Glad you find it convincing. :) Fwiw, I think it's only the second best argument for theism with the word "harmony" in the title in a paper co-written by me. Mainly because, in the case of psychophysical harmony, I think it's a bit easier to justify the claim that P(harmony|atheism) is really low, because it's more intuitively clear that a very small proportion of possible psychophysical laws would be harmony-inducing.
Yeah, I agree, I think that psychophysical harmony is slightly more convincing. Though nomological harmony is less vulnerable to a revenge problem. I also think that the two arguments work well together--psychophysical harmony and nomological harmony both rule out bare naturalism, psychophysical harmony rules out alternatives that posit a conscious being of some, but not unlimited goodness and power, and nomological harmony rules out axiarchism and natural teleology, which rely on some set of laws.
It also seems based on the comments here that it will go the way of psychophysical harmony--being ridiculously strong evidence, but only easy to see that if one is a huge philosophy junky, so most will dismiss it with absurd objections like that it's explained away by evolution.
“That’s sort of strange, isn’t it? There are lots of possible laws that would have applied to other stuff that doesn’t exist. For instance, if the laws only applied to bosons, but there weren’t any bosons, the universe would sit around doing nothing.”
What would it even mean for a law that applies to something that doesn’t exist? How would we know if such laws are out there?
A law, on some accounts, just basically tells fundamental stuff what to do. So there could be a law that says “all bosons move” but no bosons to move. This would mean that if there were some bosons they’d move. Additionally, I explain later in the article how even if you think laws just describe the powers of things, the same objection arises.
You ask how we know that there aren’t a bunch of other inert laws. You could posit them but
1) that’s not parsimonious. It makes fundamental reality super complex.
2) if there were we’d expect to notice that new laws apply to new, more complex arrangements of stuff.
Point 1 assumes parsimony in the first place and Point 2 just reduces to "why do we have simple and reductive laws of physics" which is just parsimony again. Parsimony is an argument for God but it isn't nomological harmony. If you ask me, parsimony exists because it's the only mathematically plausible way to predict what kind of universe you'd live in in the same way the Kolmogorov axioms are the only mathematically plausible way probability works.
I think this assumes that a law is somehow outside a thing itself and not due to the properties of the thing itself and it’s relation to its surroundings. Maybe I’m missing something, but, at least intuitively, that doesn’t seem to be what people mean when they talk about laws of nature.
It seems to me though that if we posit a very large rulebook with a very large pile of toys, both more or less at random, the result should be... a multiverse! “Nomologically inert” objects wouldn’t interact with anything and so not be noticed by anybody, while each set of interacting elements would, being causally closed from each other, function as their own world. Each of these worlds would have consistent laws, avoiding the induction problems associated with modal realism. Some would be locally theistic, but most would be stupidly mechanistic.
(I should give this more thought because this seems attractive for higher-value metaphysical questions than atheology! I’ve been long attracted to modal realism but the induction problem has worried me as well.)
I think this addresses the first horn of your lemma: "why would there by harmonious laws leading to a multiverse?" On the conception outlined, the *default* state of a large enough rulebook and large-enough pile (or just large-enough pile of objects with powers) produces a multiverse by default; it would require fine-tuning not to.
Call a rulebook of arbitrary size and toy pile of arbitrary size a "superworld;" in this case a version of modal realism over superworlds would be parsimonious but not lead to induction problems.
"The second solution is ridiculously unparsimonious—it posits a huge number of random, unconnected universes, for no reason."
There might be a perfectly good reason for the multiverse, that we just don't have a good basis for understanding from our vantage point.
The idea of an infinite number of universes with an infinite variation in the physics of each one, to me seems like a WAY simpler possibility than having to explain why there is just one universe that just happens to be 13.7 billion years old, etc. Imagine dumping a bucket of soap into a full bathtub of water... you've created many thousands of new bubbles of varying sizes and shapes, and despite the variation and complexity between them you can explain the whole thing with a very simple action (soap + water). It would be much stranger if this process produced one unitary perfect bubble.
If we could imagine some particular reason for the creation of infinite multiverses (whatever that reason may be - I certainly have no idea - but hey, maybe it's actually something relatively simple!) then our universe with its perfect or near-perfect physics fine-tuning is easy to explain because infinity universes will include plenty (also infinity, actually) that support consciousness.
My immediate thought would be that you could have a sort of plenitudinous platonism approach, but with regards to laws: In every possible universe, there are laws for every possible type of thing, and in every universe (or I guess every universe except the one that has every possible type of thing) there are some laws that are entirely inert and are thus undiscoverable. Maybe our universe *does* have a law for schmangles, and we'd just never know! Of course, a lot of people would say this is extremely unparsimonious, but I'm not so sure - some good arguments against that assumption with regards to plenitudinous platonism in mathematics make me skeptical.
