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?
The thing I’d like to understand is why some people feel that there must be some kind of external reason for the behaviors, particularly the apparent consistent behaviors, of things in the universe. I’ve just never felt that, nor have I ever really contemplated it as a serious issue. That light moves along at a brisk pace just shy of 300 million meters per second is just a property of light in this universe as far as I can tell. What about that particular behavior should prompt me to wonder if there’s a reason for that specific behavior and what that reason is?
It simply boils down to the same old question: why this and not something else? A couple of thoughts come to mind when such questions are posed in my vicinity: A) why would something else necessarily be possible, B) even if something else is possible, this is the one that is, and C) no reason at all.
That’s Platonism. The rules exist in some ideal Platonic world (or “Platonic heaven”), independent of us. But, in that case, an uncountable infinitude of rules already exist and we are unaware of most of them. I don’t find that a useful way of looking at things, so I am not a Platonist.
We also invent forces, which we say act on apples.
But your statement isn’t quite right.
According to Aristotle, apples fell because that was the natural thing for them. There wasn’t any force.
According to Newton, apples fall because there is a force of gravity.
According to Einstein, apples “fall” because that is the natural thing to do. It’s just that space-time is curved, and the curvature affects apples. There isn’t any force acting on the apples that causes them to fall.
The way that we conceptualize the world changes with scientific change.
The fact of conceptual change illustrates that these are our rules, not some platonic entities. We invent concepts and rules so that we can more effectively exploit our world. And we we change our concepts and rules when we find that doing so will improve how we exploit the world.
We tend to think in terms of the Newtonian conception, rather than Einstein’s General Relativity. And that’s because Newton’s laws are often more useful to us earthbound organisms.
The molecules of the air move around pretty randomly in something like brownian motion. Suppose our world were such that apples moved in brownian motion, but air molecules had something more directional to them. Then we would be making laws about molecular motion of air, since we would need to use those to breath. And we wouldn’t be making a big deal over the motion of apples.
The point that I am trying to make, is that we create concepts and rules in order for us to organize how we look at our rules. We do this to benefit us in our interactions with the world. So we are the rule makers.
And sure, if an alien from Andromeda were to visit earth and use our rules, he would find that nature seemed to follow those rules. But maybe the alien is such that those rules are of no relevance at all to his biology (or whatever we call it). So if that alien were naturally living on earth, he would come up with totally different rules that make no sense to us but would work for him.
My point, then, is that there is nothing special about what we call “laws of nature”. They are things that we invent to help us exploit our world. And if our world were different, but still such that we could survive, then we would have different concepts and different rules.
Or, to put it differently, if you want to explain “laws of nature”, then look to human behavior rather than to metaphysics.
Origenes:
I don’t see the problem.
In the OP, you write:
Could you explain why you believe this?
Well, what would you like me to say? I’m glad you are coming to your senses…. gradually though…
If you theists are going to reify natural laws, you should also reify mathematical concepts, but then you should accept infinite regresses actually exist.
But all I want to know is: who is this doing this synthetic type of alpha beta psychedelic funkin’?
For what it’s worth, it’s generally theists (not all of them, but too many) who have no interest in explaining the “laws” of physics. “God did it” is all the explanation they’ve got and all that they want, and it’s not any kind of explanation at all.
Glen Davidson
Another OP from you on something you admittedly don’t understand. I can hardly contain myself.
I don’t think of the mass of the electron as a behavior.
Neil Rickert,
But isn’t there a force causing space-time to curve?
Maybe you have to take a second look at what Paul Davies wrote. From the OP:
What does it mean to say that A does not depend on B? For one thing it means that A cannot be explained by B.
Assuming a bottom-up explanation of the laws, why is it that wildly different physical processes produce the same limited set of laws? If you are correct and physical processes produce regularities, is it not to be expected that different physical processes produce different regularities / laws?
I notice that I’m simply repeating myself. If you don’t see the problem now … I’m afraid that I cannot be much clearer than I have already been.
Or perhaps the curvature causes the force?
