It’s the law!

There is an almost unanimous consensus about laws having to be considered either natural or man made.

As in the law of gravity is implacable – hence ‘natural’, while the Penal Code is a lot more ‘amenable’.

Yeah, right…

Then how come Hammurabi had been able to write his Code some three and a half Millennia before Newton famously noticed that apples do fall to the ground? Besides being such irresistible objects of temptation, of course.
One way out would be to assume that Hammurabi was a lot smarter than Newton but that would be too easy, don’t you think?

Now that I’ve mentioned the noticing game, let me point out some of my own observations.
People have tried to fly way before Newton had told them this is impossible – for us, at least.
Individuals might occasionally get away with murder but murderous societies are far less stable than the more peaceful ones.
Gravity has been already ‘defeated’ while no totalitarian government has yet managed to ‘stay afloat’ in a consistent manner – no matter how many dissidents it had murdered.

Another approach to this conundrum would be to consider that natural laws deal with the non responsive kind of chaos while man made ones are meant to approximate what happens when the chaos is able to respond to what’s being thrown in it.

For instance weather and financial market. No one can change the weather – hence it is considered a non-responsive kind of chaos, while the market is constantly pushed one way or another by the various pieces of information that reaches the participants. Which participants respond to those inputs – according to their own abilities and preferences, hence the ‘responsive’ character of the market.

So, could we consider that nature is non-responsively chaotic while humans behave equally chaotic but in a responsive manner?

The key word here being ‘we’, of course.
After all, we have coined the very concept of law, we are the ones speaking about the difference between ‘natural’ and ‘man made’ and we have discovered, formulated and eventually bent all laws… both natural and man made.

It seems that the whole situation is a lot foggier than at the begging.
That I’ve messed things up instead of making some sense of them…

Let me use another tack.

First of all, let me notice that we’re surrounded by ‘things’. And that these things relate to each other. And to us, of course.
From this point of view, the world is made of things AND of the relationships that appear amongst these things.

And here’s the catch. Laws are not things. They are a small part of the relationships that appear between the things that exist in this world. And since we’ve already discovered that there are a lot more things around us than we will ever be able to ‘see’/notice, it would be unreasonably to expect us to be able to notice all the relationships that ‘tie together’ the world.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try!

Returning to what we call ‘laws’, let me add yet another classification.

‘Noticed’ laws versus ‘pro-active’ laws.

In this sense ‘thou shalt not kill’, the Law of Gravity and ‘drive on one side only’ are, all three of them, ‘noticed’ laws. In the sense that things remain in order as long as we observe these laws.

On the other hand, pro-active laws are a lot more trickier.

‘Do this, do that’! …

‘Why?!?’

‘Because I know better AND/OR because I can make you obey my orders!’

While observing the noticed laws is essential in letting things flow naturally, imposing/accepting ‘pro-active’ laws is the recipe for disaster. Man made disaster.