Re: Monotheistic religions and Time

[Kuroneko]

For the record, Edi split this from Knobbyboy's ban thread.

Frankly, the existence of the universe is problematic from a philosophical perspective. ...
I freely admit that I am merely a layman where scientific issues are concerned, and so my I am taking a much more philosophical approach to this issue.

Alright, let's take a philosophical approach. What would it mean to give a cause to the existence of an aggregate, other than accounting for each of its parts and for how those parts acquired their particular configuration? In other words, if everything in a system has a cause, and the overall arrangement also has cause, then the existence of the whole thing seems to be properly accounted for.

If there is no further meaning for a cause of an aggregate, then asking for a cause of "the universe" beyond causes of each of its parts and their arrangement isn't even philosophically coherent, much less physically.

[Simon_Jester]

Wow. This one really went to crap while I was out. Darn.

Alright, let's take a philosophical approach. What would it mean to give a cause to the existence of an aggregate, other than accounting for each of its parts and for how those parts acquired their particular configuration? In other words, if everything in a system has a cause, and the overall arrangement also has cause, then the existence of the whole thing seems to be properly accounted for.

If there is no further meaning for a cause of an aggregate, then asking for a cause of "the universe" beyond causes of each of its parts and their arrangement isn't even philosophically coherent, much less physically.

If all the accounting traces back to a singularity, and if the process by which all the parts and the arrangement of the parts invokes a set of laws that exist but have no a priori reason to be true, aside from the weak anthropic principle...*

Asking for a cause of "the universe" is philosophically coherent. That doesn't mean such a cause is philosophically necessary, any more than it is philosophically necessary for us to know why we perceive 400 nanometer EM waves as having the quality of "blueness" and 700 nanometer waves with the quality of "redness." There might honestly not be a reason for that, and there damn sure doesn't have to be one.

But "there need be no reason for X, it's just the way it is" is not the same as "there must/can be no reason for X, it's just the way it is."

*That is, if we did not live in a causal universe with that origin and those laws, we would not be observing it...

A) According to the atheist perspective, the universe simply exists...because it does. They cannot discover a "why" and so they go out of their way to either ignore this question or downplay its importance through some kind of cop out while instead focusing on the internal mechanics or "how" of the system instead.

B) The alternative viewpoint, which has largely fallen out of "vogue" in our modern day and age, holds that there must have been some force behind the creation of the universe, and this might have possibly been a "God" of sorts.

Neither explanation works well from a philosophical point of view. "How" so far has of yet to answer "why," and it shows no signs of rectifying this fundamental failing any time soon. Whereas the second option presents a whole plethera of problems of which I am sure that you are well aware.

The trouble is that there's no obvious reason why "why" must be a valid question, as opposed to being a meaningless question like "is black a really dark red, or a really dark blue?" It's pretty clear that "how" must be a valid question, because the universe has evolved in some way over time, so we can be pretty sure that there's a definite answer to "how." We cannot find any comparable surety for "why."

Therefore, the failure to provide an answer for "why" is in no way a deficiency of "how" theories, any more than a theory of color is deficient because it cannot say whether black is extremely dark red or extremely dark blue.

[Kuroneko]

If all the accounting traces back to a singularity, and if the process by which all the parts and the arrangement of the parts invokes a set of laws that exist but have no a priori reason to be true, aside from the weak anthropic principle...*

First, if it is possible to give a cause for the existence of any particular part of the universe, then since this already involves the laws of nature, asking for a cause of "the universe" really is nothing more than an account of all its parts and their arrangement, as claimed. But that's not very interesting, since it avoids the core of the matter...

Second, and more importantly, the laws of nature are innate in things: how the constituent parts behave is part of their identity. It's nonsensical to have an electron that doesn't behave like an electron--if it failed to do so, it wouldn't be an electron in the first place. More generally, try to define anything without reference to how it (or any of its parts) interacts with or relates to anything else (or again, its parts). And for physical things in particular, the elementary particles provide a foundation.

I suppose I'm forced to defend in a roundabout way the view that laws of nature are themselves a priori--but synthetic a priori, rather than analytic.

[Simon_Jester]

Second, and more importantly, the laws of nature are innate in things: how the constituent parts behave is part of their identity. It's nonsensical to have an electron that doesn't behave like an electron--if it failed to do so, it wouldn't be an electron in the first place. More generally, try to define anything without reference to how it (or any of its parts) interacts with or relates to anything else (or again, its parts). And for physical things in particular, the elementary particles provide a foundation.

Yes, but we can still imagine a philosophically coherent question of the form "why is the gravitational constant X and not Y?"

We are justified in saying that things we observe (including the fundamental properties of particles and the physical constants) are what they are. We are not justified in saying that they must be what they are in the philosophical-logical sense of "must be," in the sense that a circle must be not-square.

Asking "why is the gravitational constant X and not Y?" is incoherent if the gravitational constant must be X in some philosophical sense. But if that were true, then we ought to be able to provide an answer: not the answer the asker was looking for, but an explanation of why it's an ill-posed question at a bare minimum. After all, we can usually do that for other incoherent questions such as "what is the radius of a square circle?"

Without the ability to provide that answer, we are not justified in calling the question incoherent simply because we don't care about providing an answer.


I suppose I'm forced to defend in a roundabout way the view that laws of nature are themselves a priori--but synthetic a priori, rather than analytic.[/quote]

[Surlethe]

Kuroneko, are you arguing that it is philosophically incoherent to ask why the constituent parts of the universe interact and behave in some way and not in another way?

[Kuroneko]

I freely admit that my own position runs into many of the same problems, but this is exactly why I was arguing that both were problematic to begin with.

