I'm wondering why you challenged me on this, but did not challenge Nutcase over
Message 2.
We're speaking about physical laws, not human laws. How could we invent laws of physics?
How could they not be invented.
That would insinuate that we had some sort of control over nature.
Perhaps you have not noticed, but science has given us a great deal of control over nature.
But maybe I'm not understanding your rationale.
That's likely. But I expect you have plenty of company in that.
If I walk around, I might be able to pick up an apple. It will help, of course, if I am walking under an apple tree. However, no matter how much I walk around, I will never be able to pick up a length or a metre or a time or a second. These things (length, time, etc) are not themselves part of nature. They are abstractions that we find useful when describing nature. And if they are abstractions, then they are human invented abstractions.
If you look carefully at the so-called "laws of nature", they are not laws of nature at all. They are statements of relations between human invented abstractions. So how could then not themselves be human inventions?
Granted, we use these abstractions to talk about nature. That's why they were invented. It is pretty hard to talk about nature without having suitable abstractions such as length and time. But inventing abstractions is not enough. If we invent abstractions and make up rules about them, what we have is mathematics. In order for our abstractions to be useful for describing nature, we must connect those abstractions to the natural world. Although this may be poorly understood, connecting our abstractions to the natural world is one of the most important parts of science.
We connect our abstractions with the natural world, by means of procedures we carry out. Incidently, science students learn how to use these procedures in their lab classes, and that is why lab time is such an important part of science education. These connecting procedures are often measuring procedures.
Many of the most important laws of physics are just formalized statements of the procedures that we follow to connect our abstractions to nature.
To summarize:
In order to describe the world, we invent abstractions (philosophers might call them universals). As part of that invention, we develop (i.e. invent) procedures that connect our abstractions with the natural world. Many of our scientific laws are formalizations of these procedures, and hence are inventions.
I hope that helps to clarify.
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