The universe doesn’t obey the laws of physics; it merely does what it does. — Art48

Or perhaps this is merely what WE do.

Laws prescribe what should occur in the future. — Art48

No. The law is approved afterwards. I mean, when the issue which is object of the law occurred already. This is why laws change through the years, because you need to adapt them in what is happening right now.
You cannot promote laws with the uncertainty of what the future holds. That would make the law so useless

Art48
The universe doesn’t obey the laws of physics; it merely does what it does.
— Art48

Or perhaps this is merely what WE do. — Joshs

We are part of the universe, Josh. Everything we do is the universe doing what it does.

We are part of the universe, Josh. Everything we do is the universe doing what it does. — Tate

What I meant specifically is that laws of physics are conceptual creations that may come to be seen eventually as a relic of a certain era of physics.

It is common to distinguish between descriptive laws and prescriptive laws. A descriptive law attempts to describe how something behaves. And such a description will be refuted by contrary behaviour.
Physical laws are descriptive. That's why contrary behaviour refutes them.

Prescriptive laws are prescriptions. That is, they direct us to do something. A prescriptive law is not refuted by contrary behaviour. For example, I do not show that there is no law against driving 100mph by simply doing so.

If someone thought there was a physical law against travelling at 100mph then I could refute that claim by driving at that speed. But if there is a prescriptive law against it then travelling at that speed will simply break the law without refuting it.

When it comes to God, God is plausibly required for there to be certain sorts of prescriptive law, the most obvious being moral laws. Moral laws prescribe, they do not describe. Thus there needs to be a prescriber. And plausibly that prescriber will turn out to be God.

When it comes to God, God is plausibly required for there to be certain sorts of prescriptive law, the most obvious being moral laws. Moral laws prescribe, they do not describe. Thus there needs to be a prescriber. And plausibly that prescriber will turn out to be God. — Bartricks

I have some ideas about objective moral values but that would be the topic of another thread.

What I meant specifically is that laws of physics are conceptual creations that may come to be seen eventually as a relic of a certain era of physics. — Joshs

I see what you mean. But think of the combined gas law. It works. What's the concept behind it? It has to do with kinetic vs potential energy. Maybe that will change, and maybe as it does our prediction skills will improve. But the CGL is already predictive as hell.

I think what we'll see there is an evolution. The same kinds of things are being explained, just explained differently.

see what you mean. But think of the combined gas law. It works. What's the concept behind it? It has to do with kinetic vs potential energy. Maybe that will change, and maybe as it does our prediction skills will improve. But the CGL is already predictive as hell. — Tate

Is this what they used to use to attempt to describe smoke and cloud patterns? When chaos theory was introduced it brought order and predictability to the modeling of such phenomena that the previous concepts could not. One has to be careful when one claims that a model is predictive as hell to take into account the extent to which it consigns aspects of the world to chance and randomness. This is a way to have one’s cake and eat it too , by blaming the world for the limitations of one’s theory while claiming it to be wonderfully predictive.

Is this what they used to use to attempt to describe smoke and cloud patterns? When chaos theory was introduced it brought order and predictability to the modeling of such phenomena that the previous concepts could not. One has to be careful when one claims that a model is predictive as hell to take into account the extent to which it consigns aspects of the world to chance and randomness — Joshs

The CGL is for working with pressurized gas. It is wonderfully predictive. :smile:

The CGL is for working with pressurized gas. It is wonderfully predictive. :smile: — Tate

Still, there must be aspects of the model that assume
chance, random and arbitrary features. Look to these for the impetus for better reformulations of the model.

Still, there must be aspects of the model that assume
chance, random and arbitrary features. Look to these for the impetus for better reformulations of the model. — Joshs

Like Brownian motion? Ok. I'll get on it. Nobel here I come!

But the point is that you are attacking a strawman, as physical laws are recognized to be descriptive, not prescriptive.
Insofar as some see in them evidence of God it is due to them seeming designed. And designs require a designer.
So it is not that laws require a lawgiver - for descriptive laws clearly do not - it is that designed descriptive laws require a designer.

