Theoretical physicist Paul Davies wrote:
But what are these ultimate laws and where do they come from? Such questions are often dismissed as being pointless or even unscientific. As the cosmologist Sean Carroll has written, “There is a chain of explanations concerning things that happen in the universe, which ultimately reaches to the fundamental laws of nature and stops… at the end of the day the laws are what they are… And that’s okay. I’m happy to take the universe just as we find it.”
Assuming that Davies is correct, I find it odd that there is little interest for understanding the laws of nature. There are some interesting questions to be answered, such as: Where do the laws come from? How do they cause things to happen?
Physicist Neil Turok once posed the question:
What is it that makes the electrons continue to follow the laws?
Indeed, what power compels physical objects to follow the laws of nature?
The question I would like to focus on is: what would a naturalistic explanation of the laws of nature look like?
Frankly, I don’t know where to start. What I do know is that a bottom-up explanation runs into a serious problem. A bottom-up explanation, from the level of say bosons, should be expected to give rise to innumerable different ever-changing laws. Different circumstances, different laws.
But this is not what we find. Again, Paul Davies:
Physical processes, however violent or complex, are thought to have absolutely no effect on the laws. There is thus a curious asymmetry: physical processes depend on laws but the laws do not depend on physical processes. Although this statement cannot be proved, it is widely accepted.
If laws do not depend on physical processes, then it follows that laws cannot be explained by physical processes. IOWs there is no bottom-up explanation for the laws of nature.
But what does it mean for naturalism if there is no bottom-up (naturalistic) explanation for the laws of nature? How does the central claim ‘everything is physical’ make sense if there is no physical explanation for the laws of nature? What if it is shown that the laws of nature control the physical but are not reducible to it?
Or, one might simply deny that the laws of physics are anything more than shorthand descriptions and do not exist at the most fundamental level. Nancy Cartwright has been defending that position for years now; see her How the Laws of Physics Lie. More can be found in this search.
KN,
Right. It’s not as if electrons consult the laws of physics to see what they are and aren’t permitted to do. The laws of physics are simply descriptions of what electrons (and other particles, fields, etc.) actually do.
It’s legitimate to ask why things behave the way they do, and we may never have an ultimate answer to that question. But Origenes’ question doesn’t make sense:
A description does not control the thing being described.
If the question made no sense, no one would be able to understand it. Yet people can understand it. Therefore, the question does make sense. Even you understood it.
Mung,
Your pedantry is useless and boring. Do you have anything worthwhile to contribute?
The question is to me uninteresting, because I can’t concieve of an answer that doesn’t suffer from the same problem as the question answered. But why do the laws obey the [explanation for the laws]? And suppose there’s an answer to that too, we can ask the same thing again. And we’re suddenly reduced to trying to wrestle the Münchhausen trilemma all over again.
I. Either something is circularly explained by it’s own property in some way.
II. Or there’s an infinite regression of deeper and deeper accounts that never ends.
III. Or it terminates in something that just is for no reason whatsoever.
All three options seem completely unsatisfying, and I don’t see a fourth option that doesn’t itself suffer from the same issue.
I don’t believe the problem can be solved. By any method.
quote:
The general idea of divine simplicity can be stated in this way: the being of God is identical to the “attributes” of God. In other words, such characteristics as omnipresence, goodness, truth, eternity, etc. are identical to God’s being, not qualities that make up that being, nor abstract entities inhering in God as in a substance.
end quote:
from here
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_simplicity
peace
It is a well established fact that the universe began highly organized and so small that it would fit into a palm of one’s hand…
How’s this even possible?
Had the blueprints of the universe and it’s laws existed before the big bang as pure information of it’s quantum state?
Was this information about the details of the quantum state of the universe later converted into the controlled transformation of energy into matter, which gave birth to the material universe?
Perhaps…It’s just my own personal theory…Whether it is true or partially true it remains to be seen… The one simple fact remains; the universe began highly organized and that can’t be explained by naturalistic ideas of bottom-up processes…
If God can have the property of existing, then the “laws of nature” can have the property of existing.
