in which 1+1=3, quite another to believe it in your heart. Do you think Peirce would have gone along with such a frontal assault on natural reason?

But it is one thing saying God could choose to create a world in which 1+1=3, quite another to believe it in your heart. Do you think Peirce would have gone along with such a frontal assault on natural reason? — apokrisis

I am not seeing the connection between this comment and the notion that "mathematical symmetries" somehow limited God's options. For one thing, Peirce consistently held that mathematics deals only with hypothetical states of affairs, not actual ones. He also insisted that we cannot be absolutely certain that 2+2=4, since human fallibility entails that it is possible - even if very unlikely - that every single person who ever performed this addition made the same mistake. Presumably he would have taken the same position on 1+1=2.

He also insisted that we cannot be absolutely certain that 2+2=4, since human fallibility entails that it is possible - even if very unlikely - that every single person who ever performed this addition made the same mistake. — aletheist

Sure, Cartesian doubt means that all knowledge is in principle fallible. But Peirce then built his career on dismissing Cartesian doubt by insisting on starting right where we are - in some state of belief. And then that the purpose of reasoned inquiry is to minimise uncertainty (rather than pursue the phantasm of absolute certainty).

So what you say seems to cut across the whole tenor of his thinking for me.

What Peirce says is: "Mathematical certainty is not absolute certainty. For the greatest mathematicians sometimes blunder, and therefore it is possible ‑ barely possible ‑ that all have blundered every time they added two and two" (CP 4.478).

So his point appears to be that humans are certainly fallible. Even if infinitely likely, it is still infinitesimally possible no-one has ever managed to get the simplest of all sums right.

But an omnipotent God couldn't be that incompetent surely? And more to the point, there is a big difference in executing a calculation and providing the very world which makes a mathematical model a matter of logical necessity. From certain reasonable axioms, certain deductive consequences (like arithmetical operations or permutation symmetries) must flow.

So either God is constrained Himself by the general principle of intelligibility - existence as the universal growth of reasonableness - or the whole of Peirce's metaphysics collapses for a far more serious reason. Semiotics just doesn't exist unless the sign relation is in fact a sign of something.

You left out my first two statements ...

I am not seeing the connection between this comment and the notion that "mathematical symmetries" somehow limited God's options. For one thing, Peirce consistently held that mathematics deals only with hypothetical states of affairs, not actual ones. — aletheist

... and I am still not following you here:

So either God is constrained Himself by the general principle of intelligibility - existence as the universal growth of reasonableness - or the whole of Peirce's metaphysics collapses for a far more serious reason. — apokrisis

If God is constrained by "existence as the universal growth of reasonableness," it is only because He chose to create existence that way. In fact, Peirce characterized this as God's purpose.

Semiotics just doesn't exist unless the sign relation is in fact a sign of something. — apokrisis

And Peirce called our existing universe God's argument, a symbol whose object is Himself and whose interpretant consists of the living realities that it is constantly working out as its conclusions.

Peirce called our existing universe God's argument, a symbol whose object is Himself and whose interpretant consists of the living realities that it is constantly working out as its conclusions. — aletheist

I can relate to that.

I think it makes the case for 'top-down' causation very eloquently. Were you a classical atomist, who believed that the fundmental constituents of the world really were point-particles, then the fact that such a purported 'point-particle' relies on its context would, I think, greatly weaken your case. — Wayfarer

The problem is that context itself, cannot validate the assumed unity. The parts of the atom, being in proximity to each other does not give existence to the unity which is the atom. There is a very particular relationship of those parts which is necessary for the existence of the atom. The atom itself cannot cause this particular relationship, because the atom only exists after the relationship is established and a cause must be prior to the effect. To make this claim (top-down causation) is to put the effect (the existence of the atom) prior to the cause (production of the necessary relationships).

So you now agree that relationships themselves have causal status when we talk about the reality of things. — apokrisis

No, not quite. I assume that something must cause these specific relationships. I do not believe that the relationships cause themselves. Nor do I believe, as you seem to, that the thing caused by the relationships is a cause of the relationships (top-down causation). That would put the effect prior to the cause. As I said in other threads, I believe that the cause of the relationships is immanent within the parts, just like the will to act is immanent within individual human beings. When the part comes into existence, as all material things come into existence, the relations that it will have to other material things, is already inherent within it. The cause has already acted on that part in its creation. So it is given its position when it comes into existence. The cause of this, (that which gives it its position), cannot be the material object which is described as a unity of the parts, acting as top-down causation, because this material unity only exists after the parts come into existence, as the effect.

.

Sean Carroll in his book ‘The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself’, Dutton, 2016 writes: ... — Querius

Sean Carroll objects to the notion of downward causation because he doesn't understand it. He wrongly believes the possibility of downward causation to contradict the causal closure of the micro-physical domain, as if a macroscopic or systemic cause of a micro-physical event entailed a violation of the laws that govern micro-physical interactions. But downward causation doesn't have this consequence. It isn't something queer, magical, or unphysical. Sean Carroll is thus shooting down a strawman notion, though, to be fair, he isn't alone in wrongly portraying downward causation in this manner; so does philosopher Jaegwon Kim. In his paper Downward Causation without Foundations, Michel Bitbol (while discussing Kim's objections) sets up the problem of physical closure thus:

"The first statement is meant to dismiss the idea of strong emergence, according to which the high-level processes are endowed with autonomous causal powers, and with ability to alter the low-level processes. It does so by assuming that for high-level processes to count as causal powers in the fullest sense, and to be able to alter anything significant in the lower level, they must induce a deviation in the laws of the micro-processes. But if this were the case, two common presuppositions of the scientific picture of the world would be denied: (a) the presupposition of nomological closure of the lower micro-physical level, and (b) the presupposition of causal fundamentalism, according to which “macro causal powers supervene on and are determined by micro causal powers” (Bedau 2002, 10). Strong emergence thus apparently amounts to an indefensible variety of ontological dualism."

Bitbol later adresses the problem of physical closure thus:

"No level of organization can claim any privilege for itself, because every such level is defined (or “constituted”) by a certain scale of intervention and observation. Moreover, no absolute meta-observer, no “view from nowhere,” is available to select one pattern of causes at a certain agent-relative level as the “truly efficient” one. This does not threaten the thesis of causal closure of the domain of physics, but only denies it any ontological significance. Causal closure here means only that it is possible to establish a systematic and self-sufficient network of causal connections relative to a single scale of intervention and experimental access, without having recourse to any other scale of intervention and access. This being granted, causal closure of a low level of organization (say the level of micro-physics) is perfectly compatible with the thesis that there are also efficient causes at an upper level of organization."