This is very interesting.
All a natural law is a description how things happen, the law itself is not the cause of it's truth.
So, are you saying that the natural world (ourselves included) don't 'obey' any sort of law, but that natural law is just a more or less consistent generalization about what does happen?
So, let me ask you a question: would you say there's any such thing as a physical impossibility that is not also a logical impossibility?
Corrected it would read like "People spout all kinds of beliefs about their ability to make choices / the natural world is relevantly deterministic / Not everything people spout can be true / What people spout is not an adequate picture of world"
I hope this isn't the structure of EY's point, since then I think the sequence has nothing of substance to say.
Yes, the natural doesn't obey any laws. If electrons started suddenly to be positively charged you couldn't call them naughty (or they would just fall under the jurisdiction of another description maybe that of positrons). But apparently they are not that fiddly, but they totally could be. You can't use the laws to compel events, an attourney is of no use. If something that contradicts with a law happens the law is just proven false.
If physical impossibility means inconsistent with how we view the worlds mechanics now then sure there are things like the fl...
ErinFlight said:
Thinking about it, I realized that this might be a common concern. There are probably plenty of people who've looked at various more-or-less technical or jargony Less Wrong posts, tried understanding them, and then given up (without posting a comment explaining their confusion).
So I figured that it might be good to have a thread where you can ask for explanations for any Less Wrong post that you didn't understand and would like to, but don't want to directly comment on for any reason (e.g. because you're feeling embarassed, because the post is too old to attract much traffic, etc.). In the spirit of various Stupid Questions threads, you're explicitly encouraged to ask even for the kinds of explanations that you feel you "should" get even yourself, or where you feel like you could get it if you just put in the effort (but then never did).
You can ask to have some specific confusing term or analogy explained, or to get the main content of a post briefly summarized in plain English and without jargon, or anything else. (Of course, there are some posts that simply cannot be explained in non-technical terms, such as the ones in the Quantum Mechanics sequence.) And of course, you're encouraged to provide explanations to others!