Hodgkin and Huxley’s model of the action potential is an apparent dream case of covering‐law explanation in biology. The model includes laws of physics and chemistry that, coupled with details about antecedent and background conditions, can be used to derive features of the action potential. Hodgkin and Huxley insist that their model is not an explanation. This suggests either that subsuming a phenomenon under physical laws is insufficient to explain it or that Hodgkin and Huxley were wrong. I defend (...) Hodgkin and Huxley against Weber’s heteronomy thesis and argue that explanations are descriptions of mechanisms. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Philosophy, Philosophy‐Neuroscience‐Psychology Program, Washington University in St. Louis, One Brookings Drive, Wilson Hall, St. Louis, MO 63130; e‐mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

The law of gravitation, an example of physical law The relation of mathematics to physics The great conservation principles Symmetry in physical law The distinction of past and future Probability and uncertainty: the quantum mechanical view of nature Seeking new laws.

We investigate the way physical laws objectively refer to the entities they are about. Laws of mathematical physics do not refer directly to the “real world” but to an ideal specific domain of objects, which we term “scope”. In order to find out which real objects physical laws deal with, reference to the scope is not sufficient. We need in addition the search for domains to which laws apply — i. e. “empirical domains”— in order to establish their (...) reference to the “real world”. It is just in such empirical domains that we are able to discover the real entities physical laws objectively refer to. “Physical reality” turns out to be not something “given” but rather something “to come out” of the very process of scientific inquiry. (shrink)

Physical laws are strikingly simple, although there is no a priori reason they must be so. I propose that nomic realists of all types (Humeans and non-Humeans) should accept that simplicity is a fundamental epistemic guide for discovering and evaluating candidate physical laws. This principle of simplicity clarifies and addresses several problems of nomic realism and simplicity. A consequence is that the oft-cited epistemic advantage of Humeanism over non-Humeanism disappears, undercutting an influential epistemological argument for Humeanism. Moreover, simplicity (...) is shown to be more tightly connected to lawhood than to mere truth. (shrink)

The Concept of Physical Law is an original and creative defense of the Regularity theory of physical law, the concept that physical laws are nothing more than descriptions of whatever universal truths happen to be instanced in nature. Professor Swartz clearly identifies and analyzes the arguments and intuitions of the opposing Necessitarian theory, and argues that the standard objection to the Regularity theory turns on a mistaken view of what Regularists mean by 'physical impossibility'; that it (...) is impossible to construct an empirical test that can distinguish between events Necessitarians call 'mere accidents' and those they call 'nornologically necessary', and that the Necessitarian theory cannot account fot human beings' free wills. Other topics in this important work include: the distinction between instrumental scientific laws and true physical laws; the distinction between failure and doom; potentialities; miracles and marvels; predictability and uniformity; statistical and numerical laws; and necessity-in-praxis. (shrink)

The concept of free will is central to our lives, as we make day-to-day decisions, and to our culture, in our ethical and legal systems. The very concept implies that what we choose can produce a change in our physical environment, whether by pressing a switch to turn out electric lights or choosing a long-term plan of action which can affect many people. Yet volition is not a part of presently known physical laws and it is not even (...) known whether it exists -- no physics experiments have ever established its presence. The purpose of this article is to make two points: first, that free will cannot be accounted for by presently known physical laws and second, that if free will exists, any description of its effects in the physical world would necessarily constitute a radical addition to presently known physical laws. (shrink)

I propose and motivate a new account of fundamental physical laws, the Measurability Account of Laws (MAL). This account has a distinctive logical form, in that it takes the primary nomological concept to be that of a law relative to a given theory, and defines a law simpliciter as a law relative to some true theory. What makes a proposition a law relative to a theory is that it plays an indispensable role in demonstrating that some quantity posited by (...) that theory is measurable. In Section 1, I motivate the project of seeking a philosophical account of fundamental physical laws, as opposed to laws of nature in general. In Section 2, I motivate seeking an account with the distinctive logical form of the MAL. In Section 3, I present the MAL and illustrate the way it works by applying it to a simple example. (shrink)

