(December 20, 2019 at 12:45 pm)mordant Wrote: I very much doubt that most scientists see some mystical inherent order that's not emergent from the natural world.
Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that a Logos-like order would be anything mystical. I'm sure you're right that most scientists don't see it that way. Neither do I.
As I said before, the term "laws of nature" may be misleading, if it points toward a legislator. Unlike laws made by humans, laws of nature come afterward, as descriptions of regularities. The traditional word for the regularities and orderliness of the world is Logos, but if this has mystical connotations to people these days I guess we should use something else. "The inherent orderliness of the world," or "the non-chaotic nature of things."
Saying that regularity is "emergent" doesn't help, I think. The fact that order emerges in an orderly way -- the same in New York and Tokyo, the same on Monday and Tuesday -- means that there is an orderliness in its emergence.
The point is to avoid the idea that this orderly non-chaos is a nothing. It is something.
Lawrence Krauss wrote a book about why there is something rather than nothing, and concludes that because the laws of nature are as they are, it is inevitable that there will be something. But he doesn't address why there are laws of nature. He wants to avoid the idea that "it's turtles all the way down," so he just starts with the turtles he's comfortable with and works upwards.
Quote:Sadly, our minds seem constructed almost specifically to be drawn to concepts that attempt to "explain everything", such as "Logos-like order". We abhor uncertainty. It is an acquired talent to learn to sit with it.
Yes, I agree with this. The fact that science can't explain -- and can't even address -- the fact that there is orderliness means that we remain uncertain.
The fact that we see a Logos-like order doesn't explain anything at all. It's just something we see -- there is order rather than chaos.
I think the best book on this is still Burtt's The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science. He explains how, since the time of Newton, science proceeds by identifying and quantifying the regularities of nature without explaining why they are as they are. Why is there gravity? Because there just is. This is the uncertainty that science demands of us.