It’s an effect. But I don’t think there is anything that fits the ordinary meaning of “force”.
“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.”
I’ve never taught particle physics, but I’ve known enough people who did to tell you what they would say if a grad student said that to them:
“What?”
Neil Rickert, http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/wwfeatures/wm/live/1280_720/images/live/p0/3f/yz/p03fyz59.jpg
The cause of curvature appears to be energy looking at the stress energy tensor. The eclipse experiment showed that star light (almost no mass) curved when arriving at earth and was predicted from the equation. So I would say the cause of curvature is energy or its mass equivalent. Thoughts?
“Assuming a bottom-up explanation of the laws, why is it that wildly different physical processes produce the same limited set of laws?”
This sentence makes no sense at all.
The very contrast between “bottom-up” and “top-down” explanations makes no sense at all.
Yes, it is usually said to be due to mass, but energy counts as mass.
Origenes:
I’m a tiny bit familiar with Turok, and this quote seems odd. As reported by NBC in April 1999:
Interestingly, Turok went on to develop, with Paul Steinhardt, a cyclic model of the universe. I’ve seen a paper in which they mention that the cyclic model is compatible with Hindu cosmology. So if you want to stick one god on him, you might as well lay on with the pantheon.
Having happened upon one misrepresentation in the post, I will look actively for others.
Origenes, you write:
You’re misrepresenting Davies. You might have linked to his post “Frozen Accidents: Can the Laws of Physics be Explained?” on PBS’s The Nature of Reality blog. The paragraph that you quote continues:
This is not just different from what you’ve attributed to Davies. It’s the exact opposite. The topic of his post is what you suggest is not getting attention.
I think you’ve got some explaining to do. You put in Turok’s mouth a question that he was asked. You attribute to Davies the opposite of what he’s saying. And you do it without providing links to sources (which you know how to do, I see at UD).
Will I find anything else factually wrong?
Origenes:
Strike three. You’re out, quote miner. Personally, I think you should lose your posting privilege for such blatant abuse — unless you apologize, and promise not to do it again.
You’ve lifted parts of two consecutive paragraphs out of context, and used them to create the story you wanted to tell. Here’s the introduction to Davies’s post, with emphasis on the passages you mined.
I admit my mistake. It was cosmologist Joel Primack who posed the question not physicist Neil Turok. In my own defense: it was an ‘honest’ mistake due to my sloppy reading skills. The question interests me and illustrates the point I was trying to get across.
To be frank, I‘m not familiar with neither Turok nor Primack and I do not have the intention to misrepresent either one of them.
I did add that link to the OP and I have no idea where it went. Maybe Alan Fox can shed his light on this matter.
Nonsense! Davies is saying that in recent years there has been some speculation about the nature of the laws themselves, before that it was considered ‘unscientific’ and got no attention. When I condense that to ‘there is little interest for understanding the laws of nature’ then that is certainly not the exact opposite of what Davies said. I give myself a B+.
I quoted from an article by Paul Davies. So? Which part(s) of the article did I intentionally leave out that contradicts my OP?
No we do not. We attempt to describe and explain a force that acts on apples independent from our descriptions of it. We do not invent that force.
Sure there was. That force may not be external to the apple, it may be intrinsic to the apple, but there is a force that makes the apple go downward nonetheless.
For one thing the curvature of space-time acts as a force on the apples.
The idea is rather simple: if there is no force, intrinsic or extrinsic to the apple, then nothing happens.
I’m less inclined towards anti-realism than Neil is, but I do think he makes an important point: not only our explanations but also our descriptions of phenomena depend on the conceptual frameworks and institutionalized practices through which phenomena are disclosed as intelligible.
Aristotelian physics depends on a quite different background than does modern physics. We use Aristotle’s words (“kinesis” and “dunamis”) but “kinetic” and “dynamic” don’t mean in modern physics what they meant in Aristotle’s Physics (from “phusis”; Physics means “On Nature”).
Comparing our physics with Aztec physics or Azande physics is even more difficult.
