Thanks, that is highly relevant. One of our contributors posted a link to a paper by called No God No Laws by Nancy Cartwright which is about exactly this (she's also reference in that Wikipedia article you've quoted.)

I still feel there's a deep issue behind all of this with regards to contingency and necessity. It seems to me when it is said that laws could have been otherwise, that this distinction is being lost. But of course it's a very big question.

Laws can be falsified if they are found in contradiction with new data. — Wikipedia

I'd be interested in some examples.

No God No Laws — Wayfarer

I'm just flummoxed by the fact that when I do something bad, I don't break any known laws of nature. Evil is perfectly compatible with the known laws of the universe. Quite dishearteningly, good seems less harmonious with how the world works. There's the reason why miracles are thought of as divine - they violate the laws of nature in a manner of speaking. God vs. God! He must be outta his mind!

I'd be interested in some examples. — Wayfarer

Look up a bit and see the issue with Mercury, which helped support Einstein against Newton.

I still feel there's a deep issue behind all of this with regards to contingency and necessity. It seems to me when it is said that laws could have been otherwise, that this distinction is being lost. But of course it's a very big question. — Wayfarer

It is a big question indeed. You mention necessary beings, and I think we crave (at times anyway) an escape from contingency and pragmatic conjectures into a completely knowable world designed by an idealized humanlike intelligence (for if not humanlike then not comprehendible by us). Sartre might be hinting at this from another angle. We want the impossible combination of freedom and substance (to be human is to want impossibly to become God, be 'done' with everything but still alive.)

Surely ‘natural law’ must form some part of the answer to this question. ... But there’s no answer to why those laws are as they are.... — Wayfarer

The laws of relativity arose as there had to be an equivalence or symmetry that united gravity and acceleration, and then space and time, and then mass and energy. The laws of quantum mechanics arose as the blackbody radiation of an object couldn't be a continuous spectrum without then being infinite in its energy. The laws of thermodynamics arose for the same atomistic reasons, plus statistical mechanics.

So in general, the natural laws are speak to the causality of symmetries and their breakings.

Going upwards to the global level is a way of discovering the ever greater generality to be found in higher states of symmetry.

Going downwards to the local level is reciprocally the way to discover the ever greater particularity to be found in broken symmetries.

Okun's cube of laws - the story of how modern science has been working towards the task of unifying the Planck triad of fundamental constants in the one quantum gravity theory - shows you how utterly programmatic and Platonic this all is.

We know the purpose (the final cause) of the universe: A home for humans. — Agent Smith

What? Those hairless apes that immediately cooked their own planet?

Sounds legit. :razz:

Thinking in these terms might also highlight the impotence of the "answer" given by the fine tuning argument. The fine tuning argument answers the question of why there is life in the universe by saying, basically: because otherwise there wouldn't be life in the universe. Or, in its more general form that applies to all of these questions: because otherwise things would not be the way they are. — Luke

‘Why’ questions look for an overarching explanatory scheme to organize particular facts or subordinate the patterns.

“But if wonder (namely, about the “obvious”) is one element that motivates philosophical questioning, it can be only the occasion for asking a real question instead of getting thrown off by some prejudgment. For even here, Lotze is caught in a widespread prejudgment that remains just as dominant today, namely, that we must simply accept and leave untouched, these supposedly basic concepts—even in the case of the most general concept: “being” / actuality.”

“All great and genuine philosophy moves within the limited sphere of a few questions which appear to common sense as perennially the same, although in fact they are necessarily different in every instance of philoso­phizing. Different not in any merely external sense, but rather in such a way that the self-same is in each case essentially transformed once more. Only in such transformation does philosophy possess its genuine self-sameness. This transformation lends a properly primordial historicity to the occurrence of the history of philosophizing, a historicity which makes its own demands.”