Why does God have that property? Maybe he has another property that explains that one. But then why does he have that property? Where does it come from? And so on and so forth.
I’m sorry, but God doesn’t solve the trilemma. Nothing does.
Well it can be, but those explanations need explanations themselves. But that is true whether those explanations are materialistic or not. There isn’t any philosophy that can escape this problem. If everything requires an explanation, so does the explanation. So what does explain it, which does not immediately raise the same question “Why that thing?”.
What answer can you give other than just blindly claiming something that itself isn’t also an inexplicable brute fact, or also requires another explanation?
I’ll give you my view, but I don’t know if it counts as naturalistic (because I have never been clear on what “naturalistic” is supposed to mean).
I see the laws of nature as human conventions.
There is a tendency to assume that the basic concepts already existed, and then laws were discovered that showed relations. But it looks to me as if the laws are really the rules for constructing the concepts. So it is in the nature of those concepts, that they follow the laws used to construct them.
If laws have true existence, independent from us, then we can distinguish between the laws and our descriptions of them. Cartwright, if I understand her correctly, claims that our descriptions of fundamental laws are inaccurate. She may very well be right but I do not hold that it is relevant to my OP.
If she takes the position that there are no laws at the most fundamental level, then the laws are reducible.
You are saying that laws don’t exist; there are just descriptions of what physical objects do. IOWs behavior of physical objects produce ‘laws’ bottom up.
This brings us to the problem of why physical objects produce a limited set of immutable laws. As I said in the OP: ‘different circumstances, different laws’. If 756 bosons produce a certain gravitational constant, then why do 398 bosons produce the same one?
The Paul Davies quote at the bottom of the OP confirms my concern with such a bottom-up explanation.
According to divine simplicity God does not have the property of existing, God is existence itself when properly understood
peace
Her view is that the laws are descriptions, not that the descriptions are of laws. The laws are results of how we measure phenomena that are of interest to us. She’s an “anti-realist” about laws — though she’s a realist about theoretical entities.
I just wanted to throw that idea into the mix so that we can see that one option for the naturalist is to just to reject metaphysical realism about laws.
If one is a metaphysical realist about laws, then perhaps the problems posed for the naturalist would still remain. I don’t know. It’s hard for me get my head around metaphysical realism about laws of physics.
I think the OP raises an interesting question and one that makes sense.
If the laws are descriptive, what are they describing? Essences?
Hanging out there even further than the laws of nature are the constants of nature.
Sure. Physical stuff. But why not absolute chaos?
As far as I can tell, they are statements of specific sets of consistent observations. Calling these sets “essences” doesn’t contribute to our understanding, it simply rings in a new word for the same set.
I’ve always found it annoying that one cannot simply keep going faster and faster, if one has infinite fuel. Why does there need to be some absolute speed limit? This seems unnecessarily arbitrary. Science fiction writers, to drive their plots, must often necessarily invent end-runs around this limitation. Comic book characters do the same, in their own ways, mostly by ignoring the physical limitations. I don’t know if it’s any more useful to ask whether the “laws” can be violated under some conditions (an engineering question) than to ask why the laws exist in the first place (a navel gazing question).
This kind of reasoning leads to infinite regress where to explain one existence a preexisting one is required… and so on…
The answer to this issue could be a transcendent being with infinite dimensions…
Rumraket,
The explanation of the explanation that requires an explanation and so on leads to infinite regress and if that were to be applied in science you would never get an explanation of anything, which would destroyed it…
So there has to be the best explanation of where the universe came from and why it began highly organized…
While an eternal, transcendent God (without beginning or end) outside time and space may not be a satisfactory answer to some, it could be the answer as to where the universe came from and why it began highly organized…
Since there doesn’t seem to be the best naturalistic explanation of how the universe began and why highly organized that wouldn’t require an explanation, until there is such an explanation, I’m leaving my theory as the best explanation…
fifth:
Divine simplicity is an incoherent concept. Perhaps I should do an OP on that.
keiths:
Origenes:
No, I’m saying that the laws are descriptions of what physical entities do, Descriptions are always physically instantiated, so they present no difficulties for naturalism. Descriptions are produced by describers, who are physical entities themselves. It’s all just physics.