Though I’m not entirely happy with the argument, Putnam already exposed critical failures with what he called “metaphysical realism”: the assumption that the world has a fully determinate nature or structure, such that they can be a single correct description of it. I think that’s what Neil is rejecting. If so, I’m with him on this.
Origenes,
Sure you can — by actually answering my question:
Start from the “level of bosons” and show us the reasoning that leads you to expect “innumerable different ever-changing laws.”
I don’t see it, and you certainly haven’t addressed the question anywhere in the OP or comments.
Yes, our descriptions of phenomena depend on conceptual frameworks. Sure.
However, as I said before, I would like to make a clear distinction between the forces in nature, which act independently from our descriptions, on the one hand and our descriptions on the other.
Allow me to quote myself:
Neil seems adamant about mixing things up.
Okay, I’ll admit that I was a bit unclear there.
We invent the concept of force. We did not invent the physical things that happen, to which we apply that concept.
The traditional commonsense notion of force would have applied to you pushing against something. It would not have applied to falling apples. Newton greatly generalized our concept of force, by connecting it to acceleration. So we now attribute forces to anything that accelerates. It was not always so.
When Newton introduced his ideas on gravity, he was criticized by Descartes, who saw Newton’s theories as depending on occult forces. (Note that the meaning of “occult” has changed somewhat since that time). So what you see as obviously true, Descartes saw as obviously false.
You don’t have a good grasp of general relativity. No modern physicist would agree with that statement, at least with the normal scientific meaning of “force”.
And, according to general relativity, nothing is happening to the apple (apart from a little air resistance). It is in “free fall” which is the “nothing is happening” state.
Yes, you are right about what I am rejecting. And thanks for the support.
I point out the role of human conventions for a reason. I am not criticizing those conventions. I think they are mostly pretty good.
But my interest is in human cognition. And we cannot hope to understand human cognition, if we fail to understand the role it plays in establishing these “mostly pretty good” conventions. If we want to insist that a human cognitive system is simply reading a structure that is already there, then consciousness and minds will forever remain mysterious. To understand consciousness, we need to understand our active engagement with the world. And establishing useful conventions is part of that engagement.
However, you are muddying the very distinction that you are claiming to make.
“And, according to general relativity, nothing is happening to the apple (apart from a little air resistance). It is in “free fall” which is the “nothing is happening” state.”
Right. “Force” of gravity is the newtonian concept. GR replaces that with free-fall through a 4-D space-time manifold, without the same Force concept.
(Force is really a placeholder term. For instance, if you have F=ma, and F=kx^2, you can put those two lego blocks together to get ma=kx^2, and you just get a differential equation to solve for the motion. You can switch out other ‘F=f(x)’ pieces and get different DEs, making for different models.)
Let’s do this step-by-step.
You propose that ‘laws’ are caused by physical processes. IOWs, according to your proposal, there are no non-physical forces — “prescriptive laws” —, which act on physical processes. Everything is physical or supervenes on the physical; including the so-called ‘laws’.
Am I right so far?
Origenes,
It’s your claim:
Go ahead and lay out your reasoning that led to your claim. Start from the “level of bosons” and show us, step by step, what leads you to expect “innumerable different ever-changing laws.”
Did you happen to read my reply to you in post #11 of the first page?
I’m not sure why you insist on my simple boson example. If you don’t see the problem at all I suggest you answer my question to you in my previous post and we will proceed from there.
Origenes,
Yes, and it’s just the same claim in a slightly different form:
I understand your claim. What I’d like to hear is the logic behind your claim.
Tell us, step by step, why would you expect 398 bosons to produce a different gravitational constant from the one produced by 756 bosons.
Assuming that bosons produce a gravitational constant — or one of the other fundamental constants — , I expect a conglomeration of 24 bosons to produce a certain gravitational constant, and a conglomeration of 10.000 bosons another.
The logic behind my reasoning is self-evident.
6.67408 × 10^-11 m^3 kg^-1 s^-2
Might be useful to look up the meaning of the word “constant”.
Origenes:
Yes, we know that’s what you expect. You’ve already told us that. The question is: Why do you expect that?