“ Only because the nothing is manifest in the ground of Dasein can the total strangeness of beings overwhelm us. Only when the strangeness of beings oppresses us does it arouse and evoke wonder. Only on the ground of wonder-the manifestness of the nothing-does the "why?" loom before us. Only because the "why" is possible as such can we in a definite way inquire into grounds and ground things. Only because we can question and ground things is the destiny of our existence placed in the hands of the researcher.”
(Heidegger)

Look up a bit and see the issue with Mercury, which helped support Einstein against Newton. — lll

Right. Those were the observations that Eddington made which helped validate Einstein's theory for the first time. But as I understand it the theory of relativity supersedes Newtonian physics in some respects, but it doesn't overturn it, as Copernican theory overturned Ptolmaic cosmology. It just showed that Newtonian laws have a limited range of applicability.

I'm just flummoxed by the fact that when I do something bad, I don't break any known laws of nature. — Agent Smith

You live in a culture that doesn't believe in natural moral laws. Put another way, the only natural laws that our culture recognises are physical. In other cultures it was assumed that misbehaviour would reap its consequences either through divine retribution or the law of karma.

The laws of relativity arose as there had to be an equivalence or symmetry that united gravity and acceleration, and then space and time, and then mass and energy. — apokrisis

Right, but in practice it isn't so neat and tidy, is it? I think it remains true that according to the projections on the basis of known physics, the universe shouldn't exist.

I think we crave (at times anyway) an escape from contingency — lll

In metaphysical terms, both the theory of a multiverse and the "theory of everything" are seeking to move beyond contingency to necessity, to formulate what would in traditional terms be called "necessary" being. This approach is an attempt to bypass the traditional response which would identify such a necessary being with God. But the simple fact is that no mathematical formula creates anything. In itself, it is the creation of the mind that conceives it. It may help explain what exists, but it does not create the thing it explains.

The anxiety over contingency is nonetheless a valid anxiety because without some necessary being - such as God - the drive towards the intelligibility of the universe, which is the foundational drive of science, hits a brick wall with existence itself, which remains radically unintelligible, without explanation, unless it is related in some way to necessary being.

This, of course, is not a proof that such a being exists, but it does indicate why the notion of a divine being arises in relation to the problem of contingency; it also indicates the vacuous nature of the question, "Who made God?" Necessary being is self-explanatory; it needs no further explanation, no "maker" to explain it. It also shows why God's existence or non-existence can never be a scientific question. Scientific method is predicated on the need for empirical verification, which means it can only deal with contingent being, not necessary being. — Neil Ormerod, The Metaphysical Muddle of Lawrence Krauss

Hence the ubiquity of relativism and subjectivism which is all-pervasive in modern philosophy.

Yeah why questions seem to have an unfalsifiability to them as they can't ever verify an answer and become effectively uninformative and useless. It's a similar issue with any negation like "no" to any question but that suffers from unverifiability.

But as I understand it the theory of relativity supersedes Newtonian physics in some respects, but it doesn't overturn it, as Copernican theory overturned Ptolmaic cosmology. It just showed that Newtonian laws have a limited range of applicability. — Wayfarer

That limited applicability is due to the model 'not noticing' or 'accounting for' the bending of space by mass (it's been awhile, perhaps a physicist can chime in.) An analogy might be fitting a quadratic model to data that's generated cubically, where the generating function is 'basically' or almost quadratic in the region in question. Or consider the description of a scene by a color blind person. For many purposes this is fine. Animals with color vision, as I understand it, tend to need it, perhaps to gauge the difference between edible and poisonous fruit, etc. It should be noted that measurements are noisy or approximate and that no model fits a data set perfectly.

Right, but in practice it isn't so neat and tidy, is it? I think it remains true that according to the projections on the basis of known physics, the universe shouldn't exist. — Wayfarer

We know there must be CP violation based on the same lawful structure of global symmetry coupled to local symmetry breaking.

And then we have both experimental evidence and theoretical frameworks to show such CP violation is a fact.

The current issue is that there isn't enough known sources of CP violation to complete the job according to the degree of CP violation we seem to observe.

Hence, at best, you are making a premature call. The glass half full view would be that physics is closing in on its stated target.