This paper argues that nonphysical souls would violate fundamental physical laws if they were able to influence brain events. Though we have no idea how nonphysical souls might operate, we know quite a bit about how brains work, so we can consider each of the ways that an external force could interrupt brain processes enough to control one’s body. It concludes that there is no way that a nonphysical soul could interact with the brain—neither by introducing new energy into (...) the physical world, nor by borrowing existing energy from it—without apparently violating one or more basic laws of physics, such as the law of conservation of energy. And despite widespread appeals to quantum mechanics to give interactionism an air of scientific respectability, the essential randomness of quantum processes prohibits the distinctly nonrandom influence that a nonphysical soul must have on brain events in order to control the body, and quantum mechanical uncertainty is not great enough to allow neurons to fire action potentials. -/- 1. Introduction -- 2. How the Brain Works -- 3. Mind-Brain Interaction Mechanisms - 3.1 Opening Sodium Channels - 3.2 Altering Voltage Gradients - 3.3 Synaptic Transmission - 3.3.1 The Presynaptic Neuron - 3.3.2 The Post-Synaptic Neuron - 3.3.3 The Beck and Eccles Models - 3.4 Neuronal Modulation - 3.5 Self-Generation of Action Potentials by Neurons -- 4. Harnessing Energy -- 5. How Many Action Potentials for a Volitional Act? -- 6. Input: From Brain to Nonphysical Mind -- 7. Discussion -- Appendix A: Opening Gates on Membrane Channels - A.1 Directly Opening Gates - A.2 Changing Voltage Across the Membrane -- Appendix B: The Biochemical Approach. (shrink)

Consider the claims that representations of physical laws are intersubjective, and that they ultimately provide the foundation for all other intersubjective knowledge. Those claims, as well as the deeper philosophical commitments that justify them, constitute rare points of agreement between the Marburg School neo-Kantians Paul Natorp and Ernst Cassirer and their positivist rival, Ernst Mach. This is surprising, since Natorp and Cassirer are both often at pains to distinguish their theories of natural scientific knowledge from positivist views like Mach’s, (...) and often from Mach’s views in particular. Thus the very fact of this agreement between the Marburg School neo-Kantians and their positivist stalking horse points to a deep current of ideas that runs beneath the whole of the post-Kantian intellectual context they shared. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to explain the sense in which laws of physics are contingent. It argues, first, that contemporary Humean accounts cannot adequately explain the contingency of physical laws; and second, that Hume’s own arguments against the metaphysical necessity of causal connections are not applicable in this context. The paper concludes by arguing that contingency is an essentially emergent, macroscopic phenomenon: we can understand the contingency of fundamental physical laws only through their relation to the (...) distribution of macroscopic modal properties in the manifest world. (shrink)

o an outsider, nothing might seem more ridiculous than the spectacle of grown men and women sitting around a conference table soberly discussing what would happen if a volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica were dropped down a black hole. Yet this very question lies at the heart of the "information paradox," a seeming contradiction to the laws of physics that is causing scientists to re-examine some of their most basic assumptions about how the universe is made.

The question of whether there are laws in ecology is important for a number of reasons. If, as some have suggested, there are no ecological laws, this would seem to distinguish ecology from other branches of science, such as physics. It could also make a difference to the methodology of ecology. If there are no laws to be discovered, ecologists would seem to be in the business of merely supplying a suite of useful models. These models would need to be (...) assessed for their empirical adequacy but not for their ability to capture fundamental truths, or the like. If, on the other hand, ecology does have laws, this prompts further questions about what these laws are and why even the best candidates for ecological laws fall short of what might be expected of laws. (shrink)