Otherwise, I would just say that I have a deep suspicion of the basic notion that any of these sorts of harmonies really need to be explained. I know that might sound silly to some, but naturalness is plausibly a theoretical virtue, and harmony is really just another word for naturalness in my mind - to say that psychophysical or nomological harmony exists is really just to say that those things behave in ways we would consider natural (in the Huemer-ish sense, not metaphysically naturalist). So I think there's something at least puzzling about the idea that, in any general explanation, the fact that things fit together in the way we'd expect is a virtue, but that the same sort of property transposed onto the nature of the world itself is something crying out for explanation. To me, that's like someone acknowledging simplicity is an explanatory virtue, but also saying theism needs to explain why the foundation of the universe is simple. That seems like something you'd be *excited* to have in your theory, not something you'd need to explain. And I feel broadly the same way here for naturalists and these instances of harmony. Maybe I'll write something longer about this intuition to really work through it, but that's what hits me right away.
Is it though? It strikes me as very natural - maybe a prime candidate for the sort of thing "naturalness" captures! Wouldn't it be weird for there to be laws governing things that don't exist and vice versa? If I think about the concept of a natural law, I just sorta naturally assume the thing it's referring to exists in the universe with that law. And if I think about the concept of a fundamental sort of thing, I just sorta naturally assume there are laws governing it. If I were some sort of dimension-hopping being who could peer into other universes, and I saw one that had laws governing things that don't exist and things existing without laws to govern them, I would immediately want to know what "went wrong!"
1. Power view of laws. Believe there are outs to your objections, but I should possibly revisit this at not-4am.
2. The only info you get from anthropics is "My existence wasn't absolutely prohibited", functionally equivalent to "I think therefore I am", everything else is inference.
3. Complicated feelings about simplicity, is it a pragmatic virtue or epistemic? Or maybe, with physicalist assumptions it's both, but without those priors it's only pragmatic?
4. I'm gonna assume it's because I'm a novice failing to bridge inferential gaps, but I keep recoiling at every instance of "must" and "should" (EDIT: and "would").
Part interpretation part memory, but I think I was reflexively recoiling from "would" and "should" because I hadn't yet evaluated whether I agreed with your framing of the arguments, and I did a poor job phrasing "My intuition disagrees with your arguments, but I'm not that confident in my intuition". For one because I hadn't even tried to precisely evaluate the arguments, and second because I've studied philosophy in a relatively shallow manner and am likely to miss and misapply the standard terminology. More rested now, I'll make another attempt.
Parsing the argument from nomological harmony as saying that non-theism has to select from all possible physical worlds, and when selecting in that fashion, it's unlikely that we exist, and it's unlikely that our laws fit together so well so that they apply to all our universe's stuff.
I think anthropics actually works fine as a counterargument to unlikely existence, that we're not selecting from all physical worlds, we're selecting from the subset of physical worlds that allow us to exist in the first place. It's an existence prior, setting boundary conditions for the universe, ruling out only those conditions that would definitely rule you out, and it's insufficient to give any more info than that. Realizing as I type this that there's some weirdness coming from the frame of reference. I'm thinking that someone else can update on the fertility of my parents based on my birth, but that I can't.
Uh, setting that aside for now, this leaves the issue of the proposed harmony of our existing laws. I'm suspicious of the idea of harmony more generally, compared to equilibrium, but what would we expect if we actually had disharmony? There's the tautologically unobservable inertness, but there's also the idea that there might be laws within our universe that are selectively applied. Seems to me like dark matter is a potential example of that.
We look at the worlds where you exist and conclude you must exist in one of them. But that drastically lowers the probabiltiy of naturalism, for it eliminates almost all possible naturalistic worlds.
The harmony I'm talking about plainly exists--it just denotes that the laws apply to stuff.
I feel like this whole probability thing only applies using physical-ish priors? I suppose the simulation hypothesis makes it seem unlikely that our universe is base reality (assuming such a thing exists), but I'd still expect base reality to be physical-ish.
IDK, I guess the idea that the laws apply to stuff doesn't seem to cry out for explanation to me. The analogy of a rulebook with game pieces evokes intelligent design, but that's just assuming the conclusion.
Also, still curious what you think about the dark matter angle.
Dark matter is still stuff that has laws apply to it!
I think you do bayesian reasoning by looking at the probability of some event conditional on some hypothesis, rather than by baking in a world roughly like ours. A world roughly like ours might need an explanation.
If the vast majority of ways A and B could interact are disharmonious, but they happen to be harmonious, that seems to require explanation.
Sorry for lack of clarity, I was referring to the hypothesis that somehow electromagnetism doesn't apply to dark matter.
I guess it doesn't seem necessarily impossible to me that there could be violations of physicalism, I just can't figure out how to reasonably update on that. Similar to positing a perfect Cartesian demon, or the idea that free will is completely unreal.
Still think anthropics gets us out of inertness, may have to agree to disagree there. As for overall harmony of our universe's laws, I'm less sure.
Why doesn't the Anthropic Principle apply equally to both. [BTW take this not as some kind of counterargument, but just not getting the point, maybe a re-write for the less philosophically sophisticated.]
A first objection appeals to the anthropic principle to explain fine-tuning. If we hadn’t been finely tuned we wouldn’t know about it, so there’s no puzzle that we are fine tuned. But this solution doesn’t work:
If your parents had never met, you wouldn’t be around to wonder about it. Nevertheless, it still might be rational to infer design (say their friends set them up) rather than chance if your parents bumped into each other in lots of extremely unlikely circumstances and were put in a series of extremely improbable situation circumstances that lead to them forming a relationship. For instance, suppose that there were 50 dinner parties each with supposedly random seating and 100 people—if your parents always ended up next to each other, it would be rational to infer the explanation of that was design rather than chance. So too in this case.