The anxiety over contingency is nonetheless a valid anxiety because without some necessary being - such as God - the drive towards the intelligibility of the universe, which is the foundational drive of science, hits a brick wall with existence itself, which remains radically unintelligible, without explanation, unless it is related in some way to necessary being. — Neil Ormerod, The Metaphysical Muddle of Lawrence Krauss

This recognition (correct or not) of brute fact or pure contingency seems to be 'the mystical' for young Wittgenstein and 'the nausea' for young Sartre's Roquentin. Also there's Hilbert's we must know, we will know. Philosophy begins in wonder and yet we're instructed also to be astonished at nothing. These imperatives are like dueling twin brothers. Be not astonished is perhaps that 'restlessness' I referenced in the face of the arbitrary. The wise child's why slices infinitely thin. Is it not in the very structure of our inquiry that some kernel remain 'true for no reason'? The only alternative, which I think is cheating, given its ineffability or outright unintelligibility, is to melt into a somehow self-explained divinely intelligent necessary being.

Hence the ubiquity of relativism and subjectivism which is all-pervasive in modern philosophy. — Wayfarer

There's plenty of that to be had, but there's also presentation of a fragile absolute. If the ego or subject has been revealed as a tired and tangled fiction, that hardly sounds like subjectivism. Cultural relativism is a more plausible complaint. Many philosophers these days will, I think, grant that we can only see by the light of our imperfect, inherited torches. This is just a mutation of the Kantianism that Hegel raged against and yet assimilated to radicalize it against its own modesty. (The view-from-nowhere is a piece of our view-from-somewhere. Here be dragons! )

But as I understand it the theory of relativity supersedes Newtonian physics in some respects, but it doesn't overturn it, as Copernican theory overturned Ptolemaic cosmology. It just showed that Newtonian laws have a limited range of applicability. — Wayfarer

Again these are all stories of following the Nile back to its source. We move up to greater theoretical generality by adding back all the symmetries that got broken.

So Newtonian physics is based on the invariances of the Galilean symmetry group - namely the inertias of translation and rotation. Then Einsteinian physics added the further symmetries of a Lorentzian boost that come with the step to the unified 4D spacetime view.

Newtonian particles have just six broken symmetries as their global degrees of freedom - their three directions of spin and three directions of straightline motion.

Einsteinian particles gain their further four degrees of freedom which result in relativistic invariance - the symmetry that zeroes energetic boost between different inertial frames. They have all 10 freedoms of the unified Poincaré symmetry group.

Even Copernican theory only overturned Ptolemaic cosmology in the sense of climbing this same ladder of symmetry un-breaking to arrive at a higher level of mathematical abstraction.

So this is the historical model of how fundamental physics has progressed. It separates reality into its global necessity and local contingency. Or in maths speak, its globally-unified symmetries and locally-broken degrees of freedom.

Each step in one direction is also a step in the other direction so far as the modelling of reality is concerned - because they are a reciprocal or dichotomous deal. They are yoked together as a unity of opposites.

If you manage to identify the aspects of the Cosmos that have Platonic necessity, that brings with it by definition the aspects of the Cosmos that are the dialectically contingent.

All that is not constrained to be the case is then free to be whatever.

Simple as.

What? Those hairless apes that immediately cooked their own planet? — apokrisis

Nice!

:wink:

Only when the strangeness of beings oppresses us does it arouse and evoke wonder. Only on the ground of wonder-the manifestness of the nothing-does the "why?" loom before us. Only because the "why" is possible as such can we in a definite way inquire into grounds and ground things. Only because we can question and ground things is the destiny of our existence placed in the hands of the researcher.” — Joshs

Nice quote !

Even Copernican theory only overturned Ptolemaic cosmology in the sense of climbing this same ladder of symmetry un-breaking to arrive at a higher level of mathematical abstraction. — apokrisis

But the Ptolmaic cosmology was mythological - crystalline spheres, a geo-centric universe, epicycles. Those were factually incorrect posits. And its overturning was not simply mathematical but observational and empirical. (Actually I have a rather good book on all of this, A More Perfect Heaven, by Dava Sorbel which I must get around to reading.) So I think the Copernican revolution was more radical than Einstein's in that sense, as Einstein didn't invalidate the basic tenets of Newtonian physics in the way that Copernicus did Ptolemy.

