Re: Fundamental problems in Physics

[John Kineman <***>]

Howard,
OK, that's what I thought you meant, and I would agree. My word-play 
then was to call it physical behavior (left-side) vs. physical law 
(right side). Mixing up those terms seems to me to be the crux of most 
of the disagreements on that topic, because it is the very idea of 
equating behavior with law that comes into question, right? In other 
words, the laws, demonstrable as they are, do not equate with actual 
physical behavior in a practical sense.

For the most part they are idealizations or constraints on behavior. The 
traditional view is that law=behavior is indeed true, but that in a 
practical experiment other laws are also at work to introduce errors. 
That is a deterministic idea, where ultimately every possible behavior 
"should" have an equivalent natural law - a highly unproven assertion. 
We've accepted that it isn't true at levels where the uncertainty 
principle applies, but Rosen is saying it is also not true at the 
macro-scale or of living organisms, because of complexity which ensures 
two things (please check me on this): (a) there is no end to the number 
of other possible relationships involved, lawlike or not (i.e., no 
largest model), and (b) some of the relationships cannot be formalized.  
Accordingly, as a general principle, we cannot say that law equals behavior.

JK

Howard Pattee wrote:

> John,
> My usage of physical laws, as I explained to Tim, refers to nature 
> itself (left side of modeling diagram). I agree with you that 
> physicists do not know or have only partial context-dependent models 
> (right side of modeling diagram) for all these laws, but physicists 
> believe (have faith) that nature herself is inherently lawful, which 
> is what I meant by my statement.
>
> Howard
>
> At 05:05 PM 12/14/04 -0700, John K wrote:
>
> > Judith, Howard, et al.,
> >
> > I'd like to suggest that the only difficulty with these statements is 
> > their absoluteness. That is what is irritating on the other side. 
> > What does "completely general" mean as opposed to perhaps "general 
> > for certain contexts."  I do not believe, for example, that spacetime 
> > itself  is completely general outside the known universe. And physics 
> > does speculate about other universes, quite seriously. Hence all the 
> > general dynamical laws based on space and time are not "completely 
> > general." All Rosen was saying was that the generality is always 
> > context dependent.