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Comment by hackinthebochs | Hacker News Reader

Is it intelligible that it might not have been? What would it mean for nature to be inconsistent? What would a universe look like that didn't follow laws?

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Random stuff happening? Pockets of local consistency?

Random stuff happening for no reason with no pattern or constraint runs afloul of the principle of sufficient reason. The PSR is a basic assumption of intelligibility. Events happening with no cause can't be made sense of. Everything that happens is brute in the worst way possible. By the standards of reason, it is maximally unintelligible. We must rationally give higher credence to any other explanation, i.e. an order and law-based universe.

One might say the universe has no obligation to be intelligible to us, and perhaps that true. But we have an obligation to intelligible beliefs. In being able to ask the question of why the world is law-based, we're rationally constrained in the answer we can accept. You can see it as an application of the anthropic principle, but I think it's more basic than that. If there is sense to be made of anything (in a logical sense that is prior to the universe), then the universe must also make sense.

There's no causation line from abstractions such as mathematics to material effects. The fact material conditions follow abstract conditions is a very particular problem and different from the one you aim to solve with your reply.

There is no causal line, but there is a sort of influence, we can call it constraint propagation. The constraints of logical consistency and the rules that follow (e.g. mathematics) constrain the natural world. Logic determines what is possible, the universe is what is actual. The possible is a superset of the actual. Constraints on the possible are constraints on the actual.

Again, there's no apparent connection between logic and mathematical truths and the universe. Moreover, logic and mathematical truths are causally inert: they cannot be a cause to a physical effect.

Yet it appears like all physical effects are following such laws and rules. I.e, there appears to be something that breathes fire into our equations.

Well this will depend on how you conceive of logical and mathematical facts. If you think of them as abstract "objects", you end up with the problem of how abstract objects can influence the world. But if you conceive of logical and mathematical facts as descriptions of states of possible formal systems, i.e. systems that do not contain a contradiction, then there is no problem. The actual world is simply a subset of the possible world; truths derived from investigating what is possible necessarily and obviously apply to the actual as a subset of the possible.

Ok but isn't a formal system also an abstract logical structure? Why are atoms actually following truths from logical systems? The problem remains.

Wigner clearly delineates the problem on his famous paper about the applicability of mathematics. It's still a topic in philosophy to this day. I'm sure you appreciate that if it was a simple solution it wouldn't be a big deal.

Yes, a formal system is a logical structure. The set of all formal systems defines all possible logical structures, i.e. all consistent rule-based systems. So the question of why do atoms follow a logical structure is simply the question of whether it is possible for atoms to not follow a rule-based system. The answer is embedded in the question: atoms are constrained structures, thus to have atoms is to have a rule-based system. More broadly, we can't conceive of a universe not governed by rules on some scale so all our credence should rationally lie with the necessity of a rule-based universe.

>It's still a topic in philosophy to this day. I'm sure you appreciate that if it was a simple solution it wouldn't be a big deal.

The more philosophy I read, the less I appreciate this. It's clear to me that philosophy as an institution is perniciously dominated by the fashion of the day which undermines the idea of philosophical consensus (or lack thereof) as oriented towards truth.

There's no reason for atoms to even exist man. The fact they exist and that they follow a specific rule system that is based off of abstractions is absolutely mind-boggling. Your argument is also inching towards a kind of argument by lack of imagination.

I can imagine a world (maybe not ours) where there are no atoms, just ideas, in God's mind, and the ideas are interacting and are formed by something completely different than atoms. Like our dreams. Are there atoms in dreams? What about a dream of a person that turns into a bird and flies through the emptiness of space and disappears into a mist that starts dreaming of a person.......

So the question still remains and it is still open to discussion even if you insist that any universe must follow a rule-based system. Moreover, that would imply the existence of these rules in a kind of platonic sense. How would they give rise to a universe? This is not as simple as you make it to be, at all.

I think you're mistaken about philosophy; maybe early 20th century philosophy. Right now it seems like there's lots of interesting debates going on. But I'm just an observer.

You can certainly use your imagination to picture a universe unlike anything we've come to understand about our universe. But in doing so you're still engaging with a rule-based system to some degree. "Ideas interacting in God's mind" is still sensible enough that you could communicate the notion to me using words. To be utterly free of rules is to be inconceivable, much less subject to communication. The only way we can begin to gesture towards a system without rules is by way of opposition to rule-based systems. But all of our cognitive tools are useless at getting a hold of the concept, because it by definition eschews penetration by cognitive tools. You may say denying the possibility of such a universe lacks imagination; I say it identifies the limits of imagination as such. The limits of imagination, the limits of conceivability, are the limits of cognitive access and sense-making.

I agree there are a lot of interesting debates going on. I just don't think philosophical consensus has much evidentiary value. Philosophy is the process of turning intuitions into concrete positions on philosophical subject matter. But no one's intuitions are better suited to me than my own. There's no substitute for just doing the work of understanding an idea and weighing the credence for oneself.

I mean that rules could be constantly changing in an ad-hoc manner, in such a way that to an external observer that is not the decision maker, the rules would be chaotic and completely senseless. Like the dream: there's no rule to grasp.

And I don't think it's that far off from our universe: we are likely something akin to a thought in a Mind. Anyways good chat - I think there's a big gap between our understanding of what is possible and what is, and how it can be given it is what we observe.

There probably wouldn't exist any type of inteligent animal to wonder about it, since life and the evolution of life kind of requires chemestry to be a thing.

The anthropic principle doesn't explain why it is, in actuality, intelligible. It's only a constraint on what couldn't be the case given we exist.

It's clearly a much deeper question, given even Wigner wrote a paper about it. He called it a miracle.

Look, ultimately, mathematics is abstract and the physical world is material. The fact that an abstract condition is able to affect material conditions is literally a miracle that can only be explained metaphysically.

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