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?
Erik,
The distinction I was making is between hypotheses that can be confirmed or disconfirmed by any measurement taken anywhere in the history of the universe and hypotheses that can only be confirmed or disconfirmed within some specific delimited region of space-time.
That puts fundamental physics (quantum mechanics, general relativity) in a different category than non-fundanental physics (e.g. fluid mechanics), chemistry, biology, psychology, sociology, and other sciences.
Some final comments.
Quotes from the Paul Davies article:
Isn’t it curious that such an assumption has long been acceptable in a time where naturalism is the dominant view? ‘Immutable laws which were somehow imprinted’ doesn’t have a nice clear naturalistic ring to it.
Indeed. And an answer is not forthcoming.
If A does not depend on B, then A cannot be explained by B.
I repeat my conclusion: there is no easy naturalistic explanation.
Nonsense. It is certainly not just me. Paul Davies has no naturalistic explanation and neither does cosmologist Sean Carroll:
Translation: We have no explanation for the laws. They are truly ‘fundamental’. We don’t know where they come from, we don’t know where they are, we don’t know how they cause things to happen.
—
Finally a rather trivial matter. Keiths has repeatedly asked me to explain the logic behind my illustrative claim:
I answered that the logic behind my reasoning is self-evident. To my surprise Keiths got support from someone who struck me as very reasonable.
Okay, so maybe I’m being unclear here. So here goes:
If 24 bosons -> C, then 10000 bosons -> 10000/24 x C
The self-evident logic is that if physical process A under circumstance X produces a certain ‘fundamental’ constant, it is to be expected that A produces a different ‘fundamental’ constant under circumstance Y. And it is also to be expected that physical process B produces yet another ‘fundamental’ constant.
Those other sciences do not seem to be physics. That’s what I was saying.
The first question still remains unanswered: 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 it’s shorthand for something that doesn’t exist? It may be shorthand, but surely shorthand for something that exists, no?
And now there’s another question: If “any measurement taken anywhere in the history of the universe” is more fundamental than things “within some specific delimited region of space-time”, then surely that which transcends the history of the universe (namely, metaphysics) is even more fundamental. Right?
I think you are misunderstanding what GTOE physicists mean when they talk about laws of nature being imprinted.
The apparent regularities we observe are not necessarily the only possible ones, but they were fixed at the big bang. I don’t know if this view is widely held, but it shows up frequently in discussion.
I don’t know what you mean by “shorthand” here. My point is that we should think of “laws of nature” as the constitutive statements of a framework of physical theory. Newton’s laws are not those of Einstein. We can re-formulate Newton’s laws within a relativistic framework, but the laws ultimately rely on incompatible assumptions about the ontology of space and time.
My use of fundamental/non-fundamental is a way of tracking the distinction between “confirmable by any measurement in space-time” and “confirmable by measurements in delimited regions of space-time”. Thus the really important distinction I want to make is not between physics and other sciences but between fundamental physics and all other science, including non-fundamental physics.
I would have thought that whatever transcends all of space and time also transcends whatever can be measured, so I’m puzzled by how you want to bring metaphysics into the discussion. How can we measure whatever it is that transcends the universe? What kind of equipment would be used to make those measurements? How would we determine if that equipment is functioning correctly?
I think it would be fair to say that Kuhn challenged that view in his 1962 book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”. And it’s the view that I have been disagreeing with in my replies in this thread. I have actually been questioning that view for around 30 years.
I’m not clear on why you see it as a problem for naturalism. But then I have never been clear on what, if anything, naturalism is supposed to imply.
It’s your word, so you should ask this of yourself.
And what of this can be said to not exist at the most fundamental level (those are your words again)? Space? Time? Ontology? Constitutive statements? Framework of physical theory?
And you never answered: Does the fundamental level itself exist?
Here we agree.
To quote you once again, “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.”
What is the most fundamental level and what exactly does not exist there? If it’s something measurable, and “laws of physics” are shorthand for those measurements, then how can you say laws of nature do not exist? In what sort of logical framework can that which can be measured be said to not exist? And for what purpose would you say that, if there is another purpose than just being funny or irrational?