It is laws of the prescriptive kind - so, normative laws - that require a law giver

From an old thread:

"Physical laws" are features of physical models and not the universe itself. [ ... ] If in current scientific terms new observations indicate that aspects of the universe have changed, then, in order to account for such changes, we will have to reformulate our current (or conjecture new) physical models which might entail changes to current (or wholly different) "physical laws". E.g. Aristotlean teleology —> Newtonian gravity —> Einsteinian relativity. — 180 Proof

This thread seems a little ridiculous. Call then laws or rules or whatever. They work, and I suppose the question is whether they will always work.

Yep. They are simply something we say about the way things are. Calling them "laws" does not imply that they are prescribed by some authority.

The etymology is clear,

from Old Norse *lagu "law," collective plural of lag "layer, measure, stroke," literally "something laid down, that which is fixed or set." — Etymology online

Bohm2 - whatever happened to him? - provided a link to a good OP on this topic, No God, No Laws, Nancy Cartwright.

Two approaches of understanding laws are explained by the regularity theory as well as the necessitarian theory. The regularity theory states that laws describe the way certain things and objects behave. Whereas, the necessitarian approach describes laws as more than summaries of behaviors, but rather how such things and objects must behave. Do either of these approaches to the laws of nature allow for laws to be both true and explanatory? Nancy Cartwright believes this to be impossible.

Cartwright on Laws of Nature

The argument seems to be based on the somewhat odd idea that a description of facts is not itself a fact.

You are trying to sneak god in again.

I didn't invent it. Apparently Cartwright is highly regarded in the subject.

And isn't equating the description of a fact with a fact the same as confusing map and territory?

It's not just description, it's also explanations. You can't describe the future because you haven't seen it. Explanations allow you to predict, but a prediction is not knowledge.

And isn't equating the description of a fact with a fact the same as confusing map and territory? — Wayfarer

That looks like a false analogy. A painting of a painting is still a painting. A fact about a fact is still a fact.

Do you have an argument that shows that:

• physical laws are descriptions
• a description is not a fact

Laws prescribe what should occur in the future. ... Habits derive from what occurred in the past; a habit is a descriptive account of past trends.

...When we trade “laws of the universe” for “habits of the universe”, we dispense with the eternal, exterior law-giver and recognize that, as far as we can tell, the universe determines its own behavior. The universe doesn’t obey the laws of physics; it merely does what it does. — Art48

What we have here is the usual thing of a metaphysical dichotomy - an argument that successfully derives its two dialectical extremes, but then falters by striving to eliminate one or either side of the story rather than seeing them as the two sides of the one more general story.

In general, science finds itself pursuing both ways of thinking. It treats the laws of nature as both cumulative statistical accidents - the kind of patterns that the Laws of Thermodynamics describe. And then it has its other laws that seem prescribed by the maths of symmetry - like relativity and quantum theory.

So the actuality of the physical world seems split between two poles of causality - the actions of blind material accident and prescriptive formal constraints. Or Aristotle's hylomorphic theory of substance, in other words.

Thus you can argue forever about which pole of causality really underpins reality. The idea of a law has to be seen as one or other of these two choices ... because ... two choices, right?

Yet it should be obvious that instead reality - as substantial actuality - is produced by this very division of causality towards its different poles of causality. Physical reality is a system, a structured process. And so that involves the creation of differentiation itself. You need the yin and yang of local accidents and global necessities to have anything worth describing at all.

When it comes to framing the laws of nature, this is why we end up with a lot of embedded conflicts, such as classical vs quantum laws, statistical vs mathematical laws, etc. Sometimes we have to lean towards one pole, sometimes towards the other.

What this conflict should tell is is not that one way of framing laws is the real way, the other some kind of error. Instead, it should tell us that we are always trying to stand outside the complexity of our physical actuality. And the two ways of doing that cleanly are to pretend that the cosmos is either ruled by cumulative statistical accident or by prescriptive mathematical structure.

We do both - we take the limit in both directions to see what we discover, to see what it becomes useful to so - and end up with the various famiiiar bodies of law like thermodynamics, relativity and quantum theory. Then we see the moves to try to re-integrate what we have separated in the various systems science, condensed matter physics and information theoretic approaches to modelling physical reality.

Again, epistemology demands breaking the thing-in-itself apart into dialectially-opposed viewpoints. We want to be absolutely sure of standing "outside" the world we intend to describe by standing outside both its possible sides, or limiting extremes. We have to transcend the world in two reciprocal directions to be certain of actually getting beyond all its possible limits.

