I like the work of a research programme, called Foundation Encyclopedia Dialectica, that does not waste a lot of effort debating Theism vs. Atheism vs. Agnosticism, but, instead, uses a new 'contra-Boolean algebra' of dialectics that they have discovered, to build qualitative models -- '''ontological models''' -- of the entire known universe -- the 'Dialectic of Nature' -- and of the many 'sub-universes' of our one experientially-known Universe. Their work is available for free-of-charge download at http://www.dialectics.org .

If you have to dismiss an idea because it doesn’t explain something, first you have to make sure the thing not being explained is/was there at all. Evolution does not explain the existance of unicorns. History does not record the exact number of vampires Abraham Lincoln killed. Are those problems for evolution/history, or are they problems for unicorns/vampires? For the history books to be wrong, you first have to prove that vampires exist at all.

If the universe is a dynamic expression of "Rta" (other Sanskrit terms include Vijnana and Mahat) or as Plotinus refers to it, "Nous" or non-dualistic intelligence ("non dualistic" because it is - at least in Indian philosophy - the substance and action of everything in every possible universe) then inevitably, the expression of intelligence would be orderly....

If.

What you wrote above does very little to explain your position. I'm not familiar with Sankrit terms. You would make yourself much more clear if you laid off the Sanskrit and used common parlance. Although, if obfuscation is your goal by all means carry on.

But in my conversation with Caravelle, my only interest is the question....

A question that a physicalist cannot answer is not very damning if the non-physicalist can't answer it either. Just because cultural group think makes us think that non-physicalism (specifically theism) gives an intuitive answer to your questions, does not make it so. We should be careful of cultural intuitions.

If the universe is a dynamic expression of "Rta" (other Sanskrit terms include Vijnana and Mahat) or as Plotinus refers to it, "Nous" or non-dualistic intelligence ("non dualistic" because it is - at least in Indian philosophy - the substance and action of everything in every possible universe) then inevitably, the expression of intelligence would be orderly, though in a supra-rational manner, not entirely captured by rational thought, somewhat along the lines of what Schrodinger, Bohr and Eddington thought about the implications of quantum physics. Schrodinger referred specifically to the Upanishads, and Bohr to Taoism, in an attempt to find an appropriate reference to supra-rational intelligence.

But in my conversation with Caravelle, my only interest is the question - "Since Davies, Smolin and numerous other physicists agree that (a) it's possible for the order or regularities - or non-necessary regularities, if you wish - of nature to change, and they agree there's no basis for asserting otherwise, since one can only, if one is a physicalist, have faith that order can be created, and sustained in the way it has been in our universe - if all this is the case, then isn't it the case that it's also merely a matter of faith that the "rules of order" couldn't either change massively (Smolin, Davies, et all have only, to the best of my knowledge, talked about relatively small, incremental changes) or cease altogether.

The problem with that conversation, in case anybody else wishes to join in, is that Caravelle keeps taking the philosophic question and bringing it back to quantitative methodology, which cannot even address much less answer such questions. "Why" questions are out of the sphere of empirical investigation.

A physicist begins with sensory data - either data obtained by direct senses or through the aid of technology, then dispenses with the immeasurable qualia, leaving pure quantitative relations, then proceeds to analyze those quantitative relations and comes up with general and ultimately, fundamental principles. That is where the work of empirical physics ends.

Then the philosophic questions emerge - why is this order here? The scientists, as in the link above where Davies refers to it, when they stick to their own sphere say, "we don't know, it just is. We don't ask those questions." And as scientists, they don't ask because they dont' have the tools to answer them. But as human beings they're perfectly entitled to ask.

The other philosophic emerge quite naturally -

how did the order arise (if there was something rather than nothing, the quantitative processes by which the order arose are again completely irrelevant to the philosophic question, which would then revert to, how is there order in those quantitative processes by which order arose)

how is it sustained?

Even if it hasn't changed for 13.7 billion years (and we know from Smolin and Davies and many others, that it has, but even if it hasn't), why not? And could it change? And could it cease to exist?

These are not questions amenable to a quantitative, empirical questioning. These are metaphysical, non scientific, philosophic questions.

