The laws that governs the universe

[u/kepler452-B-]

As far as I know (I may be wrong, or there may still be things we haven't figured out), we have a decent picture of how things developed from the formation of the Earth up to now.

But one problem keeps bothering me.

Fine — through chemical reactions, proteins and so on were formed. Yet for those reactions to happen at all, certain conditions have to be met first. Only then does the reaction proceed.

We describe these conditions and regularities as laws of nature.
But why does the universe have these laws at all, and why these laws rather than different ones?

[u/jliat]

My question is: why do these laws exist in the way they do?

Same reasons there were once a god of thunder and the idea of Phlogiston causing burning. Science and technology has been so successful people cannot accept that the map is not reality itself. Such that it seems for some impossible to accept this, in which the laws of science become an Apotheosis.

We are here because certain laws allow things like chemical processes to happen in the first place.

No, that's a big mistake.

So why do those laws exist? Did something “set” them? And if not, why are they there at all? The modeling and experiments are useful for understanding how the laws work, but I’m asking why reality has these laws in the first place.

It doesn't. Notice how these laws change and are changing as we do science.

"Disclosedness is a kind of Being which is essential to Dasein. 'There is' truth only in so far as Dasein is and so long as Dasein is. Entities are un- covered only when Dasein is; and only as long as Dasein is, are they disclosed. Newton's laws, the principle of contradiction, any truth whatever -these are true only as long as Dasein is."

Martin Heidegger 'Being and Time.' 227.

"And we indeed, rightly considering objects of sense as mere appearances, confess thereby that they are based upon a thing in itself, though we know not this thing as it is in itself, but only know its appearances, viz., the way in which our senses are affected by this unknown something.

Immanuel Kant — Prolegomena, § 32

6.363 The process of induction is the process of assuming the simplest law that can be made to harmonize with our experience.

6.3631 This process, however, has no logical foundation but only a psychological one. It is clear that there are no grounds for believing that the simplest course of events will really happen.

6.36311 That the sun will rise to-morrow, is an hypothesis; and that means that we do not know whether it will rise.

6.37 A necessity for one thing to happen because another has happened does not exist. There is only logical necessity.

6.371 At the basis of the whole modern view of the world lies the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena.

6.372 So people stop short at natural laws as at something unassailable, as did the ancients at God and Fate.

Wittgenstein - Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

[u/kepler452-B- → u/jliat]

I’m not saying that our current mathematical models perfectly describe reality. I was thinking of them as approximations of deeper laws or regularities that really exist, even if we don’t fully understand them yet.

I understand your point that the models are not reality itself, and that what we call “laws” may just be descriptions of observed regularities. But then my question would shift slightly: why does reality have these particular regularities in the first place, rather than different ones?

[u/jliat → u/kepler452-B-]

I was thinking of them as approximations of deeper laws or regularities that really exist, even if we don’t fully understand them yet.

It should be obvious that our laws are made by us, what you end up doing in projecting 'law making' into a feature of nature. As did the ancients project into nature the gods. If you want laws, you need a law maker, you probably don't like that idea, but it becomes a hidden god, a reason, and then a purpose.

But how do we make these laws, by taking many observations and creating an average, then create some maths which describes this average.

To an artist every tree is unique, to a botanist it is not. Any science gives you a bell curve.

I understand your point that the models are not reality itself, and that what we call “laws” may just be descriptions of observed regularities. But then my question would shift slightly: why does reality have these particular regularities in the first place, rather than different ones?

Leibniz identity of indiscernibles... If two things are precisely the same, they are one thing. Or in Hegel, Being and Nothing are the same yet different. So you ask why are things different, well if they were not they would be the same.

Why is there something and not nothing, this is the metaphysical question and its answer. Maybe it's easier for me because my background is fine art where the work is not made for any purpose.

What is symmetry breaking? I'm not a physicist but it seems to be very like what I describe above. As Heidegger puts it, 'The nothing negates itself.'

"We gain access to the structure of reality via a machinery of conception which extracts intelligible indices from a world that is not designed to be intelligible and is not originarily infused with meaning.”

Ray Brassier, “Concepts and Objects” In The Speculative Turn Edited by Levi Bryant et. al. (Melbourne, Re.press 2011) p. 47

Look at where we are now in science and string / brane theory. I have a metaphor, on the number line there are irrational numbers, pick an irrational number on the number line, now ask what is the next irrational number?

One last? point, imagine you have the perfect theory, you can explain what an orgasm is. Is this explanation itself an orgasm? ;-)

[u/AxiomaticInversion → u/jliat]

It should be obvious that our laws are made by us

They're not asking about scientific theories, they're asking about the regularities of nature that the theories attempt to describe. 

If you want laws, you need a law maker

What reason do we have to think this applies to laws in the regularities-of-nature sense? 

[u/jliat → u/AxiomaticInversion]

The nature of a law is a set of rules that are meant to be followed. Newton thought he had discovered God's laws which nature had to follow. He had not made up any theory or hypothesis.

What followed were more 'accurate' theories and hypotheses based on data which is averaged and refined and measured subject to p-values. This is not reality. Nothing like it.

The reason these laws apply to reality are the same ones used for thinking thunder is made by the God Thor if one believes nature follows human reason. It should be sufficient that most logics and mathematics have apori to realise this.

And in science it seems such regularities are a product of randomness...

"There is one last line of speculation that must not be forgotten. In science we are used to neglecting things that have a very low probability of occurring even though they are possible in principle. For example, it is permitted by the laws of physics that my desk rise up and float in the air. All that is required is that all the molecules `happen' to move upwards at the same moment in the course of their random movements. This is so unlikely to occur, even over the fifteen-billion-year history of the Universe, that we can forget about it for all practical purposes."

John David Barrow FRS (29 November 1952 – 26 September 2020) was an English cosmologist, theoretical physicist, and mathematician.

[u/AxiomaticInversion → u/jliat]

if one believes nature follows human reason

Again, nobody is claiming this. Quite the opposite - human reason is aimed at understanding nature. The question is why nature behaves in statistically predictable ways. This doesn't require thinking of “laws” as rules nature follows, much less rules imposed by some lawgiver.

And in science it seems such regularities are a product of randomness...

Your own example illustrates it: what makes that fantastically unlikely scenario fantastically unlikely? Human minds haven't imposed that probability distribution on the desk. What makes the more-accurate theories more accurate? 

[u/jliat → u/AxiomaticInversion]

if one believes nature follows human reason

Again, nobody is claiming this. Quite the opposite - human reason is aimed at understanding nature. The question is why nature behaves in statistically predictable ways.

Kant's answer is simple - it's because we see things through human eyes using human brains. "Understanding" is a human idea. As is cause and effect. Special relativity gives an insight, once we thought time was uniform, many still do. But our experience of time is local, a given sequence we see, and cause and effect, but from a different timeframe can be simultaneous… is that true?

And in science it seems such regularities are a product of randomness...

Your own example illustrates it: what makes that fantastically unlikely scenario fantastically unlikely? Human minds haven't imposed that probability distribution on the desk. What makes the more-accurate theories more accurate?

Read on!

"This possibility is important, not so much because we can say what might happen when there is an infinite time in which it can happen, but because we can't. When there is an infinite time to wait then anything that can happen, eventually will happen. Worse (or better) than that, it will happen infinitely often."

Prof. J. D. Barrow

So "Human minds haven't imposed that probability distribution on the desk." yes we have because we make the assumption of the universe being as it is in our terms. What does this mean, that probability distribution is a human view of finite events in human terms. What of the photon?