Assuming that descriptions don’t cause anything to happen, then, according to Cartwright, there are no laws. If there are no laws how does she explain the regularities in physical behavior? If the laws are not prescriptive but instead merely descriptive, then how is the illusion of prescriptive laws created?
Does she hold that gravitation does not exist? I guess not. So, if there is no prescriptive law of gravitation, then how does she explain gravitation?
Okay, but doing so the ‘anti-realist about laws’ commits himself to having to explain regularities of physical behavior bottom-up.
I agree that it would be problematic for a naturalist to be a realist about laws. Saying ‘everything is physical, except for the laws’ doesn’t have a nice ring to it.
Good question. What are our equations describing?
Which are integrated in the laws. If these constants are created bottom-up by physical forces bumping into each other why are they ‘constants’?
That’s the question. Indeed, the absence of laws seems to imply chaos.
Do you see gravitation as a ‘human convention’? I guess not. Do you hold that there is a prescriptive law about gravity ‘out there’ — independent from our descriptions of it?
That doesn’t make sense. It’s the situation we are in right now, we have the laws of physics and we don’t know “where they came from”. Despite this possibility of an infinite regression (or alternatively, termination in an inexplicable brute fact), it doesn’t “destroy” science. We still know all the things we know, we can still explain a lot of things using the laws and mechanisms we have discovered. Just because there might be an infinite regression of explanations doesn’t mean science doesn’t work. It clearly works regardless.
What powers (laws) are responsible for regularities in nature?
If ‘boundaries’ explain the regularities in nature, then these boundaries can be rightly called ‘the laws of nature’. So, instead of ‘where do the laws come from?’ my question becomes: ‘where do the boundaries come from?’
It’s interesting to note that any multiverse hypothesis proposes a collection of universes with different boundaries (‘laws’, ‘fundamental constants’).
Finally, maybe upper and lower ‘boundaries’ can explain the path and speed that the electron takes around the nucleus, but it doesn’t seem apparent to me.
The question is relevant wrt the premises of naturalism. If laws have no physical explanation, then the central claim of naturalism ‘everything is physical’ is in need of revision.
Gravitation is not a law. Rather, it is an observed natural phenomenon. I am not suggesting that the observed phenomenon is a human convention.
The law of gravity, on the other hand, has to do with how we have chosen to conceptualize that phenomenon. So that’s what I see as a human convention.
As for a prescriptive law: in a way, yes it is. Human conventions tend to be prescriptive. They prescribe human behavior. The laws of physics are prescriptions of how we should conceptualize and measure various natural phenomena.
My take on Nancy Cartwright is also a little different from that of KN. I see her as saying that the laws of physics are part of a mathematical idealization that physicists are using, an idealization that works well for making predictions. Roughly speaking, that leaves the job of physicists as constructing idealized models of reality that fit very well, so make good predictions. And the laws are prescriptive of the behavior of the idealized objects used in those models.
Neil Rickert,
Though Cartwright is a realist about theoretical entities (unlike van Fraassen, for example). So she would say (I conjecture) that the inverse square law is an idealized mathematical description of how mass distorts space-time. But she’s still going to think that spatiotemporal curvature is as real as real gets.
Occasionally something like general relativity or quantum theory comes along and makes a hash of any attempt to put phenomena in a box.
We find regularities that are lawful enough for engineers, but the math is ragged at the edges.
How about applying a mathematical derivation? The Law of Large Numbers qualifies as a law of nature, and there are multiple ways is can be derived. There are even different forms (strong/weak) deriving from initial assumptions.
The Law of Gravitation, Newton’s Laws, Ohm’s Law…this was just fashionable use of the word Law in cases where we’d now use the word theory.