The whole thing grew out of the question of the cause of the universe--but eternal things don't need a cause. You say you find that answer inadequate, but for a while the only things you've said as to why is that you're trying to be "philosophical" and that by "time" you mean it "in the layman's sense of the word"--whatever in the world that means (that quite honestly conveys no information whatsoever to me).

There may very well be many interesting philosophical things to ask here, but you're not going to get there by being vague about the kind questions you're asking and the meaning of the terms you're using. That's not even philosophy. It's not even a proper conversation.

It's quite telling that it took an entire page of argument that to figure out that by "what's cause of the universe", you mean something like "why are the physical laws as they are?" One might have hoped that your prior experience with being perpetually misunderstood (as you've claimed earlier) would have clued you in that to most people who actually study science or philosophy, some the words you're using don't mean what you intend to mean by them.
_____

Yes, but we can still imagine a philosophically coherent question of the form "why is the gravitational constant X and not Y?"

I'll assume you meant gravitational coupling, because the question about any dimensionful quantity is physically meaningless, and philosophically trivial: it is X and not Y because we chose the units such that it is X and not Y.

We are not justified in saying that they must be what they are in the philosophical-logical sense of "must be," in the sense that a circle must be not-square.

Why not? You're probably referring to the fact that we cannot just sit and think about the meanings of the terms, which we had the freedom to define in the first place, and come to a conclusion about it. But the mere fact that we can only come to know the fundamental laws a posteriori is not a very impressive reason to believe that they are themselves contingent. A standard example of a necessary a posteriori truth is the proposition "water is H2O." *

A fundamental law of nature needs to be more than a generalization of an accidentally true pattern; it is a necessitation of some connection between different things or their aspects. (Although it may be that there are no fundamental laws of nature, but then there's trivially no "why" for an anti-realist.)

* Although perhaps running the risk of pedantry, it's possible to defend "a circle must be a not-square" is itself a posteriori, since it is not true in all geometries (e.g., taxicab geometry), and only through experience that we know that the geometry of the world is Euclidean.

Asking "why is the gravitational constant X and not Y?" is incoherent if the gravitational constant must be X in some philosophical sense. But if that were true, then we ought to be able to provide an answer: not the answer the asker was looking for, but an explanation of why it's an ill-posed question at a bare minimum.

I thought I already did that by example in the previous post--it's part of the essence of an electric charge that it interacts with other electric charges. The identity of a thing is defined by at least some of its interactions with other things. Removing the fundamental laws from the things they govern is incoherent, because the governed would lose their identity. Thus, there is no possible world in which electrons exist but do not repel other electrons. This fact about electrons is therefore a necessary truth.

I'm not sure about fundamental constants. Personally, I think there aren't any. In QED, electric coupling constant isn't really a constant, and so may be an artifact of how we express the laws (and in string theory, it's explicitly a dynamical field).

Kuroneko, are you arguing that it is philosophically incoherent to ask why the constituent parts of the universe interact and behave in some way and not in another way?

Almost. Either there are fundamental laws that are genuine descriptions of reality or there are not (realism vs. anti-realism). In latter case, further asking 'why' asks for an explanation of a non-truth; in the former, they are necessary truths.

[Simon_Jester]

Yes, but we can still imagine a philosophically coherent question of the form "why is the gravitational constant X and not Y?"

I'll assume you meant gravitational coupling, because the question about any dimensionful quantity is physically meaningless, and philosophically trivial: it is X and not Y because we chose the units such that it is X and not Y.

I suppose you could say so, though for a dimensionful quantity you could equally well include the unit definitions as part of X. The fact that I can define units such that any dimensionful quantity becomes 1 (or 10, or 1/137) of those units is sort of irrelevant to what I'm getting at. You can still ask "why is Boltzmann's constant not a thousand times the value we've come to know and love?" and have the question make sense. "Redefine your units and measure in electron-millivolts per kelvin" isn't a satisfactory one. Because Boltzmann's constant still isn't a thousand times the value we've come to know and love just because you used different units. Not if you're doing dimensional analysis properly, any more than 1000 mm is a thousand times greater than 1 m.

We are not justified in saying that they must be what they are in the philosophical-logical sense of "must be," in the sense that a circle must be not-square.

Why not? You're probably referring to the fact that we cannot just sit and think about the meanings of the terms, which we had the freedom to define in the first place, and come to a conclusion about it. But the mere fact that we can only come to know the fundamental laws a posteriori is not a very impressive reason to believe that they are themselves contingent.

No, it's not. But you can ask a philosophically coherent question without having an impressive reason to expect an answer.

I'd argue that philosophical incoherence doesn't just mean it's a question not in need of an answer, or even that an answer cannot be forthcoming for practical reasons such as "we can't build you a suitable measuring apparatus." It means you're using words wrong, that there's something wrong with the question on a fundamental level. Something rather worse than merely "I'm not obliged to answer that."

"Why is there a universe?" is not a fundamentally flawed question, merely an unnecessary one.
________

Asking "why is the gravitational constant X and not Y?" is incoherent if the gravitational constant must be X in some philosophical sense. But if that were true, then we ought to be able to provide an answer: not the answer the asker was looking for, but an explanation of why it's an ill-posed question at a bare minimum.

I thought I already did that by example in the previous post--it's part of the essence of an electric charge that it interacts with other electric charges.

Yes, but how much so? Is it true that it must be in the nature of electric charge, as we define the term, that the electromagnetic interaction of charged particles is so much greater than the gravitational interaction? Must the universe contain charge? Must charge be quantized, as it appears to be?