Abstract Intentional mental states have causes and effects. Davidson has shown that this fact alone does not entail the existence of psycho?physical laws, but his anomalism makes the connection between the content and causation of intentional states utterly mysterious. By defining intentional states in terms of their causes and effects, functionalism promises to explain this connection. If intentional states have their causes and effects in virtue of their contents, then there must be intrinsic states (of the people who have (...) them) which are ?local causal surrogates? for the propositions believed, desired, or whatever. We can define these intrinsic states in terms of the laws that govern them, but these laws alone are not sufficient to account for intentional content. To do that we need to invoke laws which link these intrinsic states with their contents. Such a ?wide? functional account is sketched; it combines a suggestion of Ramsey's about truth conditions with a ?feedback? account of the content of desires. (shrink)

Contrasting accounts of physicalism and strong emergentism face two problems. According to the neutrality problem, contrasting supervenience-based formulations of these positions cannot be neutral with respect to certain unrelated metaphysical commitments. According to the collapse problem, emergent properties can be accounted for using an appropriately expansive physical ontology, rendering strong emergentism metaphysically suspect. I argue that both these problems can be solved with a principled distinction between emergent causal laws and physical laws. I propose such a distinction based (...) on a finite discontinuity in the behavior of fundamental physical constituents as a function of complexity. (shrink)

BACON.3 is a production system that discovers empirical laws. Although it does not attempt to model the human discovery process in detail, it incorporates some general heuristics that can lead to discovery in a number of domains. The main heuristics detect constancies and trends in data, and lead to the formulation of hypotheses and the definition of theoretical terms. Rather than making a hard distinction between data and hypotheses, the program represents information at varying levels of description. The lowest levels (...) correspond to direct observations, while the highest correspond to hypotheses that explain everything so for observed. To take advantage of this representation, BACON.3 has the ability to carry out and relate multiple experiments, collapse hypotheses with identical conditions, ignore differences to let similar concepts be treated as equal, and to discover and ignore irrelevant variables. BACON.3 has shown its generality by rediscovering versions of the ideal gas law, Kepler's third law of planetary motion, Coulomb's law, Ohm's law, and Galileo's laws for the pendulum and constant acceleration. (shrink)

According to the great discovery by e. noether in 1918 there exists an intrinsic connection between the mathematical symmetries of the laws of nature and the conservation laws. the two kinds of symmetries, namely the continuous and the discrete ones, are discussed. the physical background of these symmetries is illustrated. finally, we sketch some topical conservation problems in elementary particle physics.

This paper focuses on Leibniz’s conception of modality and its application to the issue of natural laws. The core of Leibniz’s investigation of the modality of natural laws lays in the distinction between necessary, geometrical laws on the one hand, and contingent, physical laws of nature on the other. For Leibniz, the contingency of physical laws entailed the assumption of the existence of an additional form of causality beyond mechanical or efficient ones. While geometrical truths, being necessary, do (...) not require the use of the principle of sufficient reason, physical laws are not strictly determined by geometry and therefore are logically distinct from geometrical laws. As a consequence, the set of laws that regulate the physical laws could have been created otherwise by God. However, in addition to this, the contingency of natural laws does not consist only in the fact that God has chosen them over other possible ones. On the contrary, Leibniz understood the status of natural laws as arising from the action internal to physical substances. Hence the actuality of physical laws results from a causal power that is inherent to substances rather than being the mere consequence of the way God arranged the relations between physical objects. Focusing on three instances of Leibniz’s treatment of contingency in physics, this paper argues that, in order to account for the contingency of physical laws, Leibniz maintained that final causes, in addition to efficient and mechanical ones, must operate in physical processes and operations. (shrink)

A model is presented to show how the existence of physical law could be a reasonable consequence of Divine Immanence in the world of natural phenomena. Divine Immanence is seen as the continual production of the principal causes or dispositions which enable created things to act and change. It..

We review studies on catching that reveal internalization of physics for action control. In catching free-falling balls, an internal model of gravity is used by the brain to time anticipatory muscle activation, modulation of reflex responses, and tuning of limb impedance. An internal model of the expected momentum of the ball at impact is used to scale the amplitude of anticipatory muscle activity. [Barlow; Hecht; Shepard].