You might ask the epistemological questions, how would we know it? If you think a quantitative, experimental method could provide evidence, then you need to go further in epistemology until you realize why that's impossible (much as Hume noted that it is impossible to get from "is" to "ought").

You might say I'm asking "ought" questions, which are metaphysical questions, not "is" questions, which are susceptible to quantitative investigation.

from a purely physicalist perspective, whether or not it has ever occurred or ever will occur – why this order could not stop briefly, or permanently, or change, briefly or permanently?

Non-physicalism solves this how?

In fact, this is even more to the point. This is precisely what I've been saying all along. Paul Davies expresses it most eloquently.

*****

Physicist Eugene Wigner confesses that the mathematical underpinning of nature "is something bordering on the mysterious and there is no rational explanation for it."3 Richard Feynman, a Nobel Prize winner for quantum electrodynamics, said, "Why nature is mathematical is a mystery...The fact that there are rules at all is a kind of miracle."4

This astonishment springs from the recognition that the universe doesn't have to behave this way. It is easy to imagine a universe in which conditions change unpredictably from instant to instant, or even a universe in which things pop in and out of existence. Instead, scientists cling to their long-held faith in the fundamental rationality of the cosmos.

****

How the Universe Works - Scientists Baffled by Laws of Nature

Physicist Paul C. Davies comments, "...to be a scientist, you had to have FAITH that the universe is governed by dependable, immutable, absolute, universal, mathematical laws of an unspecified origin. You've got to BELIEVE that these laws won't fail, that we won't wake up tomorrow to find heat flowing from cold to hot, or the speed of light changing by the hour. Over the years I have often asked my physicist colleagues why the laws of physics are what they are? ...The favorite reply is, 'There is no reason they are what they are--they just are.'"5

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/blogs/physics/2015/10/are-the-laws-of-physics-really-universal/

http://discovermagazine.com/2010/apr/10-is-search-for-immutable-laws-of-nature-wild-goose-chase

Here are scientists - including nobel prize winners - suggesting the following as possibilities:

1. There may have been a point - one can hardly even refer to it as a 'time" - near the birth of the universe, when there were no regularities of the kind we identify as "laws" of nature
2. The "laws of nature" - or "regularities," or what I'm colloquially referring to as the "order" of nature - may change over time.

None of them in the articles i've linked to have speculated that the order could cease, but there are other physicists - folks who identify themselves as mainstream, good, materialist-believing, scientists, who say given their philosophy of science (what I'm referring to as physicalism) there's no basis for asserting that's impossible.

That's all I was asking about. Are the views expressed by these scientists consistent with physicalism? They agree that those views are.

Here's an alternative approach from an internationally renowned nuclear physicist: https://www3.amherst.edu/magazine/issues/04spring/eros_insight/Zajonc_Goethe.pdf

Nothing you have said has even come close to recognizing, much less addressing, the simple question I'm asking

I answered your "simple question" twice, the second time pretty explicitly I thought. I can't say the same for you, who apparently managed to go through several exchanges without realizing what all of my comments had been about (or that they weren't primarily about answering your question - that I did was a mere aside because I'm nice that way), and in fact I have no way of telling from this last comment that whether you did finally figure it out or not. Or maybe the flounce indicates that you did; your comments have been consistent with someone who (for this conversation at least) is here to have people talk on their terms and isn't really interested in correcting their own errors or learning new things. I would have been interested in knowing more about where you feel Steve Weinberg contradicts himself for example, but conversations with someone who consistently misunderstands what I write are frustrating so it's probably for the best.

I devoted a good deal of time between 2011 and 2013 to online conversation on these subjects, and people very very rarely step out of their perspectives long enough to look at others.

You don't seem to be having conversations in a way that's conducive to that kind of thing. Maybe you go about it differently in person.

Nothing you have said has even come close to recognizing, much less addressing, the simple question I'm asking, so I'm going to leave it at that (and sorry, Aristotle is an intelligent person making an intelligent point, so, no, it has no bearing on physicalism, which is incoherent view so lacking in intelligibility that it can't even be said to be contradictory - "not even wrong" is perhaps the best description of it.

