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Can you describe a universe without fixed laws to me? I am pretty much unable to imagine one. What would it mean to have no fixed laws, wouldn't that imply abso
by danbruc 6y ago
Can you describe a universe without fixed laws to me? I am pretty much unable to imagine one. What would it mean to have no fixed laws, wouldn't that imply absolute randomness? Is that even a consistent idea to have no fixed laws at all?
If it is not absolute randomness, then there is some law, at the very least something is correlated or distributed in some way and one can at least statistically say something about the universe. But even if it is absolute randomness, if every variable might take on every possible value at every time [1], doesn't this also imply a law, everything is uniformly distributed?
I really have a very hard time to imagining something about that you can essentially not make any true statement. Because that is what it kind of boils down to, if nothing is fixed in the universe, then more or less no statement about the universe is true. [2] On the other hand, if you can make a true statement about the universe, that implies some regularity, some law the universe follows.
[1] For simplicity I assume the universe has some state that evolves over time, which is certainly not the most general imaginable universe.
[2] This is a bit handwavy, one can make all kinds of true statements - the universe is red or it is not the case that the universe is red. But I hope the gist of the argument is clear, if nothing is fixed then also statements like the universe has three spatial dimensions or the universe contains electrons or opposite charges attract each other all become false.