If you manage to identify the aspects of the Cosmos that have Platonic necessity, that brings with it by definition the aspects of the Cosmos that are the dialectically contingent. — apokrisis

'Just six numbers, imprinted in the “big bang,” determine the essential features of our entire physical world.' (Another book I have, although it's an extremely dry read.)

But the Ptolmaic cosmology was mythological - crystalline spheres, a geo-centric universe, epicycles. Those were factually incorrect posits. — Wayfarer

Flat earth theory is good enough for the local geographic point of view. Epicycles likewise give you an acceptable celestial mechanics.

Everything works fine until it doesn’t.

The Copernican revolution only got as far as shifting the centre of creation from the Earth to the Sun. Newton then got us to the level of the Cosmological Principle and it’s Galilean symmetry. Einstein took it a step more general than that.

Nothing gets invalidated here. It is just a story of increasingly comprehensive generality concerning the modelling.

You live in a culture that doesn't believe in natural moral laws. Put another way, the only natural laws that our culture recognises are physical. In other cultures it was assumed that misbehaviour would reap its consequences either through divine retribution or the law of karma. — Wayfarer

Your reply is an eye-opener for me. Merci beaucoup, monsieur!

Kant was, I believe, trying to make moral laws as all-encompassing and as strict as natural laws. Act only according to maxims that you would will to be universal laws(Categorical Imperative). I guess his view was it's aut Caesar aut nihil (all or nothing).

As you so kindly reminded me karma and retribution is a law of nature: Don't we (try to) settle scores? It feels natural to avenge a wrong. Hence justice, its civilized avatar. Don't we also like to return a favor or repay a kindness? The law of karma is real, at least in the here and now, in this life.

I've discovered another reason why miracles (violation of the laws of nature, including karmic law) are associated/atrributed to divinity (godliness). When one refuses to retaliate for a wrong you are, surprise, surprise, in breach of the natural law of karma i.e this is as miraculous as Jesus' resurrection.

Of course, the flip side of it is to, well, bite the hand that feeds you, an instance of again going against the law of karma. Evil too can perform miracles and in the days of yore this was known as witchcraft and sorcery (Satanic magick).

What? Those hairless apes that immediately cooked their own planet?

Sounds legit — apokrisis

:smile:

Kant was, I believe, trying to make moral laws as all-encompassing and as strict as natural laws. — Agent Smith

:up:

The law of karma is real, at least in the here and now, in this life. — Agent Smith

Have a read of this blog post.

When one refuses to retaliate for a wrong you are, surprise, surprise, in breach of the natural law of karma — Agent Smith

Not so - retaliating, 'paying someone back', is not karma. On the contrary, it would be regarded as a bad karmic act.

I asked grandma 3 yo ”is there a tap in heaven where the water in the sea comes from? “. Thats kind of philosophical, right?

Not so - retaliating, 'paying someone back', is not karma. On the contrary, it would be regarded as a bad karmic act. — Wayfarer

Yes, I was mulling over that. What is karma?

Karma (ˈkɑːrmə/; Sanskrit: कर्म, IPA: [ˈkɐɾmɐ] (listen); Pali: kamma) means action, work, or deed.[1] For the believers in spirituality the term also refers to the spiritual principle of cause and effect, often descriptively called the principle of karma, wherein intent and actions of an individual (cause) influence the future of that individual (effect): Good intent and good deeds contribute to good karma and happier rebirths, while bad intent and bad deeds contribute to bad karma and bad rebirths. — Wikipedia

Are you agreeing/disagreeing with the above exposition on Karma by Wikipedia?

I thought karma is what goes around comes around, positively and negatively; in a you reap what you sow kinda way.

I'm genuinely curious, lemme ask again, what is karma?

9 that’s a perfectly acceptable definition but teasing out the implications requires some persistence. I think it’s also important to state that in Indic religions, the goal of liberation (mokṣa, Nirvāṇa) is not achieved through the accumulation of meritorious karma. It is outside the framework of reward and punishment. Don’t ask me to explain that as I don’t really understand it myself.

