Quote:
Originally Posted by Anthony
I'm not sure why you're stuck on the problem of agency. Yes, there is no agent that is enforcing those laws, but the fact remains, if you try to break them, you will fail.
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A. There can be limits on something's actions other than imposed restrictions. I can't fly by flapping my arms, but that's not because some external force is holding me down.
B. There are people who argue, entirely seriously, that natural law is imposed by an external agency. This shows up, for example, in people who say that science presupposes God because if there were no God there would be nothing to make the universe orderly—but the universe is orderly, ergo, God. That is, they infer from natural law to a natural lawgiver.
C. More abstractly, a natural law in the human mind is a proposition.
The energy of the world is constant. Objects attract each other with a force directly proportional to the product of their masses. Whatever can go wrong, will. This invites the supposition that natural laws in the physical world are also propositions, and that they are stored in a mind or some other information medium. That way lies Plato.
C'. Or, more recently, that way lies the idea that because the orbit of an asteroid can be modeled by an electronic device that performs computations, the asteroid itself is performing computations to decide how to orbit.
A'. In point of fact, an entity whose nature did not impose any restrictions on what it could do would be omnipotent. That is, it would have an infinite power of action. But what we mean by "nature" is the set of all entities that have finite powers of action and thus in principle are predictable.
Bill Stoddard