The idea that a stone falls because it is ‘going home’ brings it no nearer to us than a homing pigeon, but the notion that ‘the stone falls because it is obeying a law’ makes it like a man, and even a citizen.
--C. S. Lewis
Is it a problem to think of matter/energy as obeying laws which are outside of itself? Is it a problem to think of it as obeying more than one law? Is mathematics a way of getting away from the idea of laws of nature? Is there a way of expressing behaviors as intrinsic to matter/energy in English? Is there anything in the Sequences or elsewhere on the subject?
I’m not sure what Lewis is trying to say here, but the physical science meaning and the legal meaning of “law” are different enough that I think it’s better to consider them different words that are spelled the same (and etymologically related of course). Which means he’s making a pun.
I think it does makes sense to consider them as particular cases of a more general concept, after all. Grammatical rules and the rules of chess would be other instances, somewhere in between.
They are all regularities, but laws of physics are regularities that people notice (or try to notice), while legal laws and chess rules are regularities that people impose. (Grammar rules as linguists study them are more like physics; grammar rules as language teachers teach them are more like chess rules.)
OK… let’s add one more intermediate point and consider the laws of a cellular automaton. I can see analogies both between them and the laws of our universe¹ and the analogies between them and the rules of chess.
And mathematical realists à la Tegmark would see them even more easily than me.
--C. S. Lewis
Is it a problem to think of matter/energy as obeying laws which are outside of itself? Is it a problem to think of it as obeying more than one law? Is mathematics a way of getting away from the idea of laws of nature? Is there a way of expressing behaviors as intrinsic to matter/energy in English? Is there anything in the Sequences or elsewhere on the subject?
I’m not sure what Lewis is trying to say here, but the physical science meaning and the legal meaning of “law” are different enough that I think it’s better to consider them different words that are spelled the same (and etymologically related of course). Which means he’s making a pun.
I think it does makes sense to consider them as particular cases of a more general concept, after all. Grammatical rules and the rules of chess would be other instances, somewhere in between.
They are all regularities, but laws of physics are regularities that people notice (or try to notice), while legal laws and chess rules are regularities that people impose. (Grammar rules as linguists study them are more like physics; grammar rules as language teachers teach them are more like chess rules.)
OK… let’s add one more intermediate point and consider the laws of a cellular automaton. I can see analogies both between them and the laws of our universe¹ and the analogies between them and the rules of chess.
And mathematical realists à la Tegmark would see them even more easily than me.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/39p/a_sense_of_logic/6gtm