I didn't mean to suggest that karma is a means to an/some end. I simply wanted to point out that karma is a law of nature, every bit as real as Einstein's E = mc² or, more to the point, Newton's action = reaction.

Actually in the early 20th c when Buddhism was first becoming popular in the West, the idea that Karma was like Newton's laws was quite popular. It lent credence to the notion of Buddhism being a 'scientific religion' to distinguish it from the so-called superstitious dogma of other religions.

Unfortunately I think it's a spurious comparison. The point about physical laws - which is where we started this digression - is that they only concern physical objects. And Western philosophy in the modern period tended to exclude any notion of intentionality from its reckonings. So, while I agree that karma is a natural law in the sense that Thomas Aquinas would recognise - 'The master principle of natural law is that "good is to be done and pursued and evil avoided"' - it's certainly not a natural law in the sense modern science would recognise. (But then, another of the themes that has come up in this thread is that it's not at all clear what the 'law' in 'natural' or 'scientific law' actually means.)

Well, it seems rather natural to respond in kind, oui? It feels right so to speak to scream/hit back when screamed at/struck. That's what usually happens when people interact with each other, it's (kinda sorta) a (social) law and people, for better or worse, follow it (unknowingly or not).

That's karmic law, and, in my humble opinion, it seems to be as law-like as any physical law that scientists have discovered and described (mathematically or not).

As to the question of intentionality, we seem capable of controlling our actions, if not completely at least partially, and that counts, a lot, when it comes to deciding and executing deeds in the moral dimension In short we can break the law of karma, as Jesus, the paragon of goodness in Christianity had done. The thought of crucifying those who crucified him never even crossed his mind; instead, he broke karma, and turned the other cheek. How many cheeks did Jesus have? :smile: He must've surely run out of them via dolorosa.

Anyway, why do you question what a law is? A law is a description of the behavior of objects, people are objects to, so are mind, the behavior being consistent across time and space.

The laws are such that living beings have evolved. They might have been otherwise, but we would never have been around to discuss it. — Wayfarer

If living beings have evolved, and the universe has evolved, then why not believe that the laws have evolved as well?

So I think the Copernican revolution was more radical than Einstein's in that sense, as Einstein didn't invalidate the basic tenets of Newtonian physics in the way that Copernicus did Ptolemy. — Wayfarer

The Copernican revolution did a very odd and sort of paradoxical thing, and that is that it gave birth to modern relativity theory. If the motions of the planets could be represented equally through the Ptolemaic model as through the Copernican model, then both models are actually "correct", when correctness is determined by usefulness. They are both useful in their own way. But if both models are actually correct, then there is no true or absolute perspective, from which to judge motion, and motion is best represented as relative, and relativity theory is derived.

If we take the position, that one of these models is the correct, or the true perspective, then we deny the relativity of motion, and assume an absolute, or true perspective for motion. But when we take the perspective of relativity theory, we deny that any model of motion is the true model.

The paradox is that the lay person will see the Copernican revolution as giving us the true model of the solar system, while the physicist will see the Copernican revolution as demonstrating the utility of relativity theory. So we, as the laity, come away from the Copernican revolution thinking that it has been demonstrated that there is an absolute truth to motions, while the physicists come away thinking that it has been demonstrated that the best way to model motions is as relative. So the Copernican revolution has demonstrated to some of us, the truth of absolute motion, while it has demonstrated to others, the validity of relative motion, i.e. relativity theory.

That's karmic law, and, in my humble opinion, it seems to be as law-like as any physical law that scientists have discovered and described (mathematically or not). — Agent Smith

Hey I agree.

The objections to the idea of laws is that the word implies a power that makes something happen, whereas in natural law, there's no such observable power. See Nancy Cartwright's No God No Laws.

If the motions of the planets could be represented equally through the Ptolemaic model as through the Copernican model, then both models are actually "correct", when correctness is determined by usefulness. — Metaphysician Undercover

You didn't mention that the Ptolmaic model was geocentric.