Suppose that an entire firing squad shoots at you but all their guns jam. It’s true that if they hadn’t jammed you wouldn’t be around to wonder about it. Nonetheless, this bizarre event seems to cry out for explanation.
It doesn’t follow from “if X hadn’t happened then I wouldn’t know,” that “the fact that X happened doesn’t cry out for explanation.”
This is outside of my expertise, but here's my understanding:
In quantum field theory, particles like quarks are not seen as individual objects, in the traditional sense, but rather as quantized states of energy in their respective fields. Each type of particle is associated with its own field, and what we observe as particles are excitations or disturbances in these fields.
In my understanding, particles are like lumps in the underlying field, meaning they interact because two particles are part of the same underlying field.
If someone versed in physics can step in, I'd be happy
If every particle is at root an excitation of the same underlying field, which is (one plausible outcome of) what physicists mean by a "theory of everything", then you just have one thing. The powers view then just describes the behavior of that one thing, which doesn't interact with anything else, and so has no mystery to explain.
IE, it really seems like nomological harmony is not a problem given physical monism, and the prior for physical monism seems like it should be a lot higher than the one for theism.
Here's my best answer, hope it's correct/meaningful.
I think the distinction between object and action becomes fuzzy in some cases, including this.
The "field" is just a reification of all of its interactions.
It's similar to an ocean wave - is it an object, or water moving in certain patterns? Depends on perspective, the underlying reality is the same no matter if you think of it as movement or entity.
The fact that you can interpret it as either-or is an artefact of your cognition
Certainly. But then you just have "why is there something rather than nothing", "why does the thing that exists do anything", and perhaps "given that we have a thing and it does stuff, what are the chances that the stuff it does would allow complexity and value?"
As I understand it, the argument from nomological harmony requires something like "We have Shmangles with some behavior S and Bangles with some behavior B. Of all possible values for S and B, it's unlikely any given S' and B' reference one another, but ours our harmonious in this way. Therefore views which predict this harmony are preferred"
It being unlikely relies on the some argument like: The number of Shmangle rules that reference bangles is a miniscule fraction of all possible rules, and vice versa for bangles. Since we have no reason to expect any one rule over any other, the expectation of seeing something like what we have is the even tinier product of already tiny probabilities.
But if it's all just one big Shmangle, then we have no reason to think the behavior we do observe is unlikely relative to other behaviors. We still want an explanation for why there is any behavior at all, rather than none. But given that we observe some behavior, this one is as likely as any other on priors, and needs no explanation.
Unless you're saying something like "of all possible rules, few of them have anything whatsoever to do with our mega-shmangle, ergo there's still a puzzling harmony between our universe's rules and its stuff"? If so, I guess I'm very confused about why you find that the most reasonable way to think about the situation. Perhaps I should read the paper.
This assumes that laws are separate and discrete from the objects they act upon, rather than emergent properties innate to matter etc. Why should we think that would be the case? This argument seems totally wrong, and also seems to be pursuing a broadly unproductive route of enquiry
Caught me not finishing the article💀 i still think its unproductive reasoning though. Its like you’re coming to a beach and asking why aren’t there grains of sand the size of refrigerators. It seems fairly unsurprising that elements within a universe are interrelated, whether that universe was created by God or some other hypothetical explanation (though I don’t think theres a good one)
But thats my point, you’re assuming that this is just a probabilistic equation where all possibilities are just neutrally equivalent. I’m saying that it’s not arbitrary that alike elements would be grouped together. I also disagree with the premise that you can apply this kind of logic to things external to our universe. Logic and mathematics don’t seem to extend any further than our universe, so why should we expect arbitrary rules from our universe (or in this case not even a rule just a rational expectation on the basis of a rule!) to be relevant to necessarily external events
There are infinite ways that the powers could be unconnected. You're just brutely asserting it's more probable for no reason. Not sure your point about logic and math.
I’m not brutely asserting it. Imagine you find an area full of dozens furniture stores and almost nothing else. One might assume that would be highly improbable because only a very small fraction of stores are furniture stores. Yet obviously this is wrong because the commonality is self reinforcing. Similarly, it would not be surprising to learn analogous dynamics exist in universe formation or on a more fundamental level of our universe’s building blocks than we have been able to interrogate. The point with regard to logic is simply that if logic is confined to our universe, theres no reason to expect that 1+1=2 or really any logical principle should hold true outside of it, least of all something as far down the chain of logic derivatives as probabilistic expectations. And if it doesn’t hold true out there, the whole argument is moot
What about a Lewisian best-system account of laws (or similar Humean views)? On that account, there couldn’t have been laws that applied to nothing because purported laws that applied to nothing wouldn’t be part of the best system and therefore wouldn’t be laws at all.
