Laws as Properties

Discussion in 'General Philosophy' started by Nunayer Beezwax, Apr 24, 2010.

  1. Nunayer Beezwax Registered Senior Member

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    I am near the beginning of my (active) study of the philosophy of "Laws of Nature", perhaps there is someone here who could either nip this idea of mine in the bud or (more preferably to me of course) point me in a direction that might refine and perfect it.

    So, what is a Law of Nature?

    I don't know, and I would argue that this is a prime example of something no one ever could know (see a previous post of mine on epistemology). However, this needn't slow us down any more than to force us to make a subtle alteration of our question:

    What should we mean when we appeal to the concept of a Law of Nature?

    -or-

    What hole in our conceptual scheme needs the concept of a "Law" to plug it?

    I think this might come down to something like: That which selects the actual from the possible.

    It appears that (at that most famous moment: time t) there are a range of possible dynamic trajectories for any given system at later times. But perhaps it turns out that this appearance is nothing but mere: there really is only one way for things to go. Why is that? Because of Laws.

    Example: The perfect lottery-ball machine. It appears to us that, prior to the selection of a given numbered ping pong ball that there is (roughly) an equal chance of any individual ball coming up through the shoot. But when #23 does come out, someone may ask: "Why was #23 selected and not #25, or any other number?".

    Here some physical science maven may have the patience to describe to this odd person the entire story of the trajectory of ball #23 throughout the time the machine was powered up, to that ball popping up.

    Perhaps the curious person may appeal then to "time t+88" and ask something like "Ah, but when ball 23 moved from position xyz to xyz2 at time t+88, why did it not rather appear at x2yz?"

    To this question would we be in a similar situation to that famous cartoon, where two scientists stand before a chalkboard covered with abstruse formulae, but with the text "Step 2: Then a Miracle Occurs" in the middle of the board. One scientist says to another: "I think you need to be more explicit here in Step 2"...

    At some point in description/explanation, are we forced to write on our chalkboard "Then a Law is followed..."?

    It seems the description/explanation that the physicist gives to this question will turn out to be "Ball 23 moved to the position to which it moved because that is how it had to move, because of the Laws of Physics." and go no further.

    A "Law" of this type seems to me to be "Laws" as "Constraints". The picture is something like this: For any given entity within a given dynamic system, its motion is selected by these abstracta, these "Laws", which do not allow it to take a certain number of paths. If it turns out that there is only one possible path, that is what we mean by a deterministic system.

    But this picture, in my view, feels metaphysically mystical...or something. Maybe it just isn't elegant enough, I'm not sure...

    So what if we tried to anchor this notion of "Law" to properties of the entities themselves? Might there be a way to de-abstract the reasons for why things happen from external and eternal "Laws" to, more parochial, facts about the "stuff" instead?

    I don't know where this is going...I'd appreciate any (thoughtful) comments.
     
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  3. Cyperium I'm always me Valued Senior Member

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    Laws set restrictions, without the restrictions there would be no interaction, and without interaction there would be no exchange of energy and the energy would not be transformed from one form to another.

    --->oo<---- if two balls meet then the kinetic energy of the balls is transferred to one another and they repell, not so much because of any laws, but because the energy follows a straight path and is absorbed by the other ball. We could define laws that tells us in at which angle they would repell eachother and so on, but that's just words for us to understand it better. Laws are simply for our own understanding and have little to do with the world.

    Even so, the laws we have does describe what happens in the interactions, their function is real. But the laws themselves must depend on factors as well. I would guess that laws are just a convenient way of bunching together a lot of unknowns into a known.

    We aren't really sure of why the uncertainty principle works, or why the laws of gravity pulls us to the earth, and at the same time expands the universe in an accelerating rate. The laws mean something only as an abstract of a lot of unknowns. I think they could even be described as "a emergent property" of the various unknowns that exist.
     
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  5. siledre Registered Senior Member

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    I don't see laws of nature unknowable, the most basic is survival of the fittest, there's also eat or be eaten. I wonder if Man is even part of nature anymore, or maybe man is nature personified because even though some laws of nature can apply they aren't necessary.
     
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  7. Cyperium I'm always me Valued Senior Member

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    Well, we are part of nature still (just look at icelands volcano eruption), and even though we are less dependent on the laws of nature, society is just a different system which has its own laws (economy, justice, healthcare, etc.) so perhaps we are just a prolongation of nature which didn't apply to other animals because they didn't have what it takes to create that system (of course now that the system is there the animals adjust accordingly).

    We are counter-acting nature in one way, but then again, it's still survival of the fittest, since even though we have defeated most diseases the law in its pure form still apply, we are still weaker when we are ill, evolution hasn't stopped, it has only changed direction. Instead of adjusting us to fit the laws of nature, it is now adjusting us to fit the laws of society. We can probably see super-humans in the future with never-before-seen abilities to calculate and understand economics, etc., the intellectual evolution has been going on ever since the dawn of civilisation.
     
  8. Dinosaur Rational Skeptic Valued Senior Member

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    "laws of Nature" is convenient shorthand for some notion such as "the models & mathematics which are being very successfully used to design rockets, lasers, computers, & all sorts of other worthwhile artifacts as well as providing good expLanations for much of what we can observe both with our senses & with our advanced measurement technology."
     
  9. glaucon tending tangentially Registered Senior Member

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    Though not exactly succinct, you are quite correct.
     
  10. hrebic Registered Senior Member

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    I think you are talking about Determinism. This belief as I understand it is that any effect can be completely understood (or predicted) if one sufficiently understands the cause(s).

    Classical science is deterministic. It seeks to describe "laws" which reliably predict or explain what happens in the world. It has proved enormously useful in making the lives of humans better (e.g., thermodynamics, medicine,) and worse (e.g., military science).

    But classical science has limitations. I will propose 3: 1) Chaos theory, 2) Aquinas' "First Cause", and 3) Quantum indeterminacy

    1) Chaos Theory:
    Determinism has difficulty predicting events which are chaotic. This has been popularized in the "butterfly effect," which is described as the ability of the flapping of the wings of a butterfly in one part of the world having unpredictable chaotic influences on the whether which ultimately result in a hurricane forming somewhere else.

    Obviously, no classical formulation of natural "laws" can hope to handle this type of causality in any practical way. This is because although classical laws might apply, the interactions are so complex that we would need to possess unimaginable amount of information and have equally unimaginable computing power to obtain the correct result.

    The lottery ball example in your post applies best to this problem in determinism. If this were not the case, the lottery would not work.

    2) First Cause
    Science presumes that every natural phenomenon has 1 or more natural causes. But this implies a chain of cause and effect that can be traced backward ad infinitum.

    This argument was advanced by Thomas Aquinas who argued that an infinite regression of cause and effect backwards in time is unthinkable and is therefore a proof of the existence of God.

    The dilemma for Science is that either one admits that scientific laws cannot capture cause and effect infinitely into the past (i.e., the Big Bang), or there must exist a natural phenomenon which has no natural cause (theism).

    3) Quantum Indeterminacy
    20th Century science has exposed a whole class of phenomena for which no cause, as classically understood, exists. The laws of quantum physics are statistical. They relate to probabilities of certain outcomes occurring from within a range of possible outcomes.

    Unlike Chaos Theory, where the problem is incomplete knowledge and computing power, Quantum indeterminacy claims that there are phenomena which are objectively un-caused in individual cases even though we can make statistical generalizations about the phenomena in large numbers.

    This claim has experimentally withstood the intellectual challenges of the greatest minds in the 20th century and is considered firmly grounded in physics.
     

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