So it seems to me you’re denying that the world is in any sense deterministic, and so it’s perfectly possible for human beings to be anomalous agents, just because everything is potentially anomalous. Is that right?
From the standpoint of a person making discoveries, it is known from many observations that Bob the Particle will always Wag. Thus, “Bob Wags” is stated as a Natural Law, and assumed true in all calculations, and said with force of conviction, and if some math implies that Bob didn’t Wag, the first thing to look for is errors in the math.
However, still from the same standpoint, if some day we discover in some experiment that Bob didn’t Wag, and despite looking and looking they can’t find any errors in the math (or the experiment, etc.), then they have to conclude that maybe “Bob Wags” is not fully true. Maybe then they’ll discover that in this experiment, it just so happens that Julie the Particle was Hopping. Thus, our hypothetical discoverer rewrites the “law” as: “Bob Wags unless Julie Hops”
Maybe, in some “ultimate” computation of the universe, the “True” rule is that “Bob Wags unless someone else Leers, and no one Leers when Julie Hops”. How do we know? How will we know when we’ve discovered the “true” rules? Right now, we don’t know. As far as we know, we’ll never know any “true” rules.
But it all boils down to: The universe has been following one set of (unknown) rules since the end of time and forever ’till the end of time (ha! there’s probably no such thing as “time” in those rules, mind you!), and maybe those rules are such that Bob will Wink when we make John Laugh, and then we’ll invent turbines and build computers and discuss the nature of natural laws on internet forums. And maybe in our “natural laws” it’s impossible for Bob to Wink, and we think turbines work because we make Julie Hop and have Cody Scribble when Bob doesn’t Wag to stop him. And some day, we’ll stumble on some case where Cody Scribbles, Bob doesn’t Wag, but Bob doesn’t Wink either, and we’ll figure out that, oh no!, the natural laws changed and now turbines function on Bob Winks instead of Cody Scribbles, and we have to rethink everything!
The universe doesn’t care. Bob was Winking all along, and we just assumed it was the Cody Scribbles because we didn’t know about Annie. And never there was a case where Bob Wagged and Winked at the same time, or where Bob failed to Wag when Julie Hopped. We just thought the wrong things.
And if in the future we’ll discover other such cases, it’s only because the universe has been doing those things all along, but we just don’t see them yet.
And it’s even possible that in the future Bob will marry Julie and then never again Wink… but all that means is that the rules were in fact “Bob Winks when Annie Nods unless Bob is Married to Julie”, rather than “Bob Winks when Annie Nods”, and yet our scientists will cry “The laws of physics have changed!” while everyone else panics about our precious turbines no longer working all of a sudden.
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).
This was to mean that laws obey the natural rather than the other way around in responce to >So, are you saying that the natural world (ourselves included) don’t ‘obey’ any sort of law, but that natural law is just a more or less consistent generalization about what does happen?
So it seems to me you’re denying that the world is in any sense deterministic, and so it’s perfectly possible for human beings to be anomalous agents, just because everything is potentially anomalous. Is that right?
By charitable reading, it’s not what ze’s saying.
From the standpoint of a person making discoveries, it is known from many observations that Bob the Particle will always Wag. Thus, “Bob Wags” is stated as a Natural Law, and assumed true in all calculations, and said with force of conviction, and if some math implies that Bob didn’t Wag, the first thing to look for is errors in the math.
However, still from the same standpoint, if some day we discover in some experiment that Bob didn’t Wag, and despite looking and looking they can’t find any errors in the math (or the experiment, etc.), then they have to conclude that maybe “Bob Wags” is not fully true. Maybe then they’ll discover that in this experiment, it just so happens that Julie the Particle was Hopping. Thus, our hypothetical discoverer rewrites the “law” as: “Bob Wags unless Julie Hops”
Maybe, in some “ultimate” computation of the universe, the “True” rule is that “Bob Wags unless someone else Leers, and no one Leers when Julie Hops”. How do we know? How will we know when we’ve discovered the “true” rules? Right now, we don’t know. As far as we know, we’ll never know any “true” rules.
But it all boils down to: The universe has been following one set of (unknown) rules since the end of time and forever ’till the end of time (ha! there’s probably no such thing as “time” in those rules, mind you!), and maybe those rules are such that Bob will Wink when we make John Laugh, and then we’ll invent turbines and build computers and discuss the nature of natural laws on internet forums. And maybe in our “natural laws” it’s impossible for Bob to Wink, and we think turbines work because we make Julie Hop and have Cody Scribble when Bob doesn’t Wag to stop him. And some day, we’ll stumble on some case where Cody Scribbles, Bob doesn’t Wag, but Bob doesn’t Wink either, and we’ll figure out that, oh no!, the natural laws changed and now turbines function on Bob Winks instead of Cody Scribbles, and we have to rethink everything!
The universe doesn’t care. Bob was Winking all along, and we just assumed it was the Cody Scribbles because we didn’t know about Annie. And never there was a case where Bob Wagged and Winked at the same time, or where Bob failed to Wag when Julie Hopped. We just thought the wrong things.
And if in the future we’ll discover other such cases, it’s only because the universe has been doing those things all along, but we just don’t see them yet.
And it’s even possible that in the future Bob will marry Julie and then never again Wink… but all that means is that the rules were in fact “Bob Winks when Annie Nods unless Bob is Married to Julie”, rather than “Bob Winks when Annie Nods”, and yet our scientists will cry “The laws of physics have changed!” while everyone else panics about our precious turbines no longer working all of a sudden.
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).
If you are anomalous you would have to be anomalous in some way and then that way would be a law, so no.
Well, by ‘anomalous’ I just mean ‘doesn’t obey any law’. I think maybe this was a poor choice of words. At any rate, in the great grandparent you said
I’m not sure what you want to say now.
This was to mean that laws obey the natural rather than the other way around in responce to >So, are you saying that the natural world (ourselves included) don’t ‘obey’ any sort of law, but that natural law is just a more or less consistent generalization about what does happen?