Laws & Causation

Are 'laws' emergent summaries of power exchange?

Caption: Sir Isaac Newton, reimagined by ChatGPT 5 & DALL.E as an astronaut in deep space, quizzically observing a floating apple — a playful take on gravity and the laws of nature.

Under a late-summer sky in Lincolnshire, an apple detaches from its stem. It falls—not to Newton’s head^[1], but into history. We remember the tale as if nature’s law had whispered itself into his ear, pre-written and eternal. Yet no statute was etched into the apple’s flesh, no cosmic parchment rolled out between the tree and the ground. The 'law of gravity'^[2] was not a decree handed down from on high; it was a pattern, noticed and named, a habit of the universe distilled into words.

But what if that 'habit' is not a fixed command, but the temporary settlement of countless negotiations—mass with mass, motion with space, stability with change? What if what we call laws are not laws at all but our shorthand for the ongoing give-and-take of power in motion?

If so, the question changes: not what the laws are, but how they emerge.

Classical Positions

As the Enlightenment dawned, Europe began to imagine nature as a kingdom ruled by reason—its monarchs the 'laws of nature'. These were not mere observations, but commandments written, it was thought, into the very structure of reality. The centuries that followed produced several enduring portraits of what these 'laws' might be.

Determinism pictured the cosmos as a flawless clockwork. From Laplace’s famed demon^[3]—an intellect that, knowing all positions and velocities, could predict the future and retrodict the past—came the idea that laws were absolute and binding. Every event was the inevitable consequence of those before it. In such a world, causation was simply the unfolding of the plan.

Humean Regularity Theory rejected hidden necessity. For David Hume^[4], laws were nothing more than descriptive summaries of what we habitually observe: the sun has always risen, objects have always fallen. The 'law' lies in the regularity, not in any unseen force making it so.

Necessitarianism countered that this stripped laws of their authority. Philosophers like D. M. Armstrong^[5] argued that laws are grounded in metaphysically necessary relations between universals—structural connections that must hold, not merely happen to. Gravity works as it does not by chance or custom, but because mass and attraction are linked by the fabric of reality itself.