As for me, there is definitely something more fundamental than measurable things. Metaphysics is obviously more fundamental than physics and, you are right, there are no measurements there. I would never speak about measurements when talking about the most fundamental level, but for some weird reason you began talking about measurements. Hence my questions.
My philosophy here, such as it is, would be that what exists, can be measured. Conversely, if it cannot be measured in some way, it doesn’t exist.
But I’ll note in passing that it’s possible to measure what does not exist.
Erik,
I take it that your question to me here is, “if laws are internal to theories, then what are the theories about? What is fundamental physics about?”
In that sense, I have to say, I’m not really sure! Philosophy of physics is not my area! One answer that some folks have been developing is that what’s real are structures (see here). I find this baffling but it’s a highly regarded view.
My own view, for what little it is worth, is that ultimate reality (at least within the Universe) is processes. That is, I endorse some version of process monism, largely because I think process ontology is the best way of understanding the phenomena that fundamental physics and the other sciences disclose to us. That is, adopting scientific metaphysics as the method of metaphysical speculation yields process metaphysics as a substantive metaphysical position. (This was also, for what little it’s worth, the view that both Sellars and Deleuze took — both of whom, it might be pointed out, tried to take Whitehead’s process ontology in a non-theistic direction.)
As for ‘what transcends the Universe as a whole’, I am quite strongly agnostic — I think that it is not possible for human reason to determine what exists (in any sense of “exists”) beyond the Universe.
Origenes,
There are multiple nested and interlocking confusions in your OP and your comments, so it’s going to take some work to disentangle and correct them.
Let’s start with a relatively easy one. You write:
And:
And:
As petrushka rather dryly pointed out:
Constants have the mysterious, intriguing and totally unanticipated property of being… constant. So when you talk of the gravitation constant having one value for a ‘conglomeration’ of 24 bosons and a different value for a conglomeration of 10,000 bosons, you are talking nonsense. You are proposing the existence of a constant that isn’t a constant.
Do you see your mistake? If so, we can move on to the next one.
Naturalism, as a monistic metaphysical thesis, claims that everything is physical or supervenes on the physical. The problem that fundamental irreducible laws pose for naturalism is glaringly obvious: such laws are not physical. IOWs it goes against naturalism’s monistic ambition and its central claim: ‘everything is physical’.
If naturalism would accept laws as non-physical entities, then it has to revise its central claim thusly: ‘everything is physical, except for non-physical laws’, which would be, in fact, a dualistic statement.
Furthermore, if non-physical laws ‘somehow’ act on physical processes, then this takes any heat out of the naturalist’s main objection against dualism — the ‘interaction problem’.
Thirdly, as a starting point naturalism assumes rather than explains the existence of physical processes, it’s not nice having to make additional assumptions.
Indeed. And if such a constant were produced by varying different stuff then things don’t make sense.
Let me try this:
If it is true that 24 bosons = 5697 and it is also true that 10.000 bosons = 5697 and it is also true that 2000.000 bosons = 5697 and so forth, then it is safe to assume that bosons do not explain ‘5697’.
Nope, I show that a bottom-up explanation from the level of bosons leads to nonsense, there is a difference. What I said was “assuming that bosons produce a gravitational constant” and then I go on showing that this assumption is not correct — this assumption leads us to ‘constants’ (?) with different values, which is contradicted by reality.
No. I show how a faulty assumption leads us astray. I offered an illustrative argument against a naturalistic bottom-up explanation for laws from the level of bosons.
Origenes,
The mistake you made there is assuming that the naturalist must treat laws as any kind of entity at all, either physical or non-physical. The naturalist is under no such obligation to treat laws as entities, and thus the dilemma you are constructing simply disappears.
I would contest that reading of what naturalism is committed to, but that’s a different issue.
Tell me, what is the alternative to treating fundamental laws as entities; things that exist? Being agnostic about their existence perhaps? Such spinelessness is acceptable for the Pyrrhonist and perhaps the car salesman, but surely not for the naturalist who has the ambition to present an explanation of things.
Not for those who demand understanding.
I’ll take that as what you mean by “naturalism”. For me, the problem remains that I don’t know what we mean by “physical”. Things which were, in the past, not considered physical are today considered physical. So “physical” does not name a fixed category. Rather, it names a changing category. If I say “X is physical” am I saying that people today accept X as physical? Or am I predicting that people in the future will accept X as physical?