No, it isn’t. Tell us why you think those two “conglomerations” should produce different values of G.
I thank everyone who contributed to this thread. I’m pleasantly surprised by the civil tone and reasoned discourse.
I conclude that there is no easy naturalistic explanation for the ‘curious asymmetry’ that Paul Davies observes:
Origenes:
Those of a more objective bent might notice that you haven’t made your case at all, and that you are unable to support a crucial claim on which that case rests:
Your argument boils down to something like this:
Origenes is baffled by X.
Therefore, X has no naturalistic explanation.
There’s an easy and obvious explanation: laws don’t “depend” on anything. Whether that’s a naturalistic explanation or not, probably nobody cares except you
And any “non-naturalistic” explanation is a complete non-starter.
Glen Davidson
I mostly agree, so there’s a danger here of narcissism of small differences. But of such things is philosophy made.
I think that any cognitive system will have its own characteristic ways of representing its environment. Generally speaking, a cognitive system will be reliable at detecting and navigating the affordances that must be coped with in order for the satisfaction of the system’s species-specific needs and attainment of species-specific goals. Concepts, understood here as affordance-detecting, action-guiding representations, parcel out the environment into “chunks” that can be handled.
Of the various differences between human cognition and animal cognition generally, the one that interests me the most is our capacity for “social triangulation”. I’ve described it a few times here. Basically, I mean the capacity we have to perform a mental integration of our own embodied perspective on a situation and the perceived-and-imagined embodied perspective of another cognitive subject, such that we can imagine what the situation would look like from another perspective.
This capacity for intersubjective cognition is central to our conception of objectivity — of what it is for something to be an object — and since the contrast between objective and subjective is also central to our grasp of the concept of subjectivity, the entire structure of subjective/intersubjective/objective thought stands or falls together.
(This isn’t original with me. I’m borrowing this argument from Donald Davidson, and arguably the core themes can already be found in Hegel.)
And while I have no aversion to talking about “conventions” — surely there are such things! — there are technical considerations for thinking that conventions are based on social practices, not practices on conventions. So the question becomes one of describing how hominid and human social practices alter animal cognition and the ways in which cognitive systems parcel out the world into object-sized chunks.
And yet, it is also the case that if the world in itself did not have some causal and modal structure to which cognitive systems had some epistemic access, all systems of representation would be equally effective. There would be no difference between less adequate and more adequate representational systems, and hence no difference between effective and ineffective behavior or conduct. And since that is manifestly not the case, we can conclude that the world in itself does has some causal and modal structure to which cognitive systems have some epistemic access. That’s a very modest form of metaphysical realism, which I call “weak metaphysical realism”, as distinct from the strong version that Putnam criticizes.
I came up with weak metaphysical realism a few years ago. I never published it because people don’t care about the realism/anti-realism stuff any more. That debate is so 1990s!
That’s almost always a smoke-screen for “I don’t have an argument but it just seems true.”
Like nearly every other “uniquely” human trait, this exists to some degree in some other mammals. I would speculate it is an extension of caregiving, social grooming, and other social behaviors.
petrushka,
Also organised hunting: orcas, wolves, chimps.
By contrast, I would say that it works both ways.
Driving on the right side of the road is surely a case where the practices follow the conventions. (And note that I grew up in a part of the world where the conventions are to drive on the left).
I’m inclined to go further, and talk of private conventions for an individual person and for neural structures. That seems to contradict the normal meaning of “convention” (maybe is more of a habit). But I see these private conventions as working the same way and having the same sort of role in cognition, as do society-wide conventions.
Looked at that way, I would say that scientific conventions perhaps start as private conventions that then spread to a few communicating scientists. But then they are formalized and become scientific laws and theories. For most scientists, outside of the core that originated them, the practices of the scientists will follow the conventions.
With ordinary it is often the other way around. We observe other folk appearing to follow private conventions, and we find it useful to emulate them. So the convention spreads in an informal way, and is perhaps better referred to then as a social norm.
