Transgression

The concept of law is a restricted one with regards computers as with regards nature as in both it does not allow for the transgression of the law. That is, we have a law saying, that as pedestrians, we must not cross the street when there is a red light. But now suppose you see someone crossing the street, you could assume the light is green and start passing yourself. Sadly, many times you’d die as the light was red and the person was just passing before the car got there. The moral: seeing the symptom of a person crossing the street does not guarantee that he is abiding by the law, and so that the light is green.

Now this all seems simple and yet we do not comprehend it with regards nature. If there is a law, everything MUST abide by it. It is not that the lighter rock can decide to fall faster than the heavier rock. It is not that we can decide to levitate. No, these laws must be abided by, and by extension computer programs cannot just decide not to work as told, to all of a sudden run with no reason, but must constantly abide by the law.

You can say it is a different kind of law and I am mixing concepts, but I do not think so. You could say it is taken into account in Quantum physics where particles can in a sense jump and behave erratically, similarly to a glass all of a sudden jumping, as quantum physics is a theory based on probability. That is an important point, and seems to answer our question, but it really doesn’t, I think. On the contrary even.

Quantum mechanics does say that a glass can all of a sudden just jump, but then it incorporates the transgression into the theory in a way so that the glass can not transgress the law but will have to follow it. Whatever it does, it follows the law, and again we are in the safe ground where the law cannot be broken. But moreover, if one thinks about this, and why this case exists in the theory it actually tells us that glasses can, with no reason, all of a sudden jump, hover, go to the left or right, depending on nothing. Or, perhaps, depending on what we could call their own will. This would certainly seem to say that they can break the law, the old law which would say that it must stay still unless there is a power on it. Thus the theory actually says that the glass can not adhere to the old laws when it feels like, and the new law simply takes that into account, to form a new law to which, again, it must abide. It must abide it, as to transgress it, is in a sense, impossible; again.

And so, all Quantum mechanics actually shows us, if we accept it, is that even in nature elements can simply decide to not follow the law! To act irrationally, or unlawfully. But then, learning from the symptom, learning not from the origin but the symptom, seeing other people cross the street, doesn’t tell us anything about whether the light is red or green, simply a probabilistic answer, which, moreover, as we don’t know the probability of following the law, doesn’t tell us much. This renders all physical experiments, or rather their use in constructing and checking theories, rather pointless as most work not by looking at the traffic light but by checking if people cross the street.

Well then, science doesn’t seem to be on very firm grounds here. But this is not about science, but on our incapability of actually comprehending the possibility of transgression in nature. Of nature not always following its laws. And this my friends is an important thing to comprehend.

To summarize, the classical view of the world as operating by laws which science simply needs to find, and then everything MUST operate by them might simply be false. This is not a call to drop science as we have no other recourse, but, rather, to comprehend the possibility of transgression in nature. Something which in our current logic seems incomprehensible.