From: Lee Daniel Crocker (lee@piclab.com)
Date: Tue Jan 14 2003 - 12:08:41 MST
> So, "intuitively" I don't feel the presence of any natural
> laws (outside physics). I guess I never have.
One can be scientifically rigorous without being pathologically
reductionist.
Even in physics one can often aggregate and simplify and apply
"laws" to complex systems that are useful even though they may or
may not have direct physical existence in waves and particles.
In designing aircraft, for example, we have formulas for things
like lift and drag which are really just shortcut ways of
describing the aggregate behavior of lots of individual air
molecules bouncing off lots of metal molecules, all mediated by
electromagnetic forces. But actually describing the behavior of
every molecule would be silly--lift and drag formulas work well,
and enable us to accomplish more with less work. Even something
as simple as Boyle's law of gases is really just a shortcut for
the ways gas molecules behave in the aggregate.
Speaking of "natural laws" of human behavior is no different,
really. Human brains are connected in ways we can observe, and
high-level behaviors have high-level consequences we can observe,
and we can generalize which of those behaviors lead to results we
favor. "Natural rights" is just a convenient notation, and is
no more (and no less) "fictional" than lift or boiling points.
-- Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/> "All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past, are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC
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