Some of those questions have answers in terms of other bits of physics: as I understand it, if we ever find a magnetic monopole we have a good answer for whether or not charge must be quantized, for instance. But it's very unlikely that physics alone will ever put us in a position where all questions of the form "must X behave in fashion Y for the sake of logical consistency alone?" will be answered.

Which is fine, and I'm not saying it isn't. But it does at least make the question "Why does X behave in fashion Y, and not fashion Y' or Y"?" sane, if not important or compelling.
_______

I'm not sure about fundamental constants. Personally, I think there aren't any. In QED, electric coupling constant isn't really a constant, and so may be an artifact of how we express the laws (and in string theory, it's explicitly a dynamical field).

Maybe so, but we haven't found a way to demonstrate it yet; the current state of the art still relies rather heavily on experimentally defined constants and relationships that have concrete effects that we can at least imagine being different.

Kuroneko, are you arguing that it is philosophically incoherent to ask why the constituent parts of the universe interact and behave in some way and not in another way?

Almost. Either there are fundamental laws that are genuine descriptions of reality or there are not (realism vs. anti-realism). In latter case, further asking 'why' asks for an explanation of a non-truth; in the former, they are necessary truths.

But unless I'm sorely mistaken, the fundamental laws we know to date aren't logically necessary, merely empirically necessary: if they were any other way, the universe would not be as we know it. But that's different from "it is inconceivable that they could be any other way in any imaginable context, much as it is inconceivable that a circle could be square on a Euclidean plane."

Empirical necessity is very much enough to show that the laws we know are true, but not enough to render the idea of alternatives insane or incoherent.

[Kuroneko]

I suppose you could say so, though for a dimensionful quantity you could equally well include the unit definitions as part of X. The fact that I can define units such that any dimensionful quantity becomes 1 (or 10, or 1/137) of those units is sort of irrelevant to what I'm getting at. You can still ask "why is Boltzmann's constant not a thousand times the value we've come to know and love?" and have the question make sense.

No, without interpreting it as an implicit question about some dimensionless quantity, it most definitely does not make sense. I'll say up-front that this issue is really not very relevant to what we were discussing, since all that means is that some other, dimensionless, quantities are fundamental.

Let's take a look back to your earlier example of the gravitational constant, G = 6.6743E-11 N/(m²·kg²), and add in Coulomb's constant, k = 8.9876E9 N/(m²·C²). But the constants tell you nothing about their strength, because you need some standard way to link electric charge with gravitational charge. Here, you can simply pick a standard--say, the electron--and produce the electric and gravitational coupling constants. And they would tell you unambiguously: gravity is a lot weak than electromagnetism.

Even with gravitational force alone, what would mean for it to be stronger, if not the force produced by some agreed-upon standard sample to to be more? So in the end you're still ending up with a dimensionless ratio. The gravitational coupling constant just picks that standard to be an electron.

But unless I'm sorely mistaken, the fundamental laws we know to date aren't logically necessary, merely empirically necessary: if they were any other way, the universe would not be as we know it. But that's different from "it is inconceivable that they could be any other way in any imaginable context, much as it is inconceivable that a circle could be square on a Euclidean plane."

Let's run down some of the possibilities.

Is logical possibility the only type that has any metaphysical force? Suppose so, as you implicitly suggest here. Then the physical laws merely report regularities of phenomena, say, the ones true at all times and all places. Under this conception of natural laws, their truth is by definition parasitic on what actually occurs, so that while it is meaningful to ask why the state of affairs is not different from the plethora of logical possibilities, it is illegitimate (or rather, trivial) to ask why the laws themselves are as they are.

Suppose we live in a world in which no one has ever and never will steal the Pope's hat. Then by the regularity conception of natural law, it is physically impossible to steal the Pope's hat. Things don't happen because of natural laws; natural laws are because of things that happen.

If you find this silliness unpalatable, then perhaps you'll not blunt our metaphysical power by admitting another kind of necessity--let's call it nomological necessity--such that (correct) physical laws are as they are precisely because they are thus necessary. Or perhaps some sort of hybrid view, where the laws are part of the essence of some of some fundamental entities (which literally makes it inconceivable that they not follow those laws).

In all of these cases, I think the conclusion follows. So what, if anything, went wrong?

Empirical necessity is very much enough to show that the laws we know are true, but not enough to render the idea of alternatives insane or incoherent.

Alright, I'll amend "incoherent" to "either incoherent or having a trivial answer."

[Shroom Man 777]

Why can't the universe be uncaused? We can see it, we can observe it. We know it exists. We don't know what caused it, sure. But we're trying to figure it out through science, through theorizing stuff like the Big Bang theory, to focusing telescopes up at the sky and through splitting atoms.

What is the necessity of saying that the universe is caused by an uncaused cause that's invisible, that's unquantifiable, that by all observable means doesn't exist?

Is an uncaused cause more acceptable if it is invisible and magical? So it's okay for god to be an uncaused cause because he's invisible and magical? But why is it not okay for the universe itself and the phenomena inside it to be an uncaused cause? Because it can be seen and observed?

[Surlethe]

Almost. Either there are fundamental laws that are genuine descriptions of reality or there are not (realism vs. anti-realism). In latter case, further asking 'why' asks for an explanation of a non-truth; in the former, they are necessary truths.

This seems a trivial proposition, with an answer satisfying only to a mathematician*. The meat of the discussion, I think, lies in this question: "... why [are] the state of affairs is not different from the plethora of logical possibilities ... [?]" - which is what I was trying to ask your position on.


