RE: Order vs. Randomness
February 3, 2014 at 5:13 am
(This post was last modified: February 3, 2014 at 5:22 am by Mudhammam.)
(February 3, 2014 at 4:41 am)Alex K Wrote:(February 3, 2014 at 4:09 am)Rayaan Wrote: I disagree because we didn't "construct" the laws of physics. Rather, we discovered the laws. The way that we express/describe the laws is our own construct indeed, but that doesn't mean that they are simply that. The laws of gravity, for example, can continue to exist if all of us completely disappeared from this universe tomorrow. The "our construct" part only applies to the way that we describe those laws. The laws themselves are real, regardless of what we call them or how we describe them.
I have to disagree here. None of the "laws" are "real" in any sense. They are parts of or consequences derived from theories, which themselves are approximations of nature. To give you an example, the 1/r^2 law for gravity is only an approximation, and thus a mathematical construct which fits nature kinda nicely, but isn't true in the philosophical sense such that you could discover it in nature like you discover a new planet. You can say that we discovered them in the realm of mathematics and found that they approximate nature well, but if you go that far you basically abolish the notion of constructing anything in a perverse platonic sense.
Precisely. Likewise, I didn't mean "rules" (notice I purposefully put it in parantheses) in the sense that the Universe is a football game being overseen by some strange extra-terrestrial referees. We must remember that the words we use to express the phenomena we observe are descriptive, not prescriptive--we create the words and their definitions to communicate our ideas and theories, that's all--we don't impose them on nature, it imposes them on us and we try to understand them the best we can. Sometimes we must change our definitions and ideas if they later turn out to be incorrect.
This is why I am weary of your whole approach, Raayan, to use abductive reasoning in trying to solve the puzzle of the Universe's origin. Your reasoning seems so contrived, so anthropomorphic, it most probably does not reflect the nature of reality in any metaphysical sense.
