(May 17, 2025 at 5:41 pm)John 6IX Breezy Wrote: Physical laws don't determine what happens, they just summarize what we observe.
You're conflating theory and phenomena here. Our physical laws are descriptive. They help us explain and predict what's going on. The phenomena on which these theories are based exist independent of the theories or explanations. In a complete absence of physicists or observers of any type, rocks will keep falling.
Theories don't determine what happens in the real world. Phenomena do. In a fully deterministic framework those phenomena govern everything. Emergent behaviours are lovely, but first and foremost, they follow the basic underlying rules. Langton's Ant doesn't suddenly decide to start turning left instead of right on a black square just because it's taken up an exciting new career in highway construction.