Laws of mechanics, quantum mechanics, electromagnetism, gravitation and relativity are derived as “related mathematical identities” based solely on the existence of a joint probability distribution for the position and velocity of a particle moving on a Riemannian manifold. This probability formalism is necessary because continuous variables are not precisely observable. These demonstrations explain why these laws must have the forms previously discovered through experiment and empirical deduction. Indeed, the very existence of electric, magnetic and gravitational fields is predicted by these (...) purely mathematical constructions. Furthermore these constructions incorporate gravitation into special relativity theory and provide corrected definitions for coordinate time and proper time. These constructions then provide new insight into the relationship between manifold geometry and gravitation and present an alternative to Einstein’s general relativity theory. (shrink)

I argue that although in his earlier work descartes thought of the laws of motion as "eternal truths," he later came to think of them as truths whose necessity is of a different type.

We advance a framework for an inferential conception of physical laws, addressing the problem of the application of mathematical structures to the relevant structure of physical domains. Physical laws, we argue, express generalizations that work as rules for deriving physically informative inferences about their target systems, hence guiding us in our interaction with various domains. Our analysis of the application of mathematics to the articulation of physical laws follows a threefold scheme. First, we examine the immersion (...) of the relevant structure of physical domains into mathematical structures. Second, we assess the inferential power of laws resulting from the mathematical formalism employed in the immersion step. And third, we provide a suitable physical interpretation for the extant mathematical structures obtained from the inferential step. We demonstrate that a deflationary, empiricist framework for an inferential conception of physical laws delivers both an understanding of the mathematical character of physical laws, and a way of responding to some of the standard philosophical riddles associated with laws. (shrink)

This article examines the role of experimental generalizations and physical laws in neuroscientific explanations, using Hodgkin and Huxley’s electrophysiological model from 1952 as a test case. I show that the fact that the model was partly fitted to experimental data did not affect its explanatory status, nor did the false mechanistic assumptions made by Hodgkin and Huxley. The model satisfies two important criteria of explanatory status: it contains invariant generalizations and it is modular (both in James Woodward’s sense). Further, (...) I argue that there is a sense in which the explanatory heteronomy thesis holds true for this case. †To contact the author, please write to: SNF‐Professorship for Philosophy of Science, University of Basel, Missionsstrasse 21, 4003 Basel, Switzerland; e‐mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

This is a book about laws. Not, however, about the laws of which we learned in science classes at school: “scientific laws”. It is rather about those universalities which govern the world of facts, what Swartz calls “physical laws”—although this language is slightly misleading because the term is intended to cover the living as well as the non-living world. Of course, it may well be that a scientific law does capture the essence of a physical law, but not (...) necessarily or usually. A physical law by definition can never be false, whereas almost paradoxically nearly all scientific laws are false. (shrink)

If the Past Hypothesis underlies the arrows of time, what is the status of the Past Hypothesis? In this paper, I examine the role of the Past Hypothesis in the Boltzmannian account and defend the view that the Past Hypothesis is a candidate fundamental law of nature. Such a view is known to be compatible with Humeanism about laws, but as I argue it is also supported by a minimal non-Humean "governing'' view. Some worries arise from the non-dynamical and time-dependent (...) character of the Past Hypothesis as a boundary condition, the intrinsic vagueness in its specification, and the nature of the initial probability distribution. I show that these worries do not have much force, and in any case they become less relevant in a new quantum framework for analyzing time's arrows---the Wentaculus. Hence, the view that the Past Hypothesis is a candidate fundamental law should be more widely accepted than it is now. (shrink)

Do we have free will? In this interview, Helen Steward explains part of her very distinctive approach to the philosophical puzzle concerning free will vs determinism. Steward rejects determinism, but not because she denies that we are not material beings (because, for example, we have Cartesian, immaterial souls that have physical effects). Her reasons for rejecting determinism are very different.

