RE: What are Laws of Nature?
March 22, 2022 at 5:36 pm
(This post was last modified: March 22, 2022 at 6:01 pm by vulcanlogician.)
(March 20, 2022 at 6:51 pm)Angrboda Wrote: I think this is basically taking a drunkard's walk around Hume's point that we don't see causes and effects, only correlations -- regularities. I think if I read you correctly, not having watched the video, regularity people want to say that's an unsurpassable barrier to saying anything more about what we see. I'm not sure Hume is right, but I think it's another one of those things in philosophy like knowledge or truth around which there is room for debate because nobody's broken through to a compelling description of what is actually happening. Nobody has 'nailed it', so to speak. We've got the important bits, but the special sauce that would make our conceptions rigorous and cogent is missing. Scientists want to say that they can identify cause and effect, but if you press them for what more than correlation is required to show causation, they tend to get irritable.
Thoughtful reply, as usual, Angrboda. I'm not sure if I put things properly to begin with. Maybe I was injecting more Hume into my analysis than the subject matter warrants. Or... maybe... the question amounts to a simple restating of Hume as you suggest. It's above my paygrade to answer. I'm pretty much working off of one YouTube lecture.
(March 22, 2022 at 5:31 pm)brewer Wrote: No big deal but just call a spade a spade. If you don't think its philosophy: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/laws-of-nature/
And you're correct, I don't want to be part of a discussion of what is considered as a law of nature. That's a philosophical discussion that I simply have little stomach for.
Yeah. It's philosophy. I almost posted it in the philosophy subforum. Then I thought "Hey, this might fit in the physical sciences forum." There really isn't such a stark line between disciplines as university course catalogs would have us imagine. Much of chemistry and biology is molecular physics. David Deutsch has published works in scientific journals that discuss things typically reserved for epistemology. In the end, I didn't even consider the fact it might matter to someone where the thread was placed, so I put it here on a whim. Like I said, this topic would be at home in the philosophy subforum. No disagreement there.
