Laws as Habits (False Intuitions of Science IV)

In part 1 of this series of posts, I outlined a few intuitions that are often assumed as part of the scientific mind-set. In part 2 and part 3, I discussed the first two intuitions. In this post, I will discuss the third intuition:

* Universal laws (the discovery of which is the task of science) dictate the behavior of all things

This may be the most widely held intuition of the four I presented and is not even unique to what I have been calling the scientific mind-set. The idea of universal laws that dictate the behavior of all things is common to many people. After all, if you throw a ball in the air, it must come down, right? The law of gravity seems both inevitable and inescapable.

I am not going to argue that if you try long enough, you can throw a ball into space. Rather, I am going to challenge the interpretation of laws as prescriptive, top-down impositions that result in a deterministic world.

The main problem with positing universal, non-violable laws is to explain their origin. A few centuries ago, such laws were thought to originate from supernatural decree, i.e. an omnipotent God. Laws may have even been seen as proof of God's existence and control of the universe! Of course, science does not have much use for a puppet master who is unseen and undetectable, and in the past few centuries the concept of laws as divinely prescribed has largely been discarded. But what has been left in its place? We have been left with God's laws without a God; laws that determine the behavior of all things but are of inexplicable origin.

The question of the nature of laws can be resolved once we realize that the origin of a law is no more than the behavior of actual entities. Laws emerge from behaviors of entities acting within the world, and as such they are better understood as habits. A habit implies that there is choice involved, and as a result this leap in understanding results in a whole-sale rejection of determinism. Rather, freedom is seen as an essential ingredient in all occasions and in all entities.

Now, we must not overstate the case for freedom, as the case of gravity ultimately shows. The creative, self-determining aspect of an entity is but one ingredient, as the choices of all other actual entities impose upon one's being as well. In some cases, the self-determining aspect might dominate, and in other cases the impositions of others dominate.

In the regime of macroscopic objects, the laws of classical physics seem to determine the positions of everything. The paradigmatic laws of classical physics include Newton's laws of motion and his law of gravitation. These laws treat the world as comprised of solid, massive bodies that endure through time. If taken as a complete description of the world, they imply a mechanistic world of determinism (if not for the intervention of a supernatural deity).

But modern physics has revealed that the solid, enduring object is but an abstraction of what is a sea of energetic, smaller entities. The rock is composed of molecules and mostly empty space! Furthermore, there is no dominant molecule, and the rock as a result represents an aggregate society with the effects of the molecules averaged out. This averaging out of many entities is the reason for the seeming determinacy of classical physics. These laws result when the individual is overwhelmed by the effects of many others in the environment, where no individual within the many stands out.

In the regime of the super-small, on the other hand, the self-determining aspect of individual entities emerges. This is expressed in the inherent randomness of the wave function of quantum physics. The historical struggle to interpret this randomness has been a result of applying the same mistaken notions in large-scale objects to those of small-scale objects. That is, electrons and other entities are viewed as vacuous objects with properties, the positions of which ought to be determined by laws governed from without. This interpretation would demand a sort of determinism even with quantum entities, which act according to some randomness that just happens to (inexplicably) be present. An alternative interpretation is to understand the quantum-scale entity as a "throb of experience", with each entity exercising partial self-determination over its behavior.

When we recognize that laws emerge from the behaviors of acting entities rather than being imposed (somehow) from beyond, we can understand that there is no true randomness. Whether the individual in question is an electron or a person, "indeterminacy" in behavior is only inexplicable from without; from the point of view of the acting individual, any behavior is the result of a process of subjective experience and action. We observe patterns in how similar entities act and formulate them as laws. When an individual remains dominant in the applicability of the law, there will be a component of randomness in the law. As the individual recedes into a multitude of entities, an averaging effect occurs and the law appears deterministic.  But even in this case, it is not a "law" that determines one's behavior but the cumulative imposition of many other actual actual entities.