I can live with terms like “natural” and “physical” being somewhat vague and referring to changing categories. But I’m going to withhold any commitment to naturalism or physicalism.
So what? That does not seem to pose a problem. By your own definition of “naturalism”, it would suffice if such laws supervene on the physical.
I’m surprised to hear you say that, since I put anti-realism about laws on the table in my very first comment on this thread.
There are many alternatives to treating laws as entities, but one alternative is treating laws as simplifying descriptions about regularities. The laws of physics are, on this suggestion, internal to theories — they are the descriptions of regularities that the model explains.
This is not to deny either that there are real phenomena to which we have epistemic access (weak metaphysical realism) or that the history of science can be reconstructed in terms of asymptotic approximation of increasingly more adequate representations of those phenomena (what’s called “convergent realism”). One can be an anti-realist about laws and still be a realist about theoretical entities, for that matter, as Cartwright is.
If you insist on taking laws as the sorts of things that exist, and if you insist on taking naturalism to be the thesis that everything that exists supervenes on subatomic particles, then but only then does your argument work. For it is surely true that bosons and fermions cannot both be the causal ground of laws and also be constrained by those laws.
I want to make this point really clear: I’m not objecting to your inference, but to your premises. The argument itself is valid if the premises are granted. I just don’t think the premises are correct.
Sure. Problem is laws don’t supervene on the physical.
Thanks for that link….but is there some specific passage in there that suggests to you that physical laws don’t supervene on the physical? I’m not saying there isn’t–but nothing jumped out at me. Thanks.
walto,
I think that what Origenes has in mind is something like this:
If physical laws supervene on particles, then physical laws cannot constrain particles.
But physical laws do constrain particles.
Therefore, physical laws do not supervene on particles.
together with
1. If naturalism is true, then everything supervenes on particles.
2. But physical laws do not supervene on particles.
3. Therefore, naturalism is false.
That seems like a strange claim, and your link to SEP doesn’t seem to help you.
Quoting from an earlier comment of yours:
Most people would take that Paul Davies quote as saying precisely that the laws do supervene on the physical. That is to say, his “somehow imprinted” should mean that the physical structure of the universe fixes the laws.
Yes, that sounds right. I suppose then the argument comes down to what ‘constrains’ means, i.e., whether the first premise is true. Thanks.
Yes, there are worries here about the use of “constrains” (my term, not Origenes’) in the consequent.
For my part, I think that it only makes sense to say that laws supervene on particles if laws are entities, and I don’t think that they are. (Except in the perfectly generic sense that descriptions are entities. If that makes any sense.)
And all this presupposes an Alexander Rosenberg-style naturalism in which the facts about fermions and bosons fix all the facts that there are. I’ve read The Atheist’s Guide to Reality and I really kind of hated it. The upshot of my book is that Rosenberg is completely mistaken about the impossibility of naturalizing intentionality.
What, exactly, is a particle?
Origenes,
You’re not appreciating the force of the point.
Let’s imagine you are an idealized observer investigating an entire series of universes. Your job is to determine the physical constants for each universe in the series.
When you look at the particular universe that contains the planet Earth, you notice that there is an attractive force between particles that behaves in a regular fashion. In this universe there is something you call ‘space’, with ‘distance’ being a measure of the space between two particles. There is also something you call ‘mass’ which is associated with the particles.
You work out that the attractive force increases as the mass of the particles increases, and that it decreases as the distance between them increases. You come up with an expression that incorporates these variables and produces a number that is directly proportional to the force. The direct proportionality means that if you take the ratio of the force to the expression, you get a constant. You dub this constant “the gravitational constant”
Note the process you’ve followed here. You identified a phenomenon (in this case, a force), you identified the variables that were relevant to that force, you discovered the way in which the variables related to the force, and you developed a formula to express a quantity that varied directly with the force, but was not identical to it. You took the ratio of the two and dubbed it a constant because it is, in fact, a constant.