Given a Lewisian account of laws of nature, the objection seems to amount to the claim that we could have had a world where physical stuff just doesn’t do anything. But I don’t see why we should assign a high prior credence to that possibility. On the Lewisian account, the scenario you describe, in which shmangles only attract bangles but bangles don’t exist, isn’t a genuine possibility, or at least isn’t genuinely distinct from the possibility that only shmangles exist and they don’t have any causal powers at all. So you don’t get to count those as two distinct scenarios that both count toward the denominator in “number of possible sets of laws and objects where something happens/number of possible sets of laws and objects.”
Keep in mind that I haven’t read the paper you’re discussing, but here’s how I’m thinking about this. Your objection to the powers view seems to operate by arguing that even on the powers view, there are many more ways the world could have had nothing happening than there are ways the world could have had objects and laws that work together to make interesting things happen. Is that how the objection works?
On Lewis’s view, the laws of nature are just (roughly) the set of statements that systematize all *actual* events throughout the whole of spacetime in a way that achieves the best possible tradeoff between simplicity and informativeness. (I’m paraphrasing from memory.) It seems to me that on this account, there’s really only *one* set of laws that could yield a world where nothing happens: the set of laws that say nothing happens, nothing interacts with anything else, etc. You could come up with a more complex set of purported laws that imply that, given the objects that exist, nothing happens (e.g., your shmangle example). But that will be a more complex, but no more informative, system, so it can’t be the actual set of laws on Lewis’s view. So Lewis’s view seems to block the inference that there are many possible sets of laws that could have yielded a world in which nothing happens.
I think multiverses are actually pretty parsimonious. Parsimony isn't about the amount of things there are but the length of the minimum description of the laws of the universe. In this case the multiverse (perhaps something like iterating over every Turing machine) would, in fact, be simpler than specifying any specific universe with a specific arrangement of things.
You might be interested in Solomonoff induction, which I think does a lot to explain why there is nomological harmony.
Right so if you posit just a bunch of unconnected fundamental universes that’s a bad theory. If you make it parsimonious by having it fall out of some set of fundamental laws, then can’t work unless it already assumes an answer to nomological harmony, because such a view requires laws that apply to stuff.
Basically this argument is that something, rather than nothing, exists. Therefore we need an explanation for someting, and the only explanation that plausibly doesn't require further explanation is God (for some reason). Plenty of arguments for and against this have been made. Nothing new.
After all, the existence of "laws" really just means the interaction between things. Why do two things interact, instead of being wholly separate? Whatever interaction tey have is apparantly governed by "laws". So in a world with no laws, presumably either nothing exists, or we are disembodied minds floating in aether who will never contact another being.
So I think there may also be two more problems with this
1. "Laws" exist whenever any two things can interest, as per your definition of laws. But if that's the test, then perhaps there are lots and lots of things. Infinitely many things with random laws. Perhpas every law logically possible is out there among an infinite variety of things. This seems distinct from the existence of god and not entirely implausible. In such a scenario, our specific world would just be one of the infinite arragements of things and laws. We can't interact with infinitely many other things because our laws are distinct. But for the material world, laws do exist!
2. This also seems to be a strong argument for solipsism. After all, the existence of laws can be expleined away by saying that laws are entirely fake hallucinations. This has the advantage of not only avoiding this very strong argument, but *also* avoiding the problem of evil. If the evidence for Theism is so uteerly massive on either side, surely solipsism, which can capture evidence from both sides, is true?
Well, you’re assuming a controversial account of laws. Laws describe the conditions under which things interact. It’s weird that those conditions arise.
1) I address this in response to other comments.
2) this is. However, solipsism is still a terrible view.
I think basically all arguments for God boil down to some variation of the argument from contingency or the principle of sufficient reason.
1. Something is true
2. That thing is either fully self-explanatory, or in need of a deeper explanation
3. The chain of deeper explanations must terminate somewhere in a fully self-explanatory level of reality that gives rise to all the others
4. Let's agree to call that level of reality "God", and proceed to discussing what properties it must have in order to be exempt from the need for deeper explanation.
Glad you find it convincing. :) Fwiw, I think it's only the second best argument for theism with the word "harmony" in the title in a paper co-written by me. Mainly because, in the case of psychophysical harmony, I think it's a bit easier to justify the claim that P(harmony|atheism) is really low, because it's more intuitively clear that a very small proportion of possible psychophysical laws would be harmony-inducing.
Yeah, I agree, I think that psychophysical harmony is slightly more convincing. Though nomological harmony is less vulnerable to a revenge problem. I also think that the two arguments work well together--psychophysical harmony and nomological harmony both rule out bare naturalism, psychophysical harmony rules out alternatives that posit a conscious being of some, but not unlimited goodness and power, and nomological harmony rules out axiarchism and natural teleology, which rely on some set of laws.
It also seems based on the comments here that it will go the way of psychophysical harmony--being ridiculously strong evidence, but only easy to see that if one is a huge philosophy junky, so most will dismiss it with absurd objections like that it's explained away by evolution.
"And yet, it is all one, whether or not I am believed. What does it matter? What is to come, will come."
“That’s sort of strange, isn’t it? There are lots of possible laws that would have applied to other stuff that doesn’t exist. For instance, if the laws only applied to bosons, but there weren’t any bosons, the universe would sit around doing nothing.”
What would it even mean for a law that applies to something that doesn’t exist? How would we know if such laws are out there?
