RE: The Constraints of Physical Law
March 25, 2014 at 8:55 pm
(This post was last modified: March 25, 2014 at 8:56 pm by Heywood.)
(March 25, 2014 at 7:34 pm)Pickup_shonuff Wrote: A question popped into my head today having to do with materialism and the nature of physical laws. I'm pretty sure David Hume, among others, raised the question (to paraphrase, hopefully not too poorly) over whether we can actually know if physical laws always remain constraint, as opposed to perhaps laws evolving and then reaching states of equilibrium or regularity by which we measure them and get the same result over time. That is to say, could we be in such a Universe (or Multiverse) that in fact is a global system that is highly irregular but in our local system, our point of view, which is perhaps just an elegant "spot" on a disorganized web, everything appears regular and moreover it causes the global system to appear regular? The "spot": Could it analogously be our galaxy, our solar system, our planet, or maybe only our human consciousness, "merely" the result of irregular laws but emergent in such a way as to appear to be the result of regularities, however only in reference to this "spot," our spatial or Earthly or conscious point of view? Could our mathematical physical laws that appear true throughout a global system only be true with reference to our particular "spot"? Maybe our spot is the Universe and the web is the Multiverse, where so much more is going on that is irregular and more fundamental than physical law, but our perspective only views a web of physical laws that appear global and constant to us?
Does this discredit materialism? Physicalism?
Furthermore, could these irregularities, which we'll say are only in other Universes, supervene over our physical laws? Could irregularities ever occur in our Universe or planet, which are not regularities that we could call physical constants or laws, but something more random, something more fundamental? Maybe something that some would want to call a miracle? Could life or conscious experience be something like that?
A lot of physical laws are simply logical consequences of symmetries. Google "noethers theorem" if you want to know why(every atheists who argues with theists should be familiar with noether's theorem imo). Are we in an irregular spot in the universe where things are just elegant? To subjective. The better question in my opinion is are we in a spot in the universe where symmetries are prevalent or are symmetries present everywhere in the universe?