*An engineer, a physicist and a mathematician are staying in a hotel.
The engineer wakes up and smells smoke. He goes out into the hallway and sees a fire, so he fills a trash can from his room with water and douses the fire. He goes back to bed. Later, the physicist wakes up and smells smoke. He opens his door and sees a fire in the hallway. He walks down the hall to a fire hose and after calculating the flame velocity, distance, water pressure, trajectory, etc. extinguishes the fire with the minimum amount of water and energy needed. Later, the mathematician wakes up and smells smoke. He goes to the hall, sees the fire and then the fire hose. He thinks for a moment and then exclaims, "Ah, a solution exists!" and then goes back to bed.

[Simon_Jester]

Why can't the universe be uncaused?

Speaking for myself, I see no reason why not. But the fact that the Universe need not be caused, and that there need not be a reason why the Universe is what it is and not something closely related, doesn't mean that there must not be a cause or a reason, or that there can not be one.

Which is the problem with trying to prove that "why is there a Universe?" is an incoherent question (one that makes no sense, such as "what is the radius of a square circle?"), instead of merely being a silly question (one we have no right to expect an answer to).
_________

No, without interpreting it as an implicit question about some dimensionless quantity, it most definitely does not make sense. I'll say up-front that this issue is really not very relevant to what we were discussing, since all that means is that some other, dimensionless, quantities are fundamental.

Fair enough; what's the fundamental dimensionless quantity behind Boltzmann's constant? How would we describe, in dimensionless terms, a universe in which all other measures were identical but the mean particle kinetic energy corresponding to a given temperature was 1.001 times larger? We could, of course, redefine the Kelvin scale so that 1 newkelvin = 1.001 oldkelvins and restore the original numerical values for everything, but is there a nontrivial way to express what has "changed" instead of merely doing that?

Is logical possibility the only type that has any metaphysical force? Suppose so, as you implicitly suggest here.

I think it's more subtle than that: logical impossibility is the only thing that has enough force to make a question incoherent, as opposed to merely pointless- a question that need not have an answer is likely to be pointless.

Then the physical laws merely report regularities of phenomena, say, the ones true at all times and all places. Under this conception of natural laws, their truth is by definition parasitic on what actually occurs, so that while it is meaningful to ask why the state of affairs is not different from the plethora of logical possibilities, it is illegitimate (or rather, trivial) to ask why the laws themselves are as they are.

Suppose we live in a world in which no one has ever and never will steal the Pope's hat. Then by the regularity conception of natural law, it is physically impossible to steal the Pope's hat. Things don't happen because of natural laws; natural laws are because of things that happen.

That raises a question: how do we say we live in a world where no one will ever steal the Pope's hat? Under the regularity conception, you have to be able to predict confidently that no one ever will before you can say that there is a natural law barring anyone from doing so. The regularity conception doesn't free scientific theories from the need to have predictive power.

If I could predict that no one will ever steal the Pope's hat from some other observed regularity of nature, or if numerous, repeated attempts to steal the hat failed when I had every reason to expect them to succeed... then yes, at some point I would have to say that it was physically impossible to steal the Pope's hat, that some sort of bizarre interference was preventing anyone from doing so.

Since you appear to use a different interpretation, what would you do if you did find yourself in a universe where the Pope's hat was by all appearances unstealable? What if the Pope was willing to cooperate in all sorts of elaborate attempts to steal his hat, by any means imaginable, allowing you to do controlled experiments in hat-theft that persistently failed? Would there ever come a point at which the repeated observation that the Pope's hat remained unstolen despite well-organized efforts to remove it would convince you that it was in fact impossible to do so? Or would you dismiss the possibility that such a physical law could exist because it seems absurd that such a law would be nomologically necessary?

Make no mistake, it does seem absurd that such a law should exist, which is why I'm not at all surprised to find that it doesn't (for certain values of "theft," the Pope's hat has already been stolen at least once that I can think of). And happily, in a more plausible universe, the whole issue becomes moot. If we merely observe that no one has stolen the Pope's hat, without carrying out repeated, organized trials in which people who logically ought to succeed attempt to do so and fail... we don't have sufficient evidence to say that it is impossible in the sense that it is impossible for electrons to decide to ignore the Exclusion Principle.

In any case, I suppose that I do adhere to something close to the regularity interpretation of natural laws: the fact that those laws are an accurate description of reality does not guarantee that they are nomologically necessary in and of itself.

[Kuroneko]

This seems a trivial proposition, with an answer satisfying only to a mathematician*. ...

It looks to be more of a case of "if there are natural laws at all, then they do not need a special/nontrivial explanation." Or at least, an attempt to argue that. The rest is just to leave open the possibility that some things happen that are not under any natural law (I'm not sure what that would actually mean, but let's call them "miracles".)

I think it's more subtle than that: logical impossibility is the only thing that has enough force to make a question incoherent, as opposed to merely pointless- a question that need not have an answer is likely to be pointless.

You're really hung up on that word. It's not as if the argument hinges on it. The whole of my original post is that there is nothing else to look for:

What would it mean to give a cause to the existence of an aggregate, other than accounting for each of its parts and for how those parts acquired their particular configuration? In other words, if everything in a system has a cause, and the overall arrangement also has cause, then the existence of the whole thing seems to be properly accounted for.

I called this 'incoherent' just in the sense that asking to complete an already completed process doesn't really make sense. You can substitute whatever descriptor you feel best.

That raises a question: how do we say we live in a world where no one will ever steal the Pope's hat? Under the regularity conception, you have to be able to predict confidently that no one ever will before you can say that there is a natural law barring anyone from doing so. The regularity conception doesn't free scientific theories from the need to have predictive power.

Right, but that's also beside the point.

If I could predict that no one will ever steal the Pope's hat from some other observed regularity of nature, or if numerous, repeated attempts to steal the hat failed when I had every reason to expect them to succeed... then yes, at some point I would have to say that it was physically impossible to steal the Pope's hat, that some sort of bizarre interference was preventing anyone from doing so.