Ernest Nagel once remarked that it is fortunately not necessary to be clear about scientific philosophy and methodology in order to practice good science. He went on to say, "Even eminent scientists can make unholy spectacles of themselves when they don the mantle of philosophy and attempt to discuss the broad implications of their specialized labors." Feynman's recent venture into the philosophy of science is, unfortunately, a lucid illustration of the validity of Nagel's observations. The book is a rather literal (...) transcription of seven semi-popular lectures delivered by Feynman at Cornell in November of 1964. Feynman is a wonderful iconoclast, a legendary virtuoso of the bongo drums and—by the way—a Nobel laureate and one of the great theoretical physicists. But this is all the more reason to expect something a little more intellectually solid than is offered in this volume. It was obviously Feynman's intent to discuss some compelling problems which lie on the borderline of physics and philosophy with an intelligent lay audience. But few will be enlightened by Feynman's clever, if uninformative, discourse about such issues as the relation of mathematics to physics, symmetry and conservation laws, and probability and uncertainty. Feynman's finest hour undoubtedly comes in the lecture on quantum mechanics, in which some aspects of the wave-particle duality are presented. But the value of much of the rest of the book is severely qualified by the author's penchant for imprecise and confusing statements and, in some cases, outright mystery-mongering. This is a great pity because theoretical physics, especially in the hands of Richard Feynman, is a source of ideas which are most worth discussing.—H. P. K. (shrink)

Our concept of the universe and the material world is foundational for our thinking and our moral lives. In an earlier contribution to the URAM project I presented what I called 'the ultimate organizational principle' of the universe. In that article (Grandpierre 2000, pp. 12-35) I took as an adversary the wide-spread system of thinking which I called 'materialism'. According to those who espouse this way of thinking, the universe consists of inanimate units or sets of material such as atoms (...) or elementary particles. Against this point of view on reality, I argued that it is 'logic', which exists in our inner world as a function of our mind, that is the universal organizing power of the universe. The present contribution builds upon this insight. Then I focussed on rationality; now I am interested in the responsibility that is the driving force behind our effort to find coherence and ultimate perspectives in our cosmos. It is shown that biology fundamentally differs from physics. Biology has its own fundamental principle, which is formulated for the first time in history in a scientific manner by Ervin Bauer. This fundamental principle is the cosmic life principle. I show that if one considers the physical laws as corresponding to reality, as in scientific realism, than physicalism becomes fundamentally spiritual because the physical laws are not material. I point out that the physical laws originate from the fundamental principle of physics which is the least action principle. I show that the fundamental principle of physics can be considered as the "instinct of atoms". Our research has found deep and meaningful connections between the basic principle of physics and the ultimate principles of the universe: matter, life and reason. Therefore, the principle of least action is not necessarily an expression of sterile inanimateness. On the contrary, the principle of physics is related to the life principle of the universe, to the world of instincts behind the atomic world, in which the principles of physics, biology, and psychology arise from the same ultimate principle. Our research sheds new light to the sciences of physics, biology, and psychology in close relation to the basic principles. These ultimate principles have a primary importance in our understanding of the nature of Man and the Universe, together with the relations between Man and Nature, Man and the Universe. The results offer new foundations for our understanding our own role in the Earth, in the Nature and in the Universe. Even the apparently inanimate world of physics shows itself to be animate on long timescales and having a kind of pre- human consciousness in its basic organisation. This hypothesis offers a way to understand when and how the biological laws may direct physical laws, and, moreover, offers a new perspective to study and understand under which conditions can self-consciousness govern the laws of biology and physics. This point of view offers living beings and humans the possibility of strengthening our natural identity, and recognising the wide perspective arising from having access to the deepest ranges of our own human resources and realising the task for which human and individual life has been created. (shrink)

Stephen Wolfram has recently outlined an unorthodox, multicomputational approach to fundamental theory, encompassing not only physics but also mathematics in a structure he calls The Ruliad, understood to be the entangled limit of all possible computations. In this framework, physical laws arise from the the sampling of the Ruliad by observers (including us). This naturally leads to several conceptual issues, such as what kind of object is the Ruliad? What is the nature of the observers carrying out the sampling, (...) and how do they relate to the Ruliad itself? What is the precise nature of the sampling? This paper provides a philosophical examination of these questions, and other related foundational issues, including the identification of a limitation that must face any attempt to describe or model reality in such a way that the modeller-observers are included. (shrink)