If you dub something a ‘constant’ when it isn’t, then you have made a mistake. So if you ever find yourself looking at one of the universes in the series and saying “Aha! I found a constant in this universe that isn’t a constant. That’s exactly what we’d expect if the laws are ‘bottom-up’!”, then you haven’t thereby discovered anything about that universe. You’ve simply discovered that you don’t know what the word ‘constant’ means.
There are variables and there are constants. If you misidentify a variable as a constant, you’ve made a mistake. You can’t draw any conclusions about the universe you’re investigating from such a silly mistake.
I didn’t write that, KN did. You should ask him.
I only used that term to pick up on Origenes’ talk about bosons in this conversation. I surely don’t know what Origenes means by bosons, though I worry that he thinks of subatomic particles as being somewhat like billiard balls, only very tiny.
Quick response wrt ‘bosons’:
A.Rosenberg — interesting prophesy by Kantian Naturalist BTW
Doesn’t respond to “what are particles.”
That’s right, kinds of particles are not themselves particles.
Rosenberg is once again being parasitic on non-material entities in order to explain physical entities. Maybe their are no physical particles.
I myself have no idea what particles are. I’ve been told that they are fluctuations in a quantum field, but I really don’t know what that means. The only thing I do know is that they aren’t tiny little billiard balls.
Only if one is a realist about universals (such as kinds). Rosenberg clearly isn’t.
A Hume reference?
Does anyone in Origenes’ camp find it odd that a particle can be a force?
What is a force, other than a relationship expressed by an equation?
You sir have no point. All you have is your misunderstanding of my argument.
Hold on … Rosenberg said “there is no third kind of subatomic particle” and you go: “kinds of particles are not themselves particles”? How is that related to what Rosenberg said? And what does it mean?
I thought the Stanford article was useful to get a general idea of supervenience. It should be clear that it not a fitting concept to ground laws. Besides the fact that supervenience does not accommodate the required downward causation, it is simply incoherent to hold that fundamental universal laws supervene on local matters of particular fact.
Origenes,
Of course I do, but it’s clear that you have no response.
Origenes,
Moving on to another source of confusion for you, you write:
And:
Setting aside your confusion over the meaning of ‘constant’, which I’ve already pointed out, you seem to be arguing that if naturalism were true, all phenomena would scale linearly with the number of particles involved.
Why on earth would you expect that? This seems to be another idea you regard as “self-evident”, when in fact it’s just an arbitrary Origeneal assumption.
The simple straightforward meaning of ‘constant’ has never been unclear to me.
You do understand that my simplified example of linear relationship was just illustrative don’t you? I’m simply pointing out that some relationship between the hypothesised cause (a physical process) and its effect (a fundamental constant) is to be expected.
Why on earth do I expect a relationship between cause and effect? Well … it may be best if you try to come up with your own answer first.
Yes, I hold it to be self-evident.
The simple straightforward point of my reasoning is that any influence of physical processes on fundamental constants would lead to incoherency. The fundamental constants are after all supposed to be immutable. Therefor the constants cannot be caused by physical processes. In short: universals cannot be caused by local matters of particular fact.
What it all boils down to is this: there is no bottom-up explanation for the existence of fundamental laws from the level of physicality.
This might be a slight confusion. Supervenience and bottom-up causation are not the same thing.
Supervenience is a relation between properties across possible worlds. For two properties X and Y, X supervenes on Y if and only if if Y were different, then X would be different, but not conversely. The different kinds of supervenience — local vs. global, weak vs. strong — are different ways in which properties can vary across possible worlds.
Since supervenience is a modal concept, and not a causal one, it’s compatible with both “bottom-up” and “downwards” causation.
That said, there seems to be a suggestion here that the relation between laws of physics and particles is one of ‘downward causation’. That seems like a pretty bad misunderstanding of what physics is.
It seems to me you could make that same argument against any kind of supervenience that results in (what you consider to be) universals. Take, for example, the classic example of the dot matrix mentioned in the SEP article. Suppose it results in a triangular arrangement. If universals (such as triangularity) cannot be caused by local matters of particular fact, and we get a triangular patttern when a bunch of dots are splashed together, then the arrangement can’t supervene on the dots. In other words, your view results in there being no such thing as supervenience at all, which is just a reductio.
The point is that supervenience can be explicated in many subtly different ways. I don’t doubt that as you define it, physical laws don’t supervene on physical objects. But my guess is that the closure of the physical world doesn’t require the particular version of supervenience you are relying on here.