And that's quite fine as well. What's important here is what how do you interpret this law after you conclude this. If you're a proper regularity theorist, you would sweep the metaphysical issues aside, and you would just say that it's a law because of that's how things happen. What explains it being a law is the regularity itself, because all there is to being a law is accurately reporting a regularity.

Now, either the law reciprocates by explaining the regularity in some manner, or there is no explanation whatsoever for it (or else it would itself be a law). Thus, for this conception of natural law, the situation is either closed or there's no answer to be found at all--either way, there is no further work to do beyond trying to find out the natural laws themselves.

Since you appear to use a different interpretation, what would you do if you did find yourself in a universe where the Pope's hat was by all appearances unstealable? What if the Pope was willing to cooperate in all sorts of elaborate attempts to steal his hat, by any means imaginable, allowing you to do controlled experiments in hat-theft that persistently failed... .

I would also conclude that it is a matter of physical law that the hat is unstealable. But that's not the point. Let me try to illustrate the difference with a further hypothetical: in addition to all you state above, that I am also completely omniscient about what happened or will ever happen to that hat *, and thus I can establish as a complete fact that it has never been nor ever will be stolen. Under the regularity conception of natural law, it is then completely and unambiguously correct to say that it is a law that the hat is unstealable. I wouldn't just know this law with good certainty or beyond a reasonable doubt or whatever--I would be completely correct about my conclusion in the maximal, absolute sense.

Under the alternative, I could still be wrong about my conclusion even in the case of being omniscient about its history, for it could be just an accident (albeit perhaps very unlikely, depending on how thorough I am in testing the issue) that all attempts at such failed. But this only makes sense if there is something to 'lawhood' that carries some metaphysical force.

* If the future history of this troubles you despite this being a hypothetical, just assume I somehow convince the Pope to destroy the hat, or whatever.


___

Fair enough; what's the fundamental dimensionless quantity behind Boltzmann's constant? How would we describe, in dimensionless terms, a universe in which all other measures were identical but the mean particle kinetic energy corresponding to a given temperature was 1.001 times larger?

If you're interested in the Boltzmann constant in particular, that part's easy. What is k? A bookkeeping device designed to keep temperature and energy from having the same units. Maxwell-Boltzmann, Bose-Einstein, and Fermi-Dirac statistics--all dependent on kT. Thermodynamics--just rescales entropy from measuring the number of available microstates directly. One can quite literally do all of physics, model any phenomenon, without ever once encountering the Boltzmann constant, and all one needs to do is measure temperature in units of energy, which is actually more fundamental, because then the unit of temperature is amount of energy needed to change entropy (which is then dimensionless and measures microstates directly) by one unit.

We could, of course, redefine the Kelvin scale so that 1 newkelvin = 1.001 oldkelvins and restore the original numerical values for everything, but is there a nontrivial way to express what has "changed" instead of merely doing that?

Yes, but it's not unique. Given that k is a peculiarity of our definition of the Kelvin scale, what might it mean for it to be different? If it means anything physical at all, it's that the behavior of water is different, because that's how the Kelvin scale is defined. Any number of dimensionless quantities could make that change--fine structure constant (which is a dimensionless measure of electron charge), gravitational coupling constant (which is a dimensionless measure of electron mass), electron-to-proton mass ratio (which introduces some corrections to the energy levels of atoms), and probably some more I'm failing to think up.

As I said before, I don't think it's important to the debate, though.

[Surlethe]

It looks to be more of a case of "if there are natural laws at all, then they do not need a special/nontrivial explanation." Or at least, an attempt to argue that. The rest is just to leave open the possibility that some things happen that are not under any natural law (I'm not sure what that would actually mean, but let's call them "miracles".)

Right. Let me restate your argument to see if I follow. A "natural law" is an accurate description of some aspect of how reality behaves. Either such natural laws exist or they do not. If they do not, then asking why they are that way is nonsense. If they do, then since reality must behave somehow, they are necessary truths (i.e., every logically coherent universe natural has a pattern of behavior, so every logically coherent universe has laws of nature).

But this doesn't seem to be worth arguing about. I'd ask again: why does the universe behave in the observed manner instead of some other logically consistent manner? Is that trivial as well? I think this is what Simon_Jester is getting at, too, though I can't speak for him.

[Rye]

But this doesn't seem to be worth arguing about. I'd ask again: why does the universe behave in the observed manner instead of some other logically consistent manner? Is that trivial as well? I think this is what Simon_Jester is getting at, too, though I can't speak for him.

What makes you think it can?

[Surlethe]

If it's logically coherent, why wouldn't it be possible for a hypothetical universe to have that configuration?

[Simon_Jester]

It looks to be more of a case of "if there are natural laws at all, then they do not need a special/nontrivial explanation." Or at least, an attempt to argue that. The rest is just to leave open the possibility that some things happen that are not under any natural law (I'm not sure what that would actually mean, but let's call them "miracles".)

Right. Let me restate your argument to see if I follow. A "natural law" is an accurate description of some aspect of how reality behaves. Either such natural laws exist or they do not. If they do not, then asking why they are that way is nonsense. If they do, then since reality must behave somehow, they are necessary truths (i.e., every logically coherent universe natural has a pattern of behavior, so every logically coherent universe has laws of nature).

But this doesn't seem to be worth arguing about. I'd ask again: why does the universe behave in the observed manner instead of some other logically consistent manner? Is that trivial as well? I think this is what Simon_Jester is getting at, too, though I can't speak for him.

That is indeed what I am getting at.

If it's logically coherent, why wouldn't it be possible for a hypothetical universe to have that configuration?

What makes you think it can?

