Re: What is Natural Law?

[Steve Johnson <***>]

Thanks Judith, this was a very lucid and helpful
elaboration. It seems that you are saying that you
have to have a purpose in order to have a "law" as in
the "Laws of Physics". That is, if there is no self,
there is no modelling relation, and hence there is no
"Law of Physics".

What would you make then of Howard's statement
(quoting from memory): "Laws of nature are what I
imagine exist regardless of whether we exist".

Does your post imply that the self-ambience dualism
has to exist before we can speak of any Laws of
Nature.

Would you say that even Newton's Law of Gravity is not
context free?

It seems that if, say, a zillion years from now
humanity were to go extinct, Newton's Law of Gravity
would still exist in the following sense: if there is
or there will be another intelligent life form
somewhere in the universe they would discover this
exact relationship regardless of their ontology. As
long as a mind has a material substrate it would
discover this Law in the exact form that we did.

To put another way, if there is another life form
sentient enough to be capable of inferential
entailment a third party analysing their science
"textbooks" would be able to establish a *perfectly*
commuting relation between their model of the Newton's
law and ours. It seems to me that this is a valid
criterion for a context free law.











--- Judith Rosen <***> wrote:

> Hi Steve (and everyone else too, of course),
> 
> I think I can help answer at least part of this
> question:
> Steve J. wrote:Anyone who can provide a definition
> of what "Law" is
> for the purpose of present discussion?
> 
> I posted an excerpt from "Life, Itself" that
> discusses Robert Rosen's 
> concept of Natural Law. He was describing, in that
> excerpt, how the 
> very fact that we are discussing phenomena in the
> ambience (and 
> arguing about what constitutes proof that we have
> figured out various 
> real consistencies in the ambience) means that
> certain things have to 
> be true. The fact that those things have to be true
> in order for us to 
> be discussing and modeling it is an embodiment of
> this truth: There 
> are consistent principles underlying phenomena we
> perceive in "the 
> ambience" and these principles echo over and over.
> This is Natural 
> Law, in totality.
> 
> I think the concept of an echo is a good analogy (An
> analogy is a word 
> model, so a good analogy is a word model that
> satisfies the Hertzian 
> Condition). To model something is a form of echoing
> chosen aspects of 
> it in a new system of some sort. That new system may
> be thoughts, may 
> be text (words, language), may be mathematical
> descriptions, may be 
> visual (diagram/graphs/maps/three dimensional
> sculptural 
> representation, etc)... In short, the mode of
> modeling doesn't change 
> what you're doing-- you're still creating or using a
> new system to 
> represent something else, in some way and to some
> degree. No model is 
> going to correspond to any original system entirely
> (identical twins 
> are not the same in every way, for example) and it
> is not even 
> necessary for a model to "get as close as possible"
> in its entirety to 
> that 'ideal' in order for it to qualify as a good
> model. In fact, I 
> would argue that it is not an "IDEAL" at all.
> 
> Why? Because what aspects you want to model depend
> entirely on what 
> you want the model FOR. Based on the context of what
> you want a model 
> to do, the aspects to be included in the modeling
> relation will be 
> chosen. So already context is critical, as is an
> ability to think! A 
> good model is one where the relation of the
> inferential entailment in 
> the model to the causal entailment in the system
> being modeled is one 
> of correspondence AND pertains to what the model is
> supposed to be 
> used for. Trouble can enter the picture from all
> directions, though, 
> because what if the modelers don't know what they
> need? What if they 
> don't know what they DON'T need??? What if the
> modelers don't realize 
> they don't know?! This is where the discussion turns
> to issues of 
> optimality and side-effects. However, let's assume
> that the modelers 
> managed to create models that were in solid enough
> correspondence with 
> the aspects of their natural systems which had
> required the use of 
> models for some reason. Let's further assume that
> the models were 
> applied well to whatever tasks required their
> application (another 
> avenue for serious trouble to creep in). In that
> case, the models 
> would prove very useful in their purpose/s and would
> satisfy the 
> Hertzian Condition.
> 
> The Hertzian Condition is contextual, too, though.
> Models created for 
> one purpose may only be corresponding accurately (in
> the modeling 
> relation) in those aspects necessary for that
> particular purpose. If 
> the model is assumed to be in correspondence in all
> sorts of other 
> ways, and applied to different purposes, what are
> the chances that it 
> will be in correspondence in ways made necessary by
> any new context? I 
> think this is what has happened/is happening with
> Physics. Those 
> models of reality satisfy the Hertzian condition
> well enough to be 
> useful when applied to the tasks they were created
> for but the 
> assumption has carried over that they can be trusted
> to be accurate 
> representations of all aspects of any natural
> system. One of the 
> things my father wrote in the notes I found after he
> died was the 
> statement; "There are no such thing as Paradoxes in
> the natural world. 
> There are only poorly created models, poorly
> applied. What we call 
> paradoxes are really a symptom; a side-effect." They
> are a symptom 
> that something is not corresponding well between our
> models and the 
> systems being modeled.
> 
> By inference, then, we can say that the more
> applications in which a 
> model satisfies the Hertzian condition (and its
> application doesn't 
> generate side-effects), the more it is likely to
> reflect at least some 
> aspect of Natural Law. Kepler's "regularities" don't
> automatically 
> fall into this category because the sun doesn't
> "rise". That's a 
> model, based on our perception. (However, it's
> interesting that this 
> is a perception that other organisms apparently have
> modeled too! The 
> sun's regular appearance and disappearance in any
> ecosystem triggers 
> the single largest migration/behavior in organisms
> of any natural 
> cyclical phenomenon.)
> 
> I don't think it's accurate to say:
> Steve J. wrote:Natural Law as per Rosen. An
> epistemological
> principle delineating what is open to (human?)
> cognition.
> 
> He said that the establishment of true
> correspondence via a modeling 
> relation was proof that we are capable of 
> perception/cognition/communication of aspects of
> Natural Law. As you 
> will see in the excerpt I posted, he said; "Natural
> Law makes two 
> separate assertions about the self and its
> ambience". What these 
> amount to (my translation) are 1.) That natural law
> exists; and 2.) 
> That we can perceive and describe aspects of it.
> 
> In my view, and I daresay in my father's as well,
> the so-called "Laws 
> of Physics" are inferential laws, pertaining to the
> models for use in 
> specific applications, and are only laws in that
> sense. If they are 
> not applicable outside of those original
> applications, as in with 
> Biological systems, then they are proving that they
> are not 
> reflections of "Natural Law". Natural Law was what
> he defined as 
> pertaining to both self and ambience: The entailment
> in the universe 
> (causality). Laws of science are our attempts to
> establish congruent 
> modeling relations and are inferential laws of
> entailment. They have 
> been generated by our "models" (whatever those
> models may be, 
> including mental imaging, intuitional
> thoughts/pictures, and 
> assumptions). The Hertzian Condition refers to the
> "encoding" and 
> "decoding" verification processes.
> 
> Does that help?
> 
> Judith
>   ----- Original Message ----- 
>   From: Steve Johnson
>   To: ***
>   Sent: Saturday, December 18, 2004 2:16 PM
>   Subject: [ROSEN] What is Law?
> 
=== message truncated ===



                
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