Hmm, if I understand you correctly, you’re saying that the universe does obey natural laws (not necessarily the ones we think of as laws, of course) in the sense that if we were to understand the universe completely, we would see that there are physical impossibilities (that aren’t logical impossibilities).
Maybe that is what Slider was saying, and it’s certainly implied by “You can’t use the laws to compel events, an attourney is of no use. If something that contradicts with a law happens the law is just proven false.” But forgive me if I misunderstood, because it’s quite difficult to disentangle the issue of whether or not the universe is lawful from the (for our purposes irrelevant) question of whether and how we know those laws, or what we ought to do when something we’ve called a law appears to be violated.
I have trouble because you are using language where law comes first and happening comes second where I think happenings come first and law comes second. I was also answering a question different from whether a law is an accurate descripion of the events. I was answering a question on which one depends on the other with law being secondary.
My imagination is also failing to picture what it would even mean for the universe not to be lawful when “law” is taken broadbly and can contain arbitarily many details. Often the question is posed on the context of simple laws. But when you ask in priciple, such things as “brute force laws” that simply list all world events need to be considered too. The universe comes to a certain state and then doesn’t know how to reach a next state and so never leaves that state? For each state transition there would be a brute force law that would be correct. I can’t imagine how the world could be anything without that way of being establishing a character for it.
So, let’s get back to a more basic question, and I apologize for how pedantic this will sound. I really don’t intend it that way. I just need to know something about your approach here. Anyway: do you think we have any reason to believe that an apple when dropped will, ceteris paribus, fall to the ground?
We don’t know what “all else equal” means. Inparticular it encompasses unknown and ununderstood phenomena. And because we can’t replicate what we don’t know (and for various other reasons) each apple dropping we do could in principle be dependant on some arcane detail of the universe. We coulde also very easy be driven to a situation where our beliefs of solidity would be more relevant/override the understanding of falling (such as having the apple on a table). Also the mental structures used in that assesment would be suspect. It is in fact more so that the ground accelerates into the apple and the apple is the one staying stationary. We could also question whether talk of apples and grounds make sense. Also there are known risks such as false vacuums happening so that the dropping doesn’t have time to take place. You could also drop an apple in orbit and it would not fall to the ground.
But even if the apple would just stay in midair that would be lawful. It doesn’t but it very well could have. There is not a reaction the apple can make that would count as “too chaotic” to be a lawful response (or we are not using lawful in that sense here (and indeed the theorethical notion of chaos applies to systems determined to great precision)).
Some laws are straight out of question as they simply are not the case. However among those that are consistent with our data there is not a clear winner. And it will always be underdetermined.
Assume that we know everything there is to know about the world, but nothing about the future. Everything we’ve observed (and we’ve observed everything so far) tells us that in cases like this one, the apple always falls to the ground. Do we have any reason at all to believe that it will fall to the ground this time? In other words, do we have any reason at all to think that the future will resemble the past? If so, what?
Assume that we know everything there is to know about the world, but nothing about the future.
This might not be possible. And it’s a tall order anyways.
Yes we know the character of the world and so know that the apple will fall.
Knowing who you are and what (and why) you do doesn’t affect what you could have done. The idea that free will is somehow against determinism often seems to boil down as if only things that we don’t know how they work are “free”. That is as if knowing a thing would affect it directly. The thing that makes things tick and our desciption on how things tick are two separate things. The Force doesn’t have the constitution of a formula. In order to exercise will you would need to have some action be correlated with your will state. If there is no such correlation your will is powerless. A natural law doesn’t come (atleast directly (you could get killed for holding a solar-centric worldview)) to interfere with those correlations. Thus there is nothing will limiting about knowing how things work.
Yes we know the character of the world and so know that the apple will fall.
Okay, so the world has a character. Lets take all the facts about the character of the world together; this is what I’m calling ‘natural laws’. The world obeys natural law in the sense that the world obeys its own character: the character of the world determines how things go. Does that sound right to you?
Yes, it sound right. Tried to reread the thread on whether there is more than terminology confusion going on. To me it’s not obvious that there is a contraposition between will and determinism. And I am guessing what kind of silliness is employed to get to that end result. It seems like a “one and only one can win” situation is constructed but I can describe the same situation so that both win.
I was saying that you being told your character (correctly) is not dangerous or limiting. It means that you have a character and it’s harder to pretend as if you could do everything. However the option would be to not have any character. And that isn’t omnipotence that would be nilpotence. For some purposes you can forget what the black box contains but to claim that fundamentally the black box doesn’t work in any way? A common situation is that you don’t know how it works or that it must work somehow exoticly.
You could also say that it isn’t the case of character of not-you making the character of you nilpotent or unnecceary. It’s a question of character of all overlapping with the character of you (which it kinda obviously needs to do).