“I see her as saying that the laws of physics are part of a mathematical idealization that physicists are using, an idealization that works well for making predictions. Roughly speaking, that leaves the job of physicists as constructing idealized models of reality that fit very well, so make good predictions.”
A physicist I knew in college described his job as the last sentence almost verbatim. .
Fair enough. I don’t see that “conventional” contradicts “real”. Driving on the right side of the road seems real enough, even though it is a matter of convention.
Origenes,
I’ve already given you a solution to the problem you pose in the OP:
Origenes:
keiths:
Origenes:
Laws do have a physical explanation. They are descriptions of how physical entities behave, and these descriptions are themselves physically instantiated and produced by physical entities — what I referred to as “describers” above.
Everything is physical, and that assertion stands in no need of revision.
Neil:
The difference is that in the case of driving on the right, the phenomenon itself is a human convention. In the case of gravitation, it is not.
All Origines is doing is asking “Why?” every time he gets a response, like a kid does.
keiths writes:
I beg to disagree. If laws were merely descriptions, there would be no reason to trust in their continuing to hold. As unfashionable as it sounds, the only view that makes sense is that laws are prescriptions, rather than descriptions. For instance, attracting electrons is not what a proton merely does; rather, it is what it should do.
I look forward to reading it. Here’s an article you should read first:
http://edwardfeser.blogspot.jp/2009/11/william-lane-craig-on-divine-simplicity.html
Finally, I should mention that Eastern Orthodox Christians draw a distinction between God’s essence (which is altogether simple) and God’s operations (which are multiple).
I would like you to focus on ‘whatever it is that causes gravitation’, rather than our (mathematical) descriptions of it. Now, there are two possibilities here:
— Gravitation is caused by a prescriptive law, which exists ‘out there’ independent of our descriptions of it.
— Gravitation is produced by the physical stuff involved, which is not governed by any laws.
If your go for the second option, then you commit yourself to explaining regularities (like gravity) bottom-up. For one thing you need to explain why there is such a thing as a universal gravitational constant.
Do you agree with me that prescriptive laws, irreducible to a physical level, do not sit well with naturalism?
Likewise if you chose the first wouldn’t you need to explain how the prescriptive laws are enforced ,whether the prescriptive laws are arbitrary?
And what reason is there to trust in their continuing to hold, other than that they have thus far? We do trust the “sun to rise” day after day (earth to revolve to cause illumination of our part of the globe), but there’s no law that insists that it must happen. Certain catastrophes could prevent it from happening, but we’re not doing badly to expect the “sun to rise.”
As unjustified as it sounds, is more like it.
Then why does it do so only barely when an electron is far away?
Why shouldn’t a proton attract a neutrino, and how do you know? Should xenon-135 be so very good at “attracting” slower neutrons, as it is? Why? Why isn’t xenon-136 nearly so good at it? Must I believe that there is some great purpose behind the differences between the two at intercepting neutrons?
Glen Davidson
I don’t get this. A description of how things work is a description of how things work. Trust is based on the description being reliable, not on whether the reliability is a ruse or transient phenomenon.
I thought there was some agreement in the community that makes definitions that a Law is a description, usually a formula or equation, and a theory is a claim about the reason the law holds, the cause and effect relationships. We might use a formula in engineering, but a theory would give us a “reason” to trust it.
Why does there need to be something that “causes” gravitation. Maybe gravitation just is, and has no cause.
I’ll go with the second, except that I would remove the word “physical”.
There are no regularities.
The word “regularity” implies something like rule following. But the only rules that we know are human created rules. It is not credible that the world that existed before there were humans was made to somehow follow human created rules.
Yes, it is possible that there’s a God, and that the world follows God’s rules. But nobody can tell what are those “God’s rules”. If there are any, they are unknown to us and unknowable to us. So that cannot be a correct picture. Moreover, if the Christian picture of this were correct, then scientific knowledge should be coming out of the monasteries instead of coming out of the scientific laboratories. For the monasteries are where you would expect God to communicate his rules to humans.
