What Happens If There Are An Infinite Number Of Laws Of Gravity Because No Two Could Be Alike?

It is one of the most surprising thing that you can point out to people, even people within science, people who should have been informed of this in their earliest training in their profession, that the laws of science are the product of human imagination.   That's not me talking, it's something that is well known among scientists, mathematicians and logicians who have had that as part of their training and their reading and reflection on their professional activities.  My favorite formulation of that is from Arthur Stanley Eddington in his lectures collected into his book, The Philosophy of Physical Science

Eighteen years ago I was responsible for a remark which has often been quoted:

"It is one thing for the human mind to extract from the phenomena of nature the laws which it has itself put into them; it may be a far harder thing to extract laws over which it has had no control. It is even possible that laws which have not their origin in the mind may be irrational and we can never succeed in formulating them."

This seems to be coming true, though not in the way that then suggested itself. I had in mind the phenomena of quanta and atomic physics, which at that time completely baffled our efforts to formulate a rational system of law. It was already apparent that the principle laws of molar physics were mind-made — the result of the sensory and intellectual equipment through which we derive our observational knowledge — and were not laws of governance of the objective universe. The suggestion was that in quantum theory we for the first time came up against the true laws of governance of the objective universe. If so, the task was presumably much more difficult than merely rediscovering our own frame of thought”.

Since then microscopic physics has made great progress, and its laws have turned out to be comprehensible to the mind; but, as I have endeavored to show, it also turns out that they have been imposed by the mind — by our forms of thought — in the same way that the molar laws are imposed…

I have used that quote several times and find that the atheist-materialists who have been introduced to that idea have often railed against the idea that when human beings talk about "physical law" or "laws of nature" what they are talking about is, actually, the interpretation of the physical universe as conceived of in human terms, not only in human terms but, specifically in a very formalized form of mathematical expression that can hardly be said to be understandable by the large majority of people. In a sense you fairly point out that those people who do understand those have been thoroughly indoctrinated and acculturated into the mindset that can understand those and find them acceptable. Though even most of them won't have more than a utilitarian understanding of them.

I am interested in what the "brain-only" dogma does to any particular intellectual construct that we so casually call "an idea".  Most people conceive of an idea, and even more so such purportedly precise ideas as "the laws of physics" to be uniform when that is likely an illusion.   How uniform can the identity of any "idea" be if those are based in the physical structures made by our brains out of the ambient material and physical forces within the brains of each and every person whose brains would eventually contain such an "idea"?   My guess would be that the exquisite precision required to embody such an idealized "idea" in even two brains, never mind the entire population graduated with credentials in any one of the sciences that are constructed would mean that the probability of those "ideas" being identical means that no two people hold that idea.   If a non-physical entity that we would call an idea could be of more reliable uniformity than one produced by brain-only orthodoxy can't be known but the obstacles to uniformity when an idea is held to be the expression of a physical structure made in brains might mean that such uniformity would be more likely if that physical substrate were not insisted upon through the dogma of materialism.

You have to wonder how any two people could ever have the same laws of science in their brain, how that could remain in existence as a uniform entity in different forms for even a minute.

What thinking about the inescapable issues and conclusions and implications of any physical definition of the mind does to the dogmatic view of the integrity of science, as if science, itself were not a product of human imagination, is a question that will have to be faced as this dogma is pushed and its rigid belief is enforced.   I suspect that the discrepancy between the popular understanding of the nature of science - which is idealistic in the extreme - and the problems for that forced by the orthodoxy of materialist ideology as science will not have good consequences for science or society.  I have to wonder if the corruption within the behavioral and social sciences that is being exposed in the past years isn't a harbinger of what will come if those insurmountable problems are swept under the rug for another generation.

And I've only been talking of "ideas" as if they were the discrete entities that we are so accustomed to talking about, as if those imagined entities are real.  The reality of the mind is that it is continuous and integrated, to talk about a discrete "idea" may be as undefinable or illusory and imaginary as talking about a discrete "event" such as many physicists and cosmologists claim generate jillions of universes every second of every day and every night.

Almost a hundred years ago, Eddington wrote this:

The search for physical reality is not necessarily utilitarian, but it has been by no means profitless. As the geometry became more complex, the physics became simpler; until finally it almost appears that the physics has been absorbed into the geometry. We did not consciously set out to construct a geometrical theory of the world; we were seeking physical reality by approved methods, and this is what has happened.