A law, on some accounts, just basically tells fundamental stuff what to do. So there could be a law that says “all bosons move” but no bosons to move. This would mean that if there were some bosons they’d move. Additionally, I explain later in the article how even if you think laws just describe the powers of things, the same objection arises.
You ask how we know that there aren’t a bunch of other inert laws. You could posit them but
1) that’s not parsimonious. It makes fundamental reality super complex.
2) if there were we’d expect to notice that new laws apply to new, more complex arrangements of stuff.
Point 1 assumes parsimony in the first place and Point 2 just reduces to "why do we have simple and reductive laws of physics" which is just parsimony again. Parsimony is an argument for God but it isn't nomological harmony. If you ask me, parsimony exists because it's the only mathematically plausible way to predict what kind of universe you'd live in in the same way the Kolmogorov axioms are the only mathematically plausible way probability works.
1) ???. It assumes parsimony is a virtue, which it is. If you deny that then you have no basis for justifying induction.
2) No. It's that if we had a vast ensemble of laws, you'd expect us to notice.
I think this assumes that a law is somehow outside a thing itself and not due to the properties of the thing itself and it’s relation to its surroundings. Maybe I’m missing something, but, at least intuitively, that doesn’t seem to be what people mean when they talk about laws of nature.
Read the part at the end where I show how the puzzle applies to the view that laws are just summaries of the powers of things.
This is interesting, thanks!
It seems to me though that if we posit a very large rulebook with a very large pile of toys, both more or less at random, the result should be... a multiverse! “Nomologically inert” objects wouldn’t interact with anything and so not be noticed by anybody, while each set of interacting elements would, being causally closed from each other, function as their own world. Each of these worlds would have consistent laws, avoiding the induction problems associated with modal realism. Some would be locally theistic, but most would be stupidly mechanistic.
(I should give this more thought because this seems attractive for higher-value metaphysical questions than atheology! I’ve been long attracted to modal realism but the induction problem has worried me as well.)
What do you make of the arguments I give against a multiverse as a solution?
I think this addresses the first horn of your lemma: "why would there by harmonious laws leading to a multiverse?" On the conception outlined, the *default* state of a large enough rulebook and large-enough pile (or just large-enough pile of objects with powers) produces a multiverse by default; it would require fine-tuning not to.
Call a rulebook of arbitrary size and toy pile of arbitrary size a "superworld;" in this case a version of modal realism over superworlds would be parsimonious but not lead to induction problems.
Why is there an arbitrarily large number of random laws and worlds paired? That’s not parsimonious.
"The second solution is ridiculously unparsimonious—it posits a huge number of random, unconnected universes, for no reason."
There might be a perfectly good reason for the multiverse, that we just don't have a good basis for understanding from our vantage point.
The idea of an infinite number of universes with an infinite variation in the physics of each one, to me seems like a WAY simpler possibility than having to explain why there is just one universe that just happens to be 13.7 billion years old, etc. Imagine dumping a bucket of soap into a full bathtub of water... you've created many thousands of new bubbles of varying sizes and shapes, and despite the variation and complexity between them you can explain the whole thing with a very simple action (soap + water). It would be much stranger if this process produced one unitary perfect bubble.
If we could imagine some particular reason for the creation of infinite multiverses (whatever that reason may be - I certainly have no idea - but hey, maybe it's actually something relatively simple!) then our universe with its perfect or near-perfect physics fine-tuning is easy to explain because infinity universes will include plenty (also infinity, actually) that support consciousness.
My immediate thought would be that you could have a sort of plenitudinous platonism approach, but with regards to laws: In every possible universe, there are laws for every possible type of thing, and in every universe (or I guess every universe except the one that has every possible type of thing) there are some laws that are entirely inert and are thus undiscoverable. Maybe our universe *does* have a law for schmangles, and we'd just never know! Of course, a lot of people would say this is extremely unparsimonious, but I'm not so sure - some good arguments against that assumption with regards to plenitudinous platonism in mathematics make me skeptical.
Otherwise, I would just say that I have a deep suspicion of the basic notion that any of these sorts of harmonies really need to be explained. I know that might sound silly to some, but naturalness is plausibly a theoretical virtue, and harmony is really just another word for naturalness in my mind - to say that psychophysical or nomological harmony exists is really just to say that those things behave in ways we would consider natural (in the Huemer-ish sense, not metaphysically naturalist). So I think there's something at least puzzling about the idea that, in any general explanation, the fact that things fit together in the way we'd expect is a virtue, but that the same sort of property transposed onto the nature of the world itself is something crying out for explanation. To me, that's like someone acknowledging simplicity is an explanatory virtue, but also saying theism needs to explain why the foundation of the universe is simple. That seems like something you'd be *excited* to have in your theory, not something you'd need to explain. And I feel broadly the same way here for naturalists and these instances of harmony. Maybe I'll write something longer about this intuition to really work through it, but that's what hits me right away.
If you have infinite laws then I think that would get mostly anti-indcutive worlds. I also think it's not parsimonious.
Naturalness is a virtue, but this type of harmony isn't naturalness. It's weird and unnatural that they pair together so well!
