Kawoomba comments on Natural Laws Are Descriptions, not Rules - Less Wrong
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There's a widely acknowledged problem involving the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The problem stems from the fact that all known fundamental laws of physics are invariant under time reversal (well, invariant under CPT, to be more accurate) while the Second Law (a non-fundamental law) is not. Now, why is the symmetry at the fundamental level regarded as being in tension with the asymmetry at the non-fundamental level? It is not true that solutions to symmetric equations must generically share those same symmetries. In fact, the opposite is true. It can be proved that generic solutions of systems of partial differential equations have fewer symmetries than the equations. So it's not like we should expect that a generic universe describable by time-reversal symmetric laws will also be time-reversal symmetric at every level of description. So what's the source of the worry then?
I think it comes from a commitment to nomic reductionism. The Second Law is, well, a law. But if you really believe that laws are rules, there is no room for autonomous laws at non-fundamental levels of description. The law-likeness, or "ruliness", of any such law must really stem from the fundamental laws. Otherwise you have overdetermination of physical behavior. Here's a rhetorical question taken from a paper on the problem: "What grounds the lawfulness of entropy increase, if not the underlying dynamical laws, the laws governing the world's fundamental physical ontology?" The question immediately reveals two assumptions associated with thinking of laws as rules: the lawfulness of a non-fundamental law must be "grounded" in something, and this grounding can only conceivably come from the fundamental laws.
So we get a number of attempts to explain the lawfulness of the Second Law by expanding the set of fundamental laws, Examples include Penrose's Weyl curvature hypothesis and Carroll and Chen's spontaneous eternal inflation model. These hypotheses are constructed specifically to account for lawful entropy increase. Now nobody thinks, "The lawfulness of quantum field theory needs grounding. Can I come up with an elaborate hypothesis whose express purpose is accounting for why it is lawful?" (EDIT: Bad example. See this comment) The lawfulness of fundamental laws is not seen as requiring grounding in the same way as non-fundamental laws. If you think of laws as descriptions rather than rules, this starts to look like an unjustified double standard. Why would macroscopic patterns require grounding in a way that microscopic patterns do not?
I can't fully convey my own take on the Second Law issue in a comment, but I can give a gist. The truth of the Second Law depends on the particular manner in which we partition phase space into macrostates. For the same microscopic trajectory through phase space, different partitions will deliver different conclusions about entropy. We could partition phase space so that entropy decreases monotonically (for some finite length of time), increases monotonically, or exhibits no monotonic trend. And this is true for any microscopic trajectory through any phase space. So the existence of some partition according to which the Second Law is true is no surprise. What does require explanation is why this is the natural partition. But which partition is natural is explained by our epistemic and causal capacities. The natural macrostates are the ones which group together microstates which said capacities cannot distinguish and separate microstates which they can. So what needs to be explained is why our capacities are structured so as to carve up phase space in a manner that leads to the Second Law. But this is partly a question about us, and it's the sort of question that invites an answer based on an observation selection effect -- something like "Agency is only possible if the system's capacities are structured so as to carve up its environment in this manner." My view is that the asymmetry of the Second Law is a consequence of an asymmetry in agency -- the temporal direction in which agents can form and read reliable records about a system's state must differ from the temporal direction in which an agent's action can alter a system's state. I could say a lot more here but I won't.
The point is that this sort of explanation is very different from the kind that most physicists are pursuing. I'm not saying it's definitely the right tack to pursue, but it is weird to me that it basically hasn't been pursued at all. And I think the reason for that is that it isn't the kind of grounding that the prescriptive viewpoint leads one to demand. So implicit adherence to this viewpoint has in this case led to a promising line of inquiry being largely ignored.
Thanks for that comment, I very much enjoy these topics.
Why would we not be able to accurately describe and process the occasional phenomenon that went counter to the Second Law?
Intermittent decreases in entropy might even make the evolution of complex brains more likely, at least it does not make the existence of agents such as us less likely prima facie. If you want to rely on the Anthropic Principle, you'd need to establish why it would prefer such strict adherence to the Second Law.
Are you familiar with Smolin's paper on the AP? "It is explained in detail why the Anthropic Principle (AP) cannot yield any falsifiable predictions, and therefore cannot be a part of science." For a rebuttal see the Smolin Susskind dialogue here.
Even if there were a case to be made that agency would only be possible if the partition generally follows the Second Law, it would be outright unexpected for the partition to follow it as strictly as we assume it does.
Out of the myriad trajectories through phase space, why would the one perfectly (in the sense of as yet unfalsified) mimicking the Second Law be taken? There could surely exist agencies if there were just a general, or even very close, correspondence. Which would be vastly more likely for us to observe, if we were iid chosen from all such worlds with agency (self sampling assumption).
I am familiar with Smolin's objections, but I don't buy them. His argument hinges on accepting an outmoded Popperian philosophy of science. I don't think it holds if one adopts a properly Bayesian perspective. In any case, I think my particular form of anthropic argument counts as a selection effect within one world, a form of argument to which even he doesn't object.
As for the ubiquity of Second Law-obeying systems, I admit it is something I have thought about and it does worry me a little. I don't have a fully worked response, but here's a tentative answer: If there were the occasional spontaneously entropy decreasing macroscopic system in our environment, the entropy decrease would be very difficult to corral. As long as such a system could interact with other systems, we could use it to extract work from those other systems as well. And, as I said, if most of the systems in our environment were not Second Law-obeying, then we could not exercise our agency by learning about them and acting on them based on what we learn. So perhaps there's a kind of instability to the situation where a few systems don't obey the Second Law while the rest do that explains why this is not the situation we're in.