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This is a silly semantics game. Nature behaves a certain way. That "is what it is" is what we call "nature's laws." I think you're confusing "nature's laws" w

This is a silly semantics game. Nature behaves a certain way. That "is what it is" is what we call "nature's laws." I think you're confusing "nature's laws" with the "laws of physics." The field of physics is a human construct, whereas nature is not. But really, it all depends on what you consider the definition to be, so I will not debate this further, as we both should understand what we each mean by this point. (Hopefully.)

shard 17y ago
You would think. I took a course at Caltech named Philosophy of Science, and we spent weeks discussing what a "law of nature" is. I think the article title is incorrect though. The law wasn't broken (that'd make sense if it was a legal system law), the law had been disproved, perhaps.
- ahk 17y ago
  Broken could also be correct if it was a "law" currently in effect universally and only the high energy of the event lead to its violation i.e the physicists using high energies managed to circumvent something that usually holds true.
bhiggins 17y ago
I think you guys would both agree that the "laws" of nature are descriptive as opposed to prescriptive.
techiferous 17y ago
We see patterns in the universe and label them "laws". Is it because the universe is by nature patterned, or is it because our limited minds, in trying to understand knowledge so vast, has to resort to patterns as a heuristic to approximate the universe?
Confusion 17y ago
Nature behaves a certain way. [..] The field of physics is a human construct, whereas nature is not. We don't know anything about the way nature behaves. The only thing we know is that physics (and chemistry, biology, etc.) seems to describe and predict the behavior pretty well. 'The laws of nature' are not a sensible thing we can refer to. It's like a square circle or 'outside the universe': you think you are making sense, but what you say doesn't actually mean anything. This is not a silly semantics game, but a very important truth about semantics: some seemingly meaningful statements just don't mean anything. There are only laws of the human construct 'physics'.
- Qz 17y ago
  I don't understand why Confusion's comment is being downvoted -- was there some faux pas that I'm not seeing?
  - Jach 17y ago
    I think it may be because many people think we do in fact know at least something about how nature works. For a non-intuitive example, we can prove two particles are identical, and if nature worked a different way it would show up in experiments.
  - Confusion 17y ago
    I think the problem is that conversation about these issues is very difficult, because language itself poses an obstacle and the same word is used to mean similar things that differ in important ways. For instance, I used the word 'nature' to mean what my parent meant: some objective, true, reality, about which we have knowledge. However, this is meaningless in exactly the same way that I argued 'laws of nature' is meaningless. Our knowledge is limited to our accounts of our observations and the theories and stories we have come up with to explain and predict such observations. 'Nature' can not possibly mean anything else than something like: "the ideas, theories, images and narratives that describe our observations of our shared reality that seem to be independent of individual humans". But when 'nature' is used in that sense in my original comment, then my claim is tautological. And when you don't accept the word can't mean anything other than I claim, then does the argument make sense? I'm trying to argue a point, where I use a word in a way that I could not actually use the word. It requires a sort of schizophrenic state of mind to appreciate the argument. (And of course, 'nature' does mean other things: a landscape painter will have entirely different concepts and images in mind when we use that word. There may be parts of that meaning that are so bound to the individual entertaining the concept that they cannot even be conveyed to another human.) All of this is, BTW, not very novel and hasn't sprung from my mind. My argument basically follows the argument as Hilary Putnam used in 'Brains in vat'. And it wasn't new then.
Qz 17y ago
There is no proof that Nature behaves a certain way. We observe how nature behaves and then induce that Nature will continue to behave that way. Induction has it's own problems -- it's little more than an educated guess.

shard 17y ago

You would think. I took a course at Caltech named Philosophy of Science, and we spent weeks discussing what a "law of nature" is. I think the article title is incorrect though. The law wasn't broken (that'd make sense if it was a legal system law), the law had been disproved, perhaps.

ahk 17y ago
Broken could also be correct if it was a "law" currently in effect universally and only the high energy of the event lead to its violation i.e the physicists using high energies managed to circumvent something that usually holds true.

bhiggins 17y ago

I think you guys would both agree that the "laws" of nature are descriptive as opposed to prescriptive.

techiferous 17y ago

We see patterns in the universe and label them "laws". Is it because the universe is by nature patterned, or is it because our limited minds, in trying to understand knowledge so vast, has to resort to patterns as a heuristic to approximate the universe?

Confusion 17y ago

Nature behaves a certain way. [..] The field of physics is a human construct, whereas nature is not. We don't know anything about the way nature behaves. The only thing we know is that physics (and chemistry, biology, etc.) seems to describe and predict the behavior pretty well. 'The laws of nature' are not a sensible thing we can refer to. It's like a square circle or 'outside the universe': you think you are making sense, but what you say doesn't actually mean anything. This is not a silly semantics game, but a very important truth about semantics: some seemingly meaningful statements just don't mean anything. There are only laws of the human construct 'physics'.

Qz 17y ago
I don't understand why Confusion's comment is being downvoted -- was there some faux pas that I'm not seeing?
- Jach 17y ago
  I think it may be because many people think we do in fact know at least something about how nature works. For a non-intuitive example, we can prove two particles are identical, and if nature worked a different way it would show up in experiments.
- Confusion 17y ago
  I think the problem is that conversation about these issues is very difficult, because language itself poses an obstacle and the same word is used to mean similar things that differ in important ways. For instance, I used the word 'nature' to mean what my parent meant: some objective, true, reality, about which we have knowledge. However, this is meaningless in exactly the same way that I argued 'laws of nature' is meaningless. Our knowledge is limited to our accounts of our observations and the theories and stories we have come up with to explain and predict such observations. 'Nature' can not possibly mean anything else than something like: "the ideas, theories, images and narratives that describe our observations of our shared reality that seem to be independent of individual humans". But when 'nature' is used in that sense in my original comment, then my claim is tautological. And when you don't accept the word can't mean anything other than I claim, then does the argument make sense? I'm trying to argue a point, where I use a word in a way that I could not actually use the word. It requires a sort of schizophrenic state of mind to appreciate the argument. (And of course, 'nature' does mean other things: a landscape painter will have entirely different concepts and images in mind when we use that word. There may be parts of that meaning that are so bound to the individual entertaining the concept that they cannot even be conveyed to another human.) All of this is, BTW, not very novel and hasn't sprung from my mind. My argument basically follows the argument as Hilary Putnam used in 'Brains in vat'. And it wasn't new then.

Qz 17y ago

There is no proof that Nature behaves a certain way. We observe how nature behaves and then induce that Nature will continue to behave that way. Induction has it's own problems -- it's little more than an educated guess.