Lack of contradictory evidence. While I have seen plenty of evidence that the laws of physics we know are the only set consistent with the universe we live in, I have not seen plenty of evidence that all other laws of physics that can be defined with mathematical rigor lead to logical inconsistencies and therefore could not apply to some imagined universe we don't live in.

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What would it mean to give a cause to the existence of an aggregate, other than accounting for each of its parts and for how those parts acquired their particular configuration? In other words, if everything in a system has a cause, and the overall arrangement also has cause, then the existence of the whole thing seems to be properly accounted for.

I called this 'incoherent' just in the sense that asking to complete an already completed process doesn't really make sense. You can substitute whatever descriptor you feel best.

Sorry. That comes from my objection to the philosophy paper Marcus Aurelius linked to, in which Smith did call the sentence "A god caused the universe to exist" incoherent... and did a bad job of arguing it. I was carrying baggage from something earlier, and I shouldn't have been.

And that's quite fine as well. What's important here is what how do you interpret this law after you conclude this. If you're a proper regularity theorist, you would sweep the metaphysical issues aside, and you would just say that it's a law because of that's how things happen. What explains it being a law is the regularity itself, because all there is to being a law is accurately reporting a regularity.

I think this is a very reasonable definition of a scientific law. However, in that situation I would not be able to stop myself from wondering "Why only the Pope's hat? Why not anybody else's?" And I don't think I should feel compelled try.

We know that a law is a law because it works and has predictive power, but knowing that it is a law is not quite the same as knowing why it is a law. Given that we know the Pope's hat cannot be stolen, there are obvious questions like "what is so special about the Pope and/or his hat?" And I don't think you can justly insist on stopping the question at the point where you discover that the coefficient of attraction (or whatever) between the Pope and his hat is so great that you'd need to vaporize both of them to remove the hat from his head. There's still a pragmatic "why" in the sense of "what is so special about that hat?" And there's still a philosophical "why" that is at least interesting, especially in such a bizarre case: why only the Pope's hat? Why not the Archbishop of Canterbury's hat, or the Dalai Lama's hat?

Scientists are neither obliged nor well equipped to answer the philosophical "why" question, and its importance should not be overstated, but that doesn't mean that the question is inherently worthless.

I would also conclude that it is a matter of physical law that the hat is unstealable. But that's not the point. Let me try to illustrate the difference with a further hypothetical: in addition to all you state above, that I am also completely omniscient about what happened or will ever happen to that hat *, and thus I can establish as a complete fact that it has never been nor ever will be stolen. Under the regularity conception of natural law, it is then completely and unambiguously correct to say that it is a law that the hat is unstealable. I wouldn't just know this law with good certainty or beyond a reasonable doubt or whatever--I would be completely correct about my conclusion in the maximal, absolute sense.

Under the alternative, I could still be wrong about my conclusion even in the case of being omniscient about its history, for it could be just an accident (albeit perhaps very unlikely, depending on how thorough I am in testing the issue) that all attempts at such failed. But this only makes sense if there is something to 'lawhood' that carries some metaphysical force.

Ah. I think I begin to understand. But only begin...

Let me see if I've got it straight. You contend that scientific "law" (I use the quotes to indicate that we may be defining the term differently) carries metaphysical force by necessity, because it comes from more than an accidental combination of events. Having absolute or functionally absolute knowledge of events would allow you to identify which law-like statements about reality were of metaphysical weight (because they can never be violated), and which do not (because they merely are never violated).

In which case the source of our disagreement is that I do not think scientific laws carry metaphysical weight, only physical weight: they tell us what is and why things must be that way for what we see to happen. They do not tell us "why things must be that way, full stop." If we can imagine a universe that isn't the one we know (say, one with a different geometry), we can imagine different laws (say, a variation on Maxwell's Laws that would work in Flatland).

One can quite literally do all of physics, model any phenomenon, without ever once encountering the Boltzmann constant, and all one needs to do is measure temperature in units of energy, which is actually more fundamental, because then the unit of temperature is amount of energy needed to change entropy (which is then dimensionless and measures microstates directly) by one unit.

Oops. You're right. Sorry.

[Darth Wong]

What does it mean to "carry metaphysical weight"?

It's true that we cannot answer why the universe is the way it is. But it is also true that there doesn't necessarily have to be a reason at all.

If there's a reason, then it would take the basic form "B therefore A", where A is the nature of the universe. But if we insist on asking these vague questions like why A is the way it is, we might as well ask why B is the way it is. This leads to the same infinite regression problem that we get from the First Mover argument. Whatever "reason" we concoct for the nature of the universe would beg the question of why the reason itself is the way it is.

Ultimately, the whole question of a universal "why" is an empty one. In fact, if one wanted to be a smart-ass, one could simply sit there and smugly respond to any idea by simply saying "why", no matter what the person says. It's the ultimate vacuous pseudo-philosophical argument to think that you can defeat any argument by simply asking "why" repeatedly until the person cannot give an answer. The fact that you can blindly use this process on any kind of argument is a good indicator of its quality.

That's why it's so favoured by dishonest religious apologists: it really leads nowhere, so they offer themselves up as an answer to an unanswerable question. In the real world, when people ask "why", they are actually asking "how". When someone asks why it rains, he is actually asking what makes it rain, which is more of a "how" question. Those who make a distinction in search of a metaphysical "why" are not really comprehending what they're asking for. They don't realize (or don't care) that as formulated, their question can never be answered. Even if God existed, he himself could be defeated similarly.

[Rye]

If it's logically coherent, why wouldn't it be possible for a hypothetical universe to have that configuration?

I have no idea what dictates "universal configuration" and only have one universe to compare it against. For all I know, this is the only way a universe CAN exist.