Is the point now reached the ultimate goal? Have the points of view of all conceivable observers now been absorbed? We do not assert that they have. But it seems as though a definite task has been rounded off, and a natural halting-place reached. So far as we know, the different possible impersonal points of view have been exhausted—those for which the observer can be regarded as a mechanical automaton, and can be replaced by scientific measuring-appliances. A variety of more personal points of view may indeed be needed for an ultimate reality; but they can scarcely be incorporated in a real world of physics. There is thus justification for stopping at this point but not for stopping earlier.

It may be asked whether it is necessary to take into account all conceivable observers, many of whom, we suspect, have no existence. Is not the real world that which comprehends the appearances to all real observers? Whether or not it is a tenable hypothesis that that which no one observes does not exist, science uncompromisingly rejects it. If we deny the rights of extra-terrestrial observers, we must take the side of the Inquisition against Galileo. And if extra-terrestrial observers are admitted, the other observers, whose results are here combined, cannot be excluded.

Our inquiry into the nature of things is subject to certain limitations which it is important to realise. The best comparison I can offer is with a future antiquarian investigation, which may be dated about the year 5000 A.D. An interesting find has been made relating to a vanished civilisation which flourished about the twentieth century, namely a volume containing a large number of games of chess, written out in the obscure symbolism usually adopted for that purpose. The antiquarians, to whom the game was hitherto unknown, manage to discover certain uniformities; and by long research they at last succeed in establishing beyond doubt the nature of the moves and rules of the game. But it is obvious that no amount of study of the volume will reveal the true nature either of the participants in the game—the chessmen—or the field of the game—the chess board. With regard to the former, all that is possible is to give arbitrary names distinguishing the chessmen according to their properties; but with regard to the chess-board something more can be stated. The material of the board is unknown, so too are the shapes of the meshes—whether squares or diamonds; but it is ascertainable that the different points of the field are connected with one another by relations of two-dimensional order, and a large number of hypothetical types of chess-board satisfying these relations of order can be constructed. In spite of these gaps in their knowledge, our antiquarians may fairly claim that they thoroughly understand the game of chess.

The application of this analogy is as follows. The recorded games are our physical experiments. The rules of the game, ascertained by study of them, are the laws of physics. The hypothetical chess-board of 64 squares is the space and time of some particular observer or player; whilst the more general relations of two-fold order, are the absolute relations of order in space-time which we have been studying. The chessmen are the entities of physics—electrons, particles, or point-events; and the range of movement may perhaps be compared to the fields of relation radiating from them—electric and gravitational fields, or intervals. By no amount of study of the experiments can the absolute nature or appearance of these participants be deduced; nor is this knowledge relevant, for without it we may yet learn "the game" in all its intricacy. Our knowledge of the nature of things must be like the antiquarians' knowledge of the nature of chessmen, viz. their nature as pawns and pieces in the game, not as carved shapes of wood. In the latter aspect they may have relations and significance transcending anything dreamt of in physics.

It is believed that the familiar things of experience are very complex; and the scientific method is to analyse them into simpler elements. Theories and laws of behaviour of these simpler constituents are studied; and from these it becomes possible to predict and explain phenomena. It seems a natural procedure to explain the complex in terms of the simple, but it carries with it the necessity of explaining the familiar in terms of the unfamiliar.

There are thus two reasons why the ultimate constituents of the real world must be of an unfamiliar nature. Firstly, all familiar objects are of a much too complex character. Secondly, familiar objects belong not to the real world of physics, but to a much earlier stage in the synthesis of appearances. The ultimate elements in a theory of the world must be of a nature impossible to define in terms recognisable to the mind.

And he was talking about theories of the physical universe.   In the past year of thinking about the problem with the materialist "brain-only" mind, I think that the ultimate nature of the mind will, itself, be infinitely farther from the reach of science because any attempt to formulate theories of it out of the practises of science will miss it entirely.

Update:  Oh, really.  Well, it would seem your scientific erudition is greater than that of Albert Einstein who called Eddington's 1923 Mathematical Theory of Relativity "The finest presentation of the topic in any language."   The "crackpot" published the long passage above in 1920.  Bertrand Russell, who definitely hated a lot of the things that Eddington published because it destroyed his 19th century, materialist world view, nevertheless deeply respected Eddington who was just about certainly the greatest British mathematical physicist of his time, certainly one of the greatest in the world.  His more troublesome speculations came far later and they didn't do anything to diminish his standing as one of the great scientists of his time.  

21st century atheists haven't even incorporated the discoveries of a century ago, they remain stuck in the 19th century materialism that even Bertrand Russell knew wasn't viable.  He mistook that failure of his ideology, as he was forced to accept by reading Eddinton's The Nature of the Physical World, 1928, as the death knell of science about ninety years ago.   He was wrong, it only meant that his ideology was impossible, science survives.  It may even survive the further insistence on 19th century materialism that decadently persists into this generation.