So I'll leave you with the words of a Nobel Prize winning physicist, Steven Weinberg (from his essay on whether or not science can explain anything)

Finally, it seems clear that we will never be able to explain our most fundamental scientific principles. (Maybe this is why some people say that science does not provide explanations, but by this reasoning nothing else does either). I think that in the end we will come to a set of simple universal laws of nature, laws that we cannot explain. The only kind of explanation I can imagine (if we are not just going to find a deeper set of laws, which would then just push the question farther back) would be to show that mathematical consistency requires these laws. But this is clearly impossible, because we can already imagine sets of laws of nature that, as far as we can tell, are completely consistent mathematically but that do not describe nature as we observe it.

For example, if you take the Standard Model of elementary particles and just throw away everything except the strong nuclear forces and the particles on which they act, the quarks and the gluons, you are left with the theory known as quantum chromodynamics. It seems that quantum chromodynamics is mathematically self-consistent, but it describes an impoverished universe in which there are only nuclear particles - there are no atoms, there are no people. If you give up quantum mechanics and relativity then you can make up a huge variety of other logically consistent laws of nature, like Newton's laws describing a few particles endlessly orbiting each other in accordance with these laws, with nothing else in the universe, and nothing new ever happening. These are logically consistent theories, but they are all impoverished. Perhaps our best hope for a final explanation is to discover a set of final laws of nature and show that this is the only logically consistent rich theory, rich enough for example to allow for the existence of ourselves. This may happen in a century or two, and if it does then I think that physicists will be at the extreme limits of their power of explanation.

**

Weinberg manages to contradict himself at least 4 times within each paragraph. Being an expert in physics doesn't guarantee any understanding of philosophy.

Thanks for taking the time. I don't think this kind of conversation tends to go anywhere on line. I devoted a good deal of time between 2011 and 2013 to online conversation on these subjects, and people very very rarely step out of their perspectives long enough to look at others. I had based my 2011 essay, "Shaving Science With Ockham's Razor," on this kind of dialog, but I've found over the years it works much better (though still requiring a great deal of work) in person.

Thanks again.

1. The physicalists cannot account for the existence of order, it is simply taken as a given.

I disagree with this. The existence of order is observed, it doesn't need to be "taken as a given". Take Alice in Wonderland - she falls into a world in which many rules of logic no longer apply, and it's definitely a world that makes no sense - how could living things even exist and observe things if basic logic doesn't apply? Then again, if basic logic doesn't apply then why wouldn't they? But what is clear is that Alice can plainly notice the lack of order around her, even as she can't make sense of it. And it puts in sharp relief the fact that we observe every day (if not every night :)) that we aren't in a Wonderland crazytown; if we live in a fundamentally disordered world it's making a very good job of masquerading as an ordered one. (and in fact plenty of people do disagree on how fundamentally ordered the world is, based on personal observations and experiences)

Similarly, it is an interesting observation that contrary to stereotype, science progresses by constant refinement rather than all-upending-revolution. Scientific revolutions do occur that change our fundamental understanding of how the world works, but even as they do so they remain consistent with previous observations - to the point that the previous theory can usually be considered a useful approximation to the new one. This doesn't have to be true; in fact many laypeople don't realize it is true. And maybe it won't continue to be true in the future. But it is the kind of thing one would expect if there existed a consistent reality (or "order") and science was an effective algorithm for building a model of it.

Or put another way, the ways in which Asimov's The Relativity of Wrong describes how our ideas of the shape of the Earth have evolved is evidence for Earth having had a consistent shape over that time; it's not how we would have expected things to go if it didn't.

2. Given that physicalism cannot account for the existence of order, is there any reason – from a purely physicalist perspective, whether or not it has ever occurred or ever will occur – why this order could not stop briefly, or permanently, or change, briefly or permanently?

I answered this already. "Reason", as in "is there any reason to think", from a purely physicalist perspective, includes evidence. If you artificially exclude evidence then the answer (if I wasn't clear enough about that in my previous reply) is "no". But then you're not talking about how any materialist I've ever run into thinks.