Hmm, if I understand you correctly, you’re saying that the universe does obey natural laws (not necessarily the ones we think of as laws, of course) in the sense that if we were to understand the universe completely, we would see that there are physical impossibilities (that aren’t logical impossibilities).
Maybe that is what Slider was saying, and it’s certainly implied by “You can’t use the laws to compel events, an attourney is of no use. If something that contradicts with a law happens the law is just proven false.” But forgive me if I misunderstood, because it’s quite difficult to disentangle the issue of whether or not the universe is lawful from the (for our purposes irrelevant) question of whether and how we know those laws, or what we ought to do when something we’ve called a law appears to be violated.
I have trouble because you are using language where law comes first and happening comes second where I think happenings come first and law comes second. I was also answering a question different from whether a law is an accurate descripion of the events. I was answering a question on which one depends on the other with law being secondary.
My imagination is also failing to picture what it would even mean for the universe not to be lawful when “law” is taken broadbly and can contain arbitarily many details. Often the question is posed on the context of simple laws. But when you ask in priciple, such things as “brute force laws” that simply list all world events need to be considered too. The universe comes to a certain state and then doesn’t know how to reach a next state and so never leaves that state? For each state transition there would be a brute force law that would be correct. I can’t imagine how the world could be anything without that way of being establishing a character for it.
So, let’s get back to a more basic question, and I apologize for how pedantic this will sound. I really don’t intend it that way. I just need to know something about your approach here. Anyway: do you think we have any reason to believe that an apple when dropped will, ceteris paribus, fall to the ground?
Yes, but with a big but.
We don’t know what “all else equal” means. Inparticular it encompasses unknown and ununderstood phenomena. And because we can’t replicate what we don’t know (and for various other reasons) each apple dropping we do could in principle be dependant on some arcane detail of the universe. We coulde also very easy be driven to a situation where our beliefs of solidity would be more relevant/override the understanding of falling (such as having the apple on a table). Also the mental structures used in that assesment would be suspect. It is in fact more so that the ground accelerates into the apple and the apple is the one staying stationary. We could also question whether talk of apples and grounds make sense. Also there are known risks such as false vacuums happening so that the dropping doesn’t have time to take place. You could also drop an apple in orbit and it would not fall to the ground.
But even if the apple would just stay in midair that would be lawful. It doesn’t but it very well could have. There is not a reaction the apple can make that would count as “too chaotic” to be a lawful response (or we are not using lawful in that sense here (and indeed the theorethical notion of chaos applies to systems determined to great precision)).
Some laws are straight out of question as they simply are not the case. However among those that are consistent with our data there is not a clear winner. And it will always be underdetermined.
Assume that we know everything there is to know about the world, but nothing about the future. Everything we’ve observed (and we’ve observed everything so far) tells us that in cases like this one, the apple always falls to the ground. Do we have any reason at all to believe that it will fall to the ground this time? In other words, do we have any reason at all to think that the future will resemble the past? If so, what?
Yes we know the character of the world and so know that the apple will fall.
Knowing who you are and what (and why) you do doesn’t affect what you could have done. The idea that free will is somehow against determinism often seems to boil down as if only things that we don’t know how they work are “free”. That is as if knowing a thing would affect it directly. The thing that makes things tick and our desciption on how things tick are two separate things. The Force doesn’t have the constitution of a formula. In order to exercise will you would need to have some action be correlated with your will state. If there is no such correlation your will is powerless. A natural law doesn’t come (atleast directly (you could get killed for holding a solar-centric worldview)) to interfere with those correlations. Thus there is nothing will limiting about knowing how things work.
Okay, so the world has a character. Lets take all the facts about the character of the world together; this is what I’m calling ‘natural laws’. The world obeys natural law in the sense that the world obeys its own character: the character of the world determines how things go. Does that sound right to you?
Yes, it sound right. Tried to reread the thread on whether there is more than terminology confusion going on. To me it’s not obvious that there is a contraposition between will and determinism. And I am guessing what kind of silliness is employed to get to that end result. It seems like a “one and only one can win” situation is constructed but I can describe the same situation so that both win.
I was saying that you being told your character (correctly) is not dangerous or limiting. It means that you have a character and it’s harder to pretend as if you could do everything. However the option would be to not have any character. And that isn’t omnipotence that would be nilpotence. For some purposes you can forget what the black box contains but to claim that fundamentally the black box doesn’t work in any way? A common situation is that you don’t know how it works or that it must work somehow exoticly.
You could also say that it isn’t the case of character of not-you making the character of you nilpotent or unnecceary. It’s a question of character of all overlapping with the character of you (which it kinda obviously needs to do).