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Comment by ericmay | Hacker News Reader

> “It leads to a new philosophy of physics that rejects the idea that the universe is a machine governed by unconditional laws with a prior existence, and replaces it with a view of the universe as a kind of self-organising entity in which all sorts of emergent patterns appear, the most general of which we call the laws of physics.”

Very interesting - granted this may be the wrong interpretation but I am very interested in the idea of application of evolutionary process to physical phenomena. Why shouldn’t or why couldn’t so-called natural “laws” face competitive pressure the same way organisms on earth do? Just particles after all. Maybe Darwin had the grand theory all along.

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Is this distinction as meaningful as it first seems; my assumption was that all 'laws of physics' are in essence only ever an expression of our current best understanding of these observed 'generalised patterns'?

By talking about the 'laws', it's easy to start treating these as though they are firm, a-priori rules, but my assumption was that - to physicists - these were always simply a short-cut way of describing a set of common, repeated and testable observations about the universe. Iow they were never 'rules' in the sense that they existed independent of the phenomena they were describing? I'm not a scientist, btw.

I think you're right w.r.t laws.

From reading the article this morning I hadn't thought of something like "there sure is a lot of carbon in the universe as far as we know" in terms of natural selection.

But maybe it's circular where "evolution" as it was originally used to describe biological systems/organisms on earth is just a way of describing changes in the universe but locally and specific as well. In other words, Evolution may be the Grand Theory of describing how the universe works and perhaps observing a black hole is akin to observing how elephants behave.

Although as someone else has pointed out here, maybe that theory is bunk too. [1]

> I'm not a scientist, btw.

Same here. I also have not yet had coffee this morning ;)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35218567

There would have to be an underlying mechanism that determines which laws out compete the others. The "environment" upon which the rest must adapt. Ultimately, you'd still have "laws," itd just be a layer up, as far as I can tell.

That’s where the anthropic principle comes in; the configurations of laws which lead to the emergence of observers (in our case, humans), are the ones which get observed. We simply cannot see the “failing” configurations, because we didn’t exist in those branches!

I always thought Rupert Sheldrake was a lot less wrong than the impression given by his critics, though he's certainly become an utter crank focusing on dubious "telepathy" experiments and attacking the "orthodoxy" to the point where he's impossible to take seriously now.

His thinking around the 80s and early 90s was onto something I think, even if he largery missed the mark when it came down to the details of his theory.

I really liked Rupert Sheldrake's ideas and most importantly, they were able to be tested.

https://www.moillusions.com/bbc-experiment-optical-illusion/

He may have been wrong, but he was wrong in the right way.

They should. However that doesn't mean we should spend a lot of time entertaining theories with no opportunity for evidence.

Who says there isn't? It can start with an imaginative hunch, and after a hundred or more years we finally get some evidence.

What they propose sounds an awful lot like systems theory to me

Lee Smolin suggested https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_natural_selection But that specific hypothesis doesn't seem to match our universe anyway.

Universal Darwinism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Darwinism

> Why shouldn’t or why couldn’t so-called natural “laws” face competitive pressure the same way organisms on earth do?

What would they compete over? What would the mechanisms of mutation and of selection be?

This also would seem to assume that time has to be fundamental and cannot be emergent, for the evolution of laws to happen over time.

One example of selection is a matter dominance over antimatter. Standard model shows many heavier muons and fermions are unstable yet in different conditions these might be dominant.

Obviously from our observed laws perspective we can find (we did not yet) reasons for such preferences yet changing conditions (time, matter density, energy, velocity, gravity) can potentially influence preferred laws and states of matter. Think of superconductivity, how is it even possible that there is no resistance in electron flow, we only make use of this phenomena without understanding the theory behind it.

I am looking forward for the book, just a tiny glympse of different perspective can influence a series of new inventions.

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