Even the so-called laws of nature are themselves little more than islands of relative stability in a sea of process.
“The salient idea of process philosophy is that the world consists of—and must, in consequence, be understood in terms of—changes rather than fixed stabilities. But from the time of Pythagoras, various philosophers have taught that while the world’s phenomena may be ever-changing, the laws that govern the comportment of these changes are stable and fixed once and for all. Following the lead of C. S. Peirce, process metaphysics firmly rejects this contention. As it sees the matter, process invades the world’s law-structure as well; the laws of nature, too, are merely transitory stabilities that emerge at one phase of cosmic history only to lapse from creation and give way to variant modes of operation in the fullness of time. And so, not only do the worlds phenomena change but so do the natural laws that govern their modus operandi. On this perspective, the world’s only pervasive permanence is change itself. Even the so-called laws of nature are themselves little more than islands of relative stability in a sea of process.
Such a processual view of natural law has important advantages. For a substance ontology is committed to seeing the physical world (nature) as a collection of substantial things or objects. And on this basis, it immediately faces the additional and vexing problem of accounting for the laws that coordinate the behavior of its things. (How do all the hydrogen atoms there are scattered through the vastness of space learn how to behave like hydrogen atoms?) As substance philosophy has it, substances emerge under the aegis of laws (and thus have a natural explanation), but the laws are ever-fixed and given in ways that exclude any genetic account and allow only the stonewalling explanation: “That’s just the way it is.” No natural explanation of physical lawfulness is available on such an approach; its only—and by tradition familiar—resort is to some extra- or supranatural agency to impose lawfulness on the substances that are supposed to constitute nature.
But by seeing the world as a matrix of process (and indeed often self-implicating process) we secure straightaway a coherent conceptualization of nature in a way that removes such difficulties. For the idea of lawful order, of programmed development, is inherent in the very concept of a process. Moreover, processes concatenate and propagate—the diffusion of processes is itself a process. The ontology of lawfulness is thus provided for. And a basis is laid for its epistemology as well. For it is only natural and to be expected that intelligent creatures should be in a position to understand the world’s processes in some measure, seeing that they themselves are a nature-internal party to them, in that they participate in the operations of nature by virtue of being component elements thereof.”
The above quote comes from Nicholas Rescher’s book Process Metaphysics: An Introduction to Process Philosophy. It’s a great introduction to process philosophy because Rescher addresses not only the philosophy of Whitehead, but other process thinkers such as C. S. Peirce, Leibniz et al.
This discussion about natural law is relevant for me because I don’t have to try too hard to find people who still think laws are essentially eternal decrees handed down from a transcendent deity on high. For example, take the recent article written by libertarian Chris Rossini in which he aims to criticize one of Bernie Sanders’ socialist economic positions. Rossini’s preposterously narrow economic analysis aside, his most telling (and egregious) metaphysical assumption is found at the end of the article when he writes: “Man cannot override economic laws.” This is a clear case of substance metaphysics at work. We’re governed by economic laws imposed upon us from the outside.
This is truly horrifying to think about. God help us if we can’t change the “economic laws” that we set-up ourselves.
Conversely, in concordance with Resher above, I understand laws process-relationally. There is no static, given order. Every law or structure emerges in time through the organisms which establish them by mutual participation, creating a statistical regularity. Just like societies of humans establish laws and agree to abide by them (and subsequently change them), this is how the “laws of physics/nature” work as well.
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Sculpture above by Tony Cragg.
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