Here’s how I see it working:
We are pragmatic organisms. All biological organisms are pragmatic in one way or another.
As pragmatic organisms, we use trial and error to find behavior that works to support our existence as biological organisms. This produces regularities in our behavior. We then invent ways of conceptualizing and describing the world that is consistent with the regularities that we have created in our behavior. And the way we do that tends to project the regularities onto the world, so that we then see the world as following our rules. But the rules really originated in our own pragmatic rules of behavior.
I beg to differ. Did apples start falling downward to the earth, only after humans created that rule? I guess that this is not what you are trying to say.
Of course I agree. I for one would like to make a clear distinction between our description, which don’t cause apples to fall, and the cause of the event.
You have managed to miss the point (as almost everybody does).
Before there were humans, there was nobody singling out things and calling them “apples”. And there was nobody singling out a direction, and calling it “down”. There wasn’t even a concept of “direction”.
So humans created these concepts. And they gave the name “down” to the direction that apples fall. So there isn’t any rule governing the behavior of apples, such that they must fall down. Rather, there is an implicit rule governing the behavior of humans, that they must use “down” as the name of the direction in which apples fall.
Standard philosophy (probably all human philosophy, not just academic philosophy) is based on the idea that we have fixed concepts and varying propositions that express relations between those concepts. But, in reality, neither propositions nor concepts are fixed. Both change over time. The conventional philosophy is reasonable, in the sense that propositions change more rapidly than do concepts. That makes it a reasonable simplification. But professional philosophers and scientists should be able to question this conventional simplification.
The problem of the source of natural laws and of so-called “fine tuning” only arises when we take that reasonable simplification as if it were gospel truth. So let’s not do that.
The unreasonable usefulness of science?
Neil Rickert:
Still, before humans, apples did fall down rather than up. That rule was already in place, independent from our description of it.
That does not follow. The fact that we name and describe things, doesn’t contradict the fact that there is a force in place which acts on apples. Our “apples fall down” is a fairly accurate description of a specific consequence of that force.
Irrelevant to the issue at hand.
Neil,
Nevertheless, the aggregations of particles that would later be called “apples” were already moving along paths that would later be called “the down direction”, due to what would later be called the “warping” of what would later be called “space-time”.
Human convention plays a role in naming things and in how natural phenomena are described, but reality calls the shots. Someone who claims that massive objects repel each other due to the force of gravity is simply wrong. That idea cannot be imposed by human will. Reality trumps convention.
“I thought there was some agreement in the community that makes definitions that a Law is a description, usually a formula or equation, and a theory is a claim about the reason the law holds, the cause and effect relationships. ”
A “Law” was a 17th-19th century grandiose word for Theory. For Example, “Ohm’s Law” is really just what you get if you take the Theory of Electromagnetism and set dI/dt=0. But it was discovered in the early 19th century, so it was called “Ohm’s Law”.
vjtorley:
If the laws are descriptions of regularities, then the laws will continue to “hold” (that is, they will continue to be accurate descriptions) to the extent that the regularities continue to hold. Why is that problematic?
You’re writing as if protons were free agents who would go off and repel electrons if the Codex Protonicus didn’t restrain them. But we don’t pick a particle, assign it to the role of ‘proton’, and say ‘you must do this’, pointing to the Codex. We observe it and infer that it is a proton based on its behavior.
Physical reality is full of objects, particles, fields, etc., behaving in certain ways. The mistake you and Origenes are making is to assume that any regularity in that behavior must be imposed from outside nature.
Descriptions do not cause apples to fall downward. When I talk of a prescriptive law I refer to e.g. a force that causes apples to fall towards the earth. I’m not talking about our mathematical description of such a force. I’m talking about a reality that is independent from us.
That’s a bit unfair. I have continually discussed the alternative: a bottom-up explanation of the laws. However, IMHO, this attempt runs into a serious problem. I have provided a brief sketch of this problem in the OP and several other posts. You have failed to address it.