Rules

‘Natural‘, ‘Artificial‘ and ‘Synthetic‘.

In my last post, I was arguing that rules are made by us, humans.
In an attempt to make some sense of the seemingly chaotic environment in and of which we’ve become aware at some point in our evolution.

So.

The ‘natural‘ rules are those which have only been ‘identified’ by us.

‘Two swords don’t fit, simultaneously, in the same scabbard’.
‘Light travels in a straight line’.
‘There’s no smoke without a fire’.
‘Magnets either attract or reject other magnets’.
‘For as long as the temperature of a gas contained in an enclosure remains constant, the product obtained by multiplying the volume of the gas by the pressure exercised by that gas on the walls of the enclosure does not change’ – Boyle’s Law.
‘Things fall down, unless…’
‘Two objects attract each-other with a force directly proportional with the added masses of the two objects and inversely proportional with the distance between the geometric centers of the same objects’. Newton.
‘The principle of mass conservation’.
‘E=M*C2’
I’ll come back later.
For the moment, I’ll just observe that ‘natural’ laws are, simply put, an enumeration of what we consider to have understood of what’s going on around us. Our take on the natural world.

‘Artificial‘ rules are decisions we had to make in order to improve our chances of survival. Decisions we had been forced to make at one point and which made so much sense that they had been perpetuated. Habits we’ve somehow acquired and which had proven themselves so useful that we impose them on our beloved children.
‘Drive on one side only’.
‘Wash your hands before dinner’.
‘Thou shalt not kill…’

‘Synthetic‘ rules are those we’ve made ‘out of the blue’.
How to play backgammon, for instance.
How to evaluate a moving picture… or an evening dress.