Is it though? It strikes me as very natural - maybe a prime candidate for the sort of thing "naturalness" captures! Wouldn't it be weird for there to be laws governing things that don't exist and vice versa? If I think about the concept of a natural law, I just sorta naturally assume the thing it's referring to exists in the universe with that law. And if I think about the concept of a fundamental sort of thing, I just sorta naturally assume there are laws governing it. If I were some sort of dimension-hopping being who could peer into other universes, and I saw one that had laws governing things that don't exist and things existing without laws to govern them, I would immediately want to know what "went wrong!"
I don't know what laws are or why we couldn't apply the same motivating principle for positing laws to laws themselves, infinitely.
There are different accounts of laws. Not sure the second part of what you're saying.
Thoughts
1. Power view of laws. Believe there are outs to your objections, but I should possibly revisit this at not-4am.
2. The only info you get from anthropics is "My existence wasn't absolutely prohibited", functionally equivalent to "I think therefore I am", everything else is inference.
3. Complicated feelings about simplicity, is it a pragmatic virtue or epistemic? Or maybe, with physicalist assumptions it's both, but without those priors it's only pragmatic?
4. I'm gonna assume it's because I'm a novice failing to bridge inferential gaps, but I keep recoiling at every instance of "must" and "should" (EDIT: and "would").
2. You get update in favor of views that make your existence more likely (e.g. your parents didn't use birth control).
3. Both. Otherwise we shouldn't trust induction because there can always be other induction undermining laws.
4. Can you give an example?
Part interpretation part memory, but I think I was reflexively recoiling from "would" and "should" because I hadn't yet evaluated whether I agreed with your framing of the arguments, and I did a poor job phrasing "My intuition disagrees with your arguments, but I'm not that confident in my intuition". For one because I hadn't even tried to precisely evaluate the arguments, and second because I've studied philosophy in a relatively shallow manner and am likely to miss and misapply the standard terminology. More rested now, I'll make another attempt.
Parsing the argument from nomological harmony as saying that non-theism has to select from all possible physical worlds, and when selecting in that fashion, it's unlikely that we exist, and it's unlikely that our laws fit together so well so that they apply to all our universe's stuff.
I think anthropics actually works fine as a counterargument to unlikely existence, that we're not selecting from all physical worlds, we're selecting from the subset of physical worlds that allow us to exist in the first place. It's an existence prior, setting boundary conditions for the universe, ruling out only those conditions that would definitely rule you out, and it's insufficient to give any more info than that. Realizing as I type this that there's some weirdness coming from the frame of reference. I'm thinking that someone else can update on the fertility of my parents based on my birth, but that I can't.
Uh, setting that aside for now, this leaves the issue of the proposed harmony of our existing laws. I'm suspicious of the idea of harmony more generally, compared to equilibrium, but what would we expect if we actually had disharmony? There's the tautologically unobservable inertness, but there's also the idea that there might be laws within our universe that are selectively applied. Seems to me like dark matter is a potential example of that.
We look at the worlds where you exist and conclude you must exist in one of them. But that drastically lowers the probabiltiy of naturalism, for it eliminates almost all possible naturalistic worlds.
The harmony I'm talking about plainly exists--it just denotes that the laws apply to stuff.
I feel like this whole probability thing only applies using physical-ish priors? I suppose the simulation hypothesis makes it seem unlikely that our universe is base reality (assuming such a thing exists), but I'd still expect base reality to be physical-ish.
IDK, I guess the idea that the laws apply to stuff doesn't seem to cry out for explanation to me. The analogy of a rulebook with game pieces evokes intelligent design, but that's just assuming the conclusion.
Also, still curious what you think about the dark matter angle.
Dark matter is still stuff that has laws apply to it!
I think you do bayesian reasoning by looking at the probability of some event conditional on some hypothesis, rather than by baking in a world roughly like ours. A world roughly like ours might need an explanation.
If the vast majority of ways A and B could interact are disharmonious, but they happen to be harmonious, that seems to require explanation.
Sorry for lack of clarity, I was referring to the hypothesis that somehow electromagnetism doesn't apply to dark matter.
I guess it doesn't seem necessarily impossible to me that there could be violations of physicalism, I just can't figure out how to reasonably update on that. Similar to positing a perfect Cartesian demon, or the idea that free will is completely unreal.
Still think anthropics gets us out of inertness, may have to agree to disagree there. As for overall harmony of our universe's laws, I'm less sure.
Sounds like the Watchmaker argument. I’m a Christian but never found any of the arguments for or against God’s existence persuasive.
It's a bit similar, but not the same. Why the constants are fine tuned isn't the same as why the laws apply to the stuff that exists.
Why doesn't the Anthropic Principle apply equally to both. [BTW take this not as some kind of counterargument, but just not getting the point, maybe a re-write for the less philosophically sophisticated.]
Here I'll quote an article I wrote elsewhere
A first objection appeals to the anthropic principle to explain fine-tuning. If we hadn’t been finely tuned we wouldn’t know about it, so there’s no puzzle that we are fine tuned. But this solution doesn’t work:
If your parents had never met, you wouldn’t be around to wonder about it. Nevertheless, it still might be rational to infer design (say their friends set them up) rather than chance if your parents bumped into each other in lots of extremely unlikely circumstances and were put in a series of extremely improbable situation circumstances that lead to them forming a relationship. For instance, suppose that there were 50 dinner parties each with supposedly random seating and 100 people—if your parents always ended up next to each other, it would be rational to infer the explanation of that was design rather than chance. So too in this case.