[Surlethe]

I have no idea what dictates "universal configuration" and only have one universe to compare it against. For all I know, this is the only way a universe CAN exist.

You can take "universal configuration" to mean "the manner in which the constituents of the aggregate interact with each other". It certainly might be the case that some factor forces this configuration to be the only possible one, but it's not obvious.

It's true that we cannot answer why the universe is the way it is. But it is also true that there doesn't necessarily have to be a reason at all.

If there's a reason, then it would take the basic form "B therefore A", where A is the nature of the universe. But if we insist on asking these vague questions like why A is the way it is, we might as well ask why B is the way it is. This leads to the same infinite regression problem that we get from the First Mover argument. Whatever "reason" we concoct for the nature of the universe would beg the question of why the reason itself is the way it is.

This is an interesting point. All of these questions must be phrased in terms of modal logic, but one may as well ask why a particular logic guarantees truth, or accurately describes the universe. If there's a "metalogic" system that works among logics, we might as well ask the same question of it. It's the same goddamn problem you get in trying to establish some universal moral system, like we were talking about in that thread a while ago (sorry, by the way, that I ran out of time to reply to that).

[Kuroneko]

I suppose a mod can flush this if Knobbyboy88's banning was also intended as a "thread over" ruling.
___

Right. Let me restate your argument to see if I follow. A "natural law" is an accurate description of some aspect of how reality behaves. Either such natural laws exist or they do not. If they do not, then asking why they are that way is nonsense. If they do, then since reality must behave somehow, they are necessary truths ... .

Not quite so fast; it's actually another dilemma. Suppose we observe a universal regularity in nature. If there is a reason for it, then that reason is a law of nature. Then there are two ways of thinking about what it means to be a "law of nature". Either
(1) laws are true because things behave like that (rather than just that we're aware of them because of that)... but then asking 'why' in regards to the law is trivial, and the chain of explanation simply loops back on itself, if there is any chain at all.
(2) things behave like they do because of the laws, but not vice versa, so that "lawhood" occupies some special category of nomological necessity... but then necessity explains why they are true.

But this doesn't seem to be worth arguing about. I'd ask again: why does the universe behave in the observed manner instead of some other logically consistent manner?

I think you're right in that my argument needs to evolve a bit, so let me try to do so by addressing your repeated question directly. So here goes: I don't see any reason why you're singling out logical possibility in the first place. What does logic do, if not abstractly model situations? Why do we believe it to be so special, if not that it works? All the reasons you have to believe in logic are exactly of the same type as you have to believe in any scientific theory, although perhaps more of them, because logic is more generally applicable than typical.

The distinction between what's logically possibile and what's nomologically possible is purely a matter of convention based on how certain we are that the relevant laws are correct. But that some of the laws can be tested in front of a bathroom mirror and some others only with the aid of multi-million dollar equipment is surely irrelevant to whether they are actually correct.

What does it mean to "carry metaphysical weight"?

Determining what is 'really' possible or impossible. For example, logic.

It's true that we cannot answer why the universe is the way it is. But it is also true that there doesn't necessarily have to be a reason at all.

Well, yes. But I had hoped to show that either there is no reason at all or that reason is trivial.

_____

If you're a proper regularity theorist, you would sweep the metaphysical issues aside, and you would just say that it's a law because of that's how things happen. What explains it being a law is the regularity itself, because all there is to being a law is accurately reporting a regularity.

I think this is a very reasonable definition of a scientific law. However, in that situation I would not be able to stop myself from wondering "Why only the Pope's hat? Why not anybody else's?" And I don't think I should feel compelled try.

So suppose further that is a truly fundamental law, i.e., that it is an irreducible fact about reality (*). Then the fact that you can ask for a reason does not mean that the question has any nontrivial answer--and if you're correct about natural law, it provably does not, for reasons given above.

(*) If this rubs you the wrong way, then just replace hats with whatever hypothetical results you would get from your investigation, and if reality is like an onion in regards to laws, suppose you were somehow clever or lucky enough to find out all of the layers.

Let me see if I've got it straight. You contend that scientific "law" (I use the quotes to indicate that we may be defining the term differently) carries metaphysical force by necessity, because it comes from more than an accidental combination of events.

I contend that (1) if it doesn't, then the issue of 'why' is closed, in the trivial, if perhaps disappointing, sense of the regularity conception of natural law, and (2) if it does, then this specialness of natural laws explains why that are true--because they are then necessarily true.

In which case the source of our disagreement is that I do not think scientific laws carry metaphysical weight, only physical weight: they tell us what is and why things must be that way for what we see to happen.

So why do things happen like that? As you say here, because of the law. But why is the law true? As your position defines, because things happen like that. The chain of explanations is a trivial circle, but it is complete, and if you're right about natural laws, valid. There is no further 'why', which was precisely my original point.

If we can imagine a universe that isn't the one we know (say, one with a different geometry), we can imagine different laws (say, a variation on Maxwell's Laws that would work in Flatland).

The fact that we can imagine them is a poor guide to whether or not they are possible in any relevant sense. We can imagine illogical universes as well (arguably not hard for most people, but more to the point, logical systems are not unique), and yet we still cling to logic as a guide to genuine possibility.

[Edi]

No, Kuroneko, it was not a "thread over" ruling as such. Your contributions are always welcome, but unfortunately I did not have time to split the thread this morning. If you wish, I can extract your conversation with Surlethe from there and merge it here, to preserve it as an intact whole.

[Kuroneko]

There is also the discussion with Simon Jester and Rye. If untangling everything it a bit problematic (since at times we replied also to Knobbyboy88 at the same post), another possibility is to let this thread run its course and merge it later.