In other words, Platonism may or may not be inconsistent with supervenience. And the failure of supervenience may or may not be inconsistent with closure. Naturally, everything depends on how one defines “Platonism,” “supervienience,” “closure,” and “the physical.”
It strikes me as a kind of inverse Hegelianism. On the latter view, if we just understood one flower in the crannied wall completely, we’d understand everything, because the laws “follow from the things.” Here there’s the opposite suggestion: Everything flows from The Word.” A kind of anachronistic rationalism, anyhow.
Only loosely. I think that a lot of philosophers, when they try and do metaphysics without doing any physics or philosophy of physics, resort to mental imagery of particles as very small little things that are bumping into each other. It’s the billiard ball model of causation, scaled down.
In fact, I think that when most philosophers think they’re giving us a contemporary metaphysics informed by physics, all they’re really doing is giving a revised Epicureanism, only with “the atoms” replaced by fermions and bosons and “the void” replaced with space-time. I suspect Rosenberg himself has made that error. If you look carefully at contemporary philosophy of physics (e.g. David Albert or Tim Maudlin), the ontology of quantum mechanics isn’t at all (from what I can tell) neo-Epicurean.
Origenes:
Sure it has. Otherwise, you never would have blessed us with the following:
If the two different conglomerations produce different values, then the quantity in question is not a constant.
keiths:
Origenes:
No, because your claim was categorical. You actually stated mathematically that the relationship should be precisely linear:
That’s silly. Naturalism does not imply that everything should be linear.
But you are the source of that incoherence, because you are the one insisting that different ‘conglormerations’ should produce different ‘constants’. Knowledgeable folks understand that constants are in fact constant, so unlike you, they wouldn’t expect to get different values for different conglomerations.
This is just more confusion on your part. Naturalists don’t assert that the gravitational constant is caused by the gravitational interaction of, say, this here refrigerator and this here salt shaker. Rather, the constant is simply part of the mathematical description — the law — of gravitation. That description is accurate when applied to the fridge and salt shaker, as well as all the other gravitational interactions we observe, so we grant it the status of “physical law”.
A single value of G makes the equations accurate in all these cases, so we grant it the status of “physical constant”.
Almost correct. My argument does not state that one specific local matter of particular fact cannot produce a triangular pattern, but instead my argument states that it cannot be the case that all diverse local matters of particular facts that exist in the universe produce that same triangular pattern.
Because the fundamental laws and constants are immutable and universal they cannot be produced wildly different distinct causes.
The following statements cannot be all true:
123A = 9 ; 78A= 9 ; 78A + 3B = 9 ; 3B = 9 ; 123A + 78A + 3B = 9
Put another way: if the moon produces a cosmological constant, and the earth produces a cosmological constant, and the sun, and Jupiter, and so forth, then it cannot be the case that we arrive at one single immutable universal cosmological constant. That’s what I mean when I say that “a universal cannot be caused by local matters of particular fact”.
(A) There is a universal immutable value which has a bottom-up explanation from the level of conglomerations.
(B) There are many different conglomerations in the universe.
(C) Each of those conglomerations is to be expected to produce its unique value.
Conclusion: if (B) and (C) are true, then premise (A) is false. IOWs there is no bottom-up explanation for universal immutable constants from the level of conglomerations.
(Last attempt of an explanation. If you still don’t get I will definitely ignore you.)
Maybe the moon ,sun and Jupiter are not the bottom of the bottom up.
It’s not even in the same ballpark. Any confusion is all yours. Anyone who says that they are the same thing deserves to be banned for stupidity. Moreover supervenience also does not accommodate downward causation.
Indeed.
Hah!
Origenes,
My point was that since supervenience is not a causal notion but a modal one, it’s as compatible with “top-down causation” as with “bottom-up causation”.
Assuming that either “bottom-up causation” or “top-down causation” make any sense at all, and I’m frankly doubtful that they do.
Origenes,
I realize that this thread has been a disappointment for you — you came here thinking you had a knock-down argument against naturalism, only to discover that in reality you were merely confused — but that is no reason to shoot (or ignore) one of the messengers.