Suppose that an entire firing squad shoots at you but all their guns jam. It’s true that if they hadn’t jammed you wouldn’t be around to wonder about it. Nonetheless, this bizarre event seems to cry out for explanation.
It doesn’t follow from “if X hadn’t happened then I wouldn’t know,” that “the fact that X happened doesn’t cry out for explanation.”
I can see that the Anthropic Principle does not rule out design but it seems to me to make no design possible.
That's not what the arguments point to
OK. Just take my remarks as data about reception.
I'm thinking of the yoneda lemma, that objects and all interactions of objects are isomorphic
Basically, the view that objects have interactions can be replaced with the view that objects are interactions.
An object without interactions seem meaningless from a physics standpoint, similar to invisible dragons
What? Clearly you could have quarks or something that just sit around doing nothing.
This is outside of my expertise, but here's my understanding:
In quantum field theory, particles like quarks are not seen as individual objects, in the traditional sense, but rather as quantized states of energy in their respective fields. Each type of particle is associated with its own field, and what we observe as particles are excitations or disturbances in these fields.
In my understanding, particles are like lumps in the underlying field, meaning they interact because two particles are part of the same underlying field.
If someone versed in physics can step in, I'd be happy
Regardless of what they are, you’ll have stuff doing stuff which is all the argument needs.
If every particle is at root an excitation of the same underlying field, which is (one plausible outcome of) what physicists mean by a "theory of everything", then you just have one thing. The powers view then just describes the behavior of that one thing, which doesn't interact with anything else, and so has no mystery to explain.
IE, it really seems like nomological harmony is not a problem given physical monism, and the prior for physical monism seems like it should be a lot higher than the one for theism.
But that field will exist and do stuff.
Here's my best answer, hope it's correct/meaningful.
I think the distinction between object and action becomes fuzzy in some cases, including this.
The "field" is just a reification of all of its interactions.
It's similar to an ocean wave - is it an object, or water moving in certain patterns? Depends on perspective, the underlying reality is the same no matter if you think of it as movement or entity.
The fact that you can interpret it as either-or is an artefact of your cognition
I don't think that's true of an ocean wave. It exists as water, and then it does stuff.
Certainly. But then you just have "why is there something rather than nothing", "why does the thing that exists do anything", and perhaps "given that we have a thing and it does stuff, what are the chances that the stuff it does would allow complexity and value?"
As I understand it, the argument from nomological harmony requires something like "We have Shmangles with some behavior S and Bangles with some behavior B. Of all possible values for S and B, it's unlikely any given S' and B' reference one another, but ours our harmonious in this way. Therefore views which predict this harmony are preferred"
It being unlikely relies on the some argument like: The number of Shmangle rules that reference bangles is a miniscule fraction of all possible rules, and vice versa for bangles. Since we have no reason to expect any one rule over any other, the expectation of seeing something like what we have is the even tinier product of already tiny probabilities.
But if it's all just one big Shmangle, then we have no reason to think the behavior we do observe is unlikely relative to other behaviors. We still want an explanation for why there is any behavior at all, rather than none. But given that we observe some behavior, this one is as likely as any other on priors, and needs no explanation.
Unless you're saying something like "of all possible rules, few of them have anything whatsoever to do with our mega-shmangle, ergo there's still a puzzling harmony between our universe's rules and its stuff"? If so, I guess I'm very confused about why you find that the most reasonable way to think about the situation. Perhaps I should read the paper.
Even if there's only one thing, most rules won't interact with the things that exist.
This assumes that laws are separate and discrete from the objects they act upon, rather than emergent properties innate to matter etc. Why should we think that would be the case? This argument seems totally wrong, and also seems to be pursuing a broadly unproductive route of enquiry
No, later in the article I show how it applies to a powers view too!
Caught me not finishing the article💀 i still think its unproductive reasoning though. Its like you’re coming to a beach and asking why aren’t there grains of sand the size of refrigerators. It seems fairly unsurprising that elements within a universe are interrelated, whether that universe was created by God or some other hypothetical explanation (though I don’t think theres a good one)
Most possible powers would be unconnected.
But thats my point, you’re assuming that this is just a probabilistic equation where all possibilities are just neutrally equivalent. I’m saying that it’s not arbitrary that alike elements would be grouped together. I also disagree with the premise that you can apply this kind of logic to things external to our universe. Logic and mathematics don’t seem to extend any further than our universe, so why should we expect arbitrary rules from our universe (or in this case not even a rule just a rational expectation on the basis of a rule!) to be relevant to necessarily external events
There are infinite ways that the powers could be unconnected. You're just brutely asserting it's more probable for no reason. Not sure your point about logic and math.