[Simon_Jester]

If you're a proper regularity theorist, you would sweep the metaphysical issues aside, and you would just say that it's a law because of that's how things happen. What explains it being a law is the regularity itself, because all there is to being a law is accurately reporting a regularity.

I think this is a very reasonable definition of a scientific law. However, in that situation I would not be able to stop myself from wondering "Why only the Pope's hat? Why not anybody else's?" And I don't think I should feel compelled try.

So suppose further that is a truly fundamental law, i.e., that it is an irreducible fact about reality. Then the fact that you can ask for a reason does not mean that the question has any nontrivial answer--and if you're correct about natural law, it provably does not, for reasons given above.

Ah. I see.

The problem this raises for me is that it's hard to know when you have a Genuine Natural Law, an irreducible fact about reality, and when you have a "natural law" that is merely a special case or simplified version of the real facts. There's no way to tell the difference except to hope that someone gets lucky and spots an inconsistency in the existing "laws" that offers deeper insight*.

Thus, your proof would seem to reduce to the statement "irreducible facts about nature are irreducible." Which is trivial; they are, but if you don't have a way of knowing when you've got one then the statement tells you nothing. More specifically and relevantly**, we have no way of knowing whether the laws on the books are Genuine Natural Laws; they certainly weren't a hundred years ago (with a few exceptions). We can easily determine whether they are true, for inductively excellent values of "true," but that doesn't translate into knowing whether they are irreducible facts about reality.

So while your proof does indicate that one can have an irreducible fact about reality such that asking why it is so is a question guaranteed to have no answer... it doesn't leave us with any promising way to identify which facts qualify. It could be that the laws of physics we now know are the irreducible facts, minus a little to justify employing the boys and girls down at the LHC for a decade or two. Or it could be that there's really only one irreducible fact, which is that we're constrained by a set of arbitrary parameters laid down by the great inscrutable Nameless God/Azathoth/Computer Running The Brain Emulators.

*"Hey, if circling charges radiate electromagnetic waves, how come electrons don't radiate away all their energy and death-spiral into the nucleus?" That sort of thing.
**Is 'relevantly' a word?
___________

If we can imagine a universe that isn't the one we know (say, one with a different geometry), we can imagine different laws (say, a variation on Maxwell's Laws that would work in Flatland).

The fact that we can imagine them is a poor guide to whether or not they are possible in any relevant sense. We can imagine illogical universes as well (arguably not hard for most people, but more to the point, logical systems are not unique), and yet we still cling to logic as a guide to genuine possibility.

Assume for the sake of argument that we can construct hypothetical universes that are logically consistent; such universes would remain an excellent illustration of the difference between "logically possible" and "true."

The reason this is interesting* is because if we occupy only one member of a (probably large) set of logically possible universes, it is at least plausible that there is some specific, undiscovered cause closing off portions of the set, so that they aren't really logically possible after all. If the undiscovered cause is a scientific one, finding out the resulting law will teach us something about science. If it is philosophical, then we learn something about philosophy and/or logic. If it is theological, then we learn something about gods**.

*(to a certain sort of person)
**What, precisely, we learn, ranging from specific information about personality traits to a decisive proof of nonexistence, varies...

[Edi]

There is also the discussion with Simon Jester and Rye. If untangling everything it a bit problematic (since at times we replied also to Knobbyboy88 at the same post), another possibility is to let this thread run its course and merge it later.

I actually managed to merge most of the relevant things from Knobblywobbly's banning thread here, since after he ignored your well written reply to him in favor of his continued dishonesty, it became a three-way conversation between you, Surlethe and simon_jester while Knobbly concentrated on arguing with Degan and Darth Wong. So it was not a problem once I had some time to sort through the thread.

[Kuroneko]

@Edi: Thank you.

The problem this raises for me is that it's hard to know when you have a Genuine Natural Law, an irreducible fact about reality, and when you have a "natural law" that is merely a special case or simplified version of the real facts. There's no way to tell the difference except to hope that someone gets lucky and spots an inconsistency in the existing "laws" that offers deeper insight*.

That's an important issue, but also one which is independent of the matter at hand. For what we were discussing were not the proper procedures of scientific investigation, but rather
-- If we knew a fundamental law of nature, could we answer why it's true?
which is quite different from
-- How can we be sure that what we think of as the laws of nature really are such?
If the reality is independent of our knowledge of it, so are they. And thus, I don't see how the latter issue reduces my attempted proof.

So all I can say to that is: very well, it is indeed hard to know Genuine Natural Law. But our epistemological difficulties have no apparent bearing on the fact that if there is such a thing, then a straightforward explanation of why it's true can be provided (for both alternative conceptions of 'natural law').

So while your proof does indicate that one can have an irreducible fact about reality such that asking why it is so is a question guaranteed to have no answer... it doesn't leave us with any promising way to identify which facts qualify.

I have indeed failed to provide such answers, but in my defense I have neither promised nor even attempted to do so. I would not presume that any amount of philosophizing on this matter would enable any scientist to do his or her job any better. The original context of what started this discussion was whether (to paraphrase) a worldview driven entirely by natural law was deficient in failing to provide the 'why'. My aim was rather to show that actually, it does provide it.

The reason this is interesting* is because if we occupy only one member of a (probably large) set of logically possible universes, it is at least plausible that there is some specific, undiscovered cause closing off portions of the set, so that they aren't really logically possible after all. If the undiscovered cause is a scientific one, finding out the resulting law will teach us something about science.

Yes (you might also want to check the second block of my last post that replies to Surlethe). What closes it off is nomological possibility, which, under the alternative conception of natural law, is only set apart from logical possibility by human convention due to limitations of our knowledge.