This leads us - as law-mongering scientists - to explore both extremes of causality. The view from pure accident as opposed to the view from pure necessity. Thermodynamics pretends the world can be accounted for by the vagaries of Darwinian statistics. QFT and GR pretend it can be accounted for by the inescapable logic of gauge and Lorentzian invariance.

A systems view would then unite the two metaphysical views to follow Aristotle in seeing physical reality as a hylomorphic blend of these two mutually opposed, but jointly exhaustive, extremes.

It's not just description, it's also explanations. — Tate

Ok, so set out the detail this distinction.

You can't describe the future... — Tate

Yes, I can. I will eat my lunch in a few hours. Are you claiming that this is not a description?

...because you haven't seen it — Tate

I haven't seen your liver; but I could describe it. So that doesn't look right.

It's not just description, it's also explanations.
— Tate

Ok, so set out the detail this distinction. — Banno

A description is 'what', an explanation is 'why'.

You can't describe the future...
— Tate

Yes, I can. I will eat my lunch in a few hours. Are you claiming that this is not a description? — Banno

A description is knowledge. You don't know you'll eat lunch in a few hours.

...because you haven't seen it
— Tate
I haven't seen your liver; but I could describe it. So that doesn't look right. — Banno

How many ounces of fat are in my liver?

A description is knowledge. — Tate

Really? Always? What could that mean? A description is always a justified true belief?

How many ounces of fat are in my liver? — Tate

Too many. A description does not have to be complete (whatever that might mean) to be true.

There's always the temptation to overstate one's case in philosophy.

There's always the temptation to overstate one's case in philosophy. — Banno

:clap:

I quite like where the OP is going with habit instead of law - using a different word can sometimes clear up a whole lot of confusion. A habit is autonomously developed, doesn't, like law, require a habit-giver à la a lawmaker/law-giver.

Since nature is its own master, it can, if it wants to, with the right effort, change its habits (for the better). Maybe g should be 0.9 m/s² - no more broken bones and cracked skulls in the ER. :snicker:

A description is knowledge.
— Tate

Really? Always? What could that mean? A description is always a justified true belief? — Banno

A scientific description is usually justified, ideally true, and believed, though that's not the only useful definition of knowledge.

I take it by "description", you include explanations, background concepts, and techniques of prediction. Sounds good. :up:

I immediately thought of Cartwright with the OP here.



To expand on the above and the very good point made here: , the "laws of physics," are not the actual rules that govern how observed phenomena work.

For example, Newtonian laws for classical scale objects are not how those objects actually work. They are idealized systems that approximate how two discrete, isolated objects interact. In reality, no such objects exist such that they only influence one another and are composed of a unitary whole. Add a third body into the mix and Newtonian laws break down (hence the "Three Body Problem" popularized by the sci-fi book).

Likewise, a lot of our models involve sticking in all sorts of contestants and fudge factors to get "accurate enough," predictions, but these are by no means the way the world actually appears to work according to our observations.

We assume perfect geometrical shapes in models all the time, but these are nowhere to be found in reality. Mandelbrot has a lot of interesting ideas on this. A core one is that objects don't have just one set of dimensions. A call of string seen from far away is just a single point. Get closer and it becomes a 3D ball. Get closer still and you have a 2D line. Move even closer, to the smallest scales, and you're back to 1D points.

Similarly, he claimed the length of the British coastlines is infinite. Measure it with a mile long ruler and you get one answer. Measure it with a foot long ruler and you get a longer answer because now you're taking account of all these tiny inlets and bends. Get even closer and eventually the static coastline disappears entirely and becomes a roiling mass of molecules.

I feel like this is an important point in reference to your original post because it shows we shouldn't be thinking of them as "laws" in your original sense in the first place. So, sort of a different path to the same conclusion you had.

How does it know how fast to fall? — Art48

Suppose, arguendo, that a group of people formulate a law and you fully understand that law + you're a stickler for rules/laws. How would you behave? Assuming you don't have the option of delinking knowledge from action, you would be doing exactly what a stone does when it follows the law of gravity, oui monsieur?

In other words, someone like you (conscious + understands the law + hasta follow 3the law) would be indiscernible from a stone (nonconscious).

 I knew what I was supposed to do, but I didn't. — Agent Smith :cool: