The Nature of Things

Science tells us that there are certain laws of nature. The idea is basically that there are certain rules that all of reality follows, that (hopefully) don't change, and help us to understand the way our pretty blue planet and its general neighborhood works. But is laws really the best name for these governing rules?

I don't know about what your thoughts on the subject are, but the way I have it figured, laws, as a rule, are made to be broken. When people make a law, the law is generally either of the form "Do such and such a thing" or of the form "Do not do such and such a thing," and if you fail to comply with that law, there is a punishment of some sort. Now, this is not the case with "physical laws," as we like to call them. Physical laws are of the form "Do this," or "Do not do this," and the things to which these rules apply must comply with the law. They are literally incapable of doing something the law tells them not to, and equally incapable of not doing that which the law tells them to do.

I have heard it said, in a discussion of science in fact, that the thing which separates human beings from mere atoms is that we have "Free Will." It is this will which gives us the ability to either follow or not follow a law. That is to say, atoms must follow laws because they have no free will, and people may choose not to follow them because we have free will. I don't quite agree with this. I would actually go so far as to say that there are fundamental rules which govern human behavior, much like our friends the "physical laws," govern the behavior of particles. What I'm trying to get at here is the idea that people have a sort of "programming." If you do something, it was within the rules that define you as a person. Now, don't take this as me being a fatalist. I'm not saying here, "If I eat your sandwich, I had to eat your sandwich; it was in my nature." But what I am saying is that if I eat your sandwich, I made that decision because that decision was consistent with my sandwich-stealing character. I couldn't have made another decision, but I still have to take the responsibility for making that decision.

Now back to laws. I think we need a different word for them. There are laws, (Do this or be punished) and there are Laws (things which sovereignly govern the behavior of a thing). I think we ought to call Big L laws "Natures," personally. Now, before you squint, or raise your eyebrows, think about the way we use the word Nature. We typically mean it to use "plants and animals and stuff like that." What nature actually means is "a characteristic of something." In other words, if we go back to my sandwich example, I have the characteristic of stealing sandwiches. But is that thing really a part of my Nature? I don't think so. I have the ability to not steal, after all. It was in the rules that defined me as a person for the moment, but I can change those rules. So, (and I apologize for using the word nature in the paragraph before this one) it's not really part of my Nature to be a sandwich thief. However, it is within my Nature to be capable of sandwich-thievery. I think the most important part of Human Nature is that it governs the way we change, and I think the same can be said for most Natures. After all, you can say that an electron is here or there (actually you can't - that's quantum physics, and I'm not going to get into that here) and its Nature governs when it changes from being here to being there.

I'm probably going to talk about Natures a lot if you decide to come back for more. I think that they're probably the most important thing in the world, because if you can understand the Nature of a thing - why it changes, how it changes - then you understand the thing itself. I don't know about you, but I find that if I have a problem, the best way to solve it is to understand what's causing it. Here's hoping you enjoyed this enough to stick around.