I’ve spent far more time on the second half of that than on the first. Because it’s what I see as important.
Most everybody else wants to talk about how we process information. But I wanted to know how we get information in the first place. You cannot process information until you have some. When I started, I had not come across the philosopher’s term “intentionality”. But I now see that what I have been mostly studying is intentionality, rather than information processing. By contrast, epistemology seems mostly to fit with information processing.
With that terminology, the main reason that I am sometimes critical of philosophy is that they put too much of their energy into information processing, and not nearly enough into intentionality (in the sense of getting information in the first place).
My reason for emphasizing conventions, is that I see “getting information in the first place” as depending on what I have called “private conventions”. And then social cognition depends on the way that we spread and adjust those private conventions, such that they become social conventions.
I don’t see this at all.
A note on our use of “cause”. It has long seemed to me that what we mean by “cause” is what we ourselves can cause either directly or indirectly. Typical scientific investigation of cause requires separating out different parts of the system to see what causes what. And since we are controlling the behavior of those parts that we separate out, we ourselves originate the causal chain that we are investigating.
I’m always puzzled when free will deniers assert that we cannot be causes of anything. Because if that is true, then I don’t see what “cause” could mean or how we could ever test ideas about causation.
I can ask “adequate for what?”.
The representation system that we use as the basis of the scientific image is very different from the representation system that we use for the manifest image. The scientific image uses a representation system with a mathematical structure. And it is because of that mathematical structure, that mathematics works so well in science. There does not seem to be any mathematical structure to the representations systems that we use for the manifest image, so our use of mathematics in ordinary life is somewhat limited.
I think that what I am seeing here (in your comment) is the distinction between information processing and “getting information in the first place”. You are emphasize information processing, and perhaps not even seeing that there is much of an issue with “getting information in the first place”. But I see the two as tightly linked. How we represent information is going to depend on how we get information. The scientific way of getting information is very different from what a perceptual system does. And that’s why representation for the manifest image has to be very different from representation for the scientific image.
As I see it, meaning comes from “getting information in the first place”. Our perception gets information in ways that are very finely tuned to our environment. And that’s the basis for meaning. Science uses a far more detached way of getting information, so far less meaning derives from that. To some extent, science depends on us projecting the meaning that we get via perception onto our scientific representations.
By the same token, does “the most fundamental level” itself exist? What does “the most fundamental level” even mean? If it doesn’t exist, then why talk about it as if operative in reality? But since we talk about it and cannot deny it, then isn’t it a much more reasonable “shorthand” to say that they exist?
In other words, let’s grant that laws of physics are a shorthand and, knowing that they are shorthand for something and the something evidently exist, then what warrants the assertion that the shorthand doesn’t exist?
Sure, but in this case the thing described is laws of nature. Laws of nature, assuming naturalism, never changed since the Big Bang. They have been unfailingly operative all along, even though variously described in various ages.
As I think others have pointed out laws of nature are really observations of regularities.
I tend to think about “fundamental physics” in terms of unrestricted measurements. As Ladyman and Ross put it in their Every Thing Must Go, a hypothesis belongs to fundamental physics if any measurement taken at any point in space-time (i.e. at any point in the history of the universe) could confirm or disconfirm the hypothesis. So it’s not a question of “levels”, strictly speaking, but of a lack of restrictions. By contrast, measurements that could confirm a hypothesis of ecology require restricting the domain of measurements to ecoystems, those of psychology to cognitive systems, etc.
My claim could be re-parsed as saying that although we have laws of fundamental physics, those laws belong to the models we use, rather than to the domain being modeled.
In other words, naturalism doesn’t assume anything and is not studying anything. It’s just observations, nevermind the what and how and why.
This makes the point for OP* rather loud and clear.
“Such questions are often dismissed as being pointless or even unscientific.”
Can you give an example of a measurement anywhere else than in space-time? Can you give an example of a hypothesis (of physics) that cannot be confirmed or disconfirmed by a measurement?
Given your current formulation, all physics is fundamental. There appears to be no other-than-fundamental physics.