I’m not brutely asserting it. Imagine you find an area full of dozens furniture stores and almost nothing else. One might assume that would be highly improbable because only a very small fraction of stores are furniture stores. Yet obviously this is wrong because the commonality is self reinforcing. Similarly, it would not be surprising to learn analogous dynamics exist in universe formation or on a more fundamental level of our universe’s building blocks than we have been able to interrogate. The point with regard to logic is simply that if logic is confined to our universe, theres no reason to expect that 1+1=2 or really any logical principle should hold true outside of it, least of all something as far down the chain of logic derivatives as probabilistic expectations. And if it doesn’t hold true out there, the whole argument is moot
What about a Lewisian best-system account of laws (or similar Humean views)? On that account, there couldn’t have been laws that applied to nothing because purported laws that applied to nothing wouldn’t be part of the best system and therefore wouldn’t be laws at all.
Then you get the objections to the powers view.
Given a Lewisian account of laws of nature, the objection seems to amount to the claim that we could have had a world where physical stuff just doesn’t do anything. But I don’t see why we should assign a high prior credence to that possibility. On the Lewisian account, the scenario you describe, in which shmangles only attract bangles but bangles don’t exist, isn’t a genuine possibility, or at least isn’t genuinely distinct from the possibility that only shmangles exist and they don’t have any causal powers at all. So you don’t get to count those as two distinct scenarios that both count toward the denominator in “number of possible sets of laws and objects where something happens/number of possible sets of laws and objects.”
Can you explain how it avoids the objections to the powers view? I haven't really looked into Lewis's view.
The paper I read for Lewis’s view is called “Humean Supervenience Debugged,” I think.
Keep in mind that I haven’t read the paper you’re discussing, but here’s how I’m thinking about this. Your objection to the powers view seems to operate by arguing that even on the powers view, there are many more ways the world could have had nothing happening than there are ways the world could have had objects and laws that work together to make interesting things happen. Is that how the objection works?
On Lewis’s view, the laws of nature are just (roughly) the set of statements that systematize all *actual* events throughout the whole of spacetime in a way that achieves the best possible tradeoff between simplicity and informativeness. (I’m paraphrasing from memory.) It seems to me that on this account, there’s really only *one* set of laws that could yield a world where nothing happens: the set of laws that say nothing happens, nothing interacts with anything else, etc. You could come up with a more complex set of purported laws that imply that, given the objects that exist, nothing happens (e.g., your shmangle example). But that will be a more complex, but no more informative, system, so it can’t be the actual set of laws on Lewis’s view. So Lewis’s view seems to block the inference that there are many possible sets of laws that could have yielded a world in which nothing happens.
Oh I think they have other objections to a view like that.
One of those situations where I just need to go read the paper.
I think multiverses are actually pretty parsimonious. Parsimony isn't about the amount of things there are but the length of the minimum description of the laws of the universe. In this case the multiverse (perhaps something like iterating over every Turing machine) would, in fact, be simpler than specifying any specific universe with a specific arrangement of things.
You might be interested in Solomonoff induction, which I think does a lot to explain why there is nomological harmony.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Kyc5dFDzBg4WccrbK/an-intuitive-explanation-of-solomonoff-induction
I'm interested in hearing more from you about anthropics.
Right so if you posit just a bunch of unconnected fundamental universes that’s a bad theory. If you make it parsimonious by having it fall out of some set of fundamental laws, then can’t work unless it already assumes an answer to nomological harmony, because such a view requires laws that apply to stuff.
Basically this argument is that something, rather than nothing, exists. Therefore we need an explanation for someting, and the only explanation that plausibly doesn't require further explanation is God (for some reason). Plenty of arguments for and against this have been made. Nothing new.
After all, the existence of "laws" really just means the interaction between things. Why do two things interact, instead of being wholly separate? Whatever interaction tey have is apparantly governed by "laws". So in a world with no laws, presumably either nothing exists, or we are disembodied minds floating in aether who will never contact another being.
So I think there may also be two more problems with this
1. "Laws" exist whenever any two things can interest, as per your definition of laws. But if that's the test, then perhaps there are lots and lots of things. Infinitely many things with random laws. Perhpas every law logically possible is out there among an infinite variety of things. This seems distinct from the existence of god and not entirely implausible. In such a scenario, our specific world would just be one of the infinite arragements of things and laws. We can't interact with infinitely many other things because our laws are distinct. But for the material world, laws do exist!
2. This also seems to be a strong argument for solipsism. After all, the existence of laws can be expleined away by saying that laws are entirely fake hallucinations. This has the advantage of not only avoiding this very strong argument, but *also* avoiding the problem of evil. If the evidence for Theism is so uteerly massive on either side, surely solipsism, which can capture evidence from both sides, is true?
Well, you’re assuming a controversial account of laws. Laws describe the conditions under which things interact. It’s weird that those conditions arise.
1) I address this in response to other comments.
2) this is. However, solipsism is still a terrible view.
I think basically all arguments for God boil down to some variation of the argument from contingency or the principle of sufficient reason.
1. Something is true
2. That thing is either fully self-explanatory, or in need of a deeper explanation
3. The chain of deeper explanations must terminate somewhere in a fully self-explanatory level of reality that gives rise to all the others
4. Let's agree to call that level of reality "God", and proceed to discussing what properties it must have in order to be exempt from the need for deeper explanation.
5. Those are the properties of God
That it made the harmonies. It has to have some power, and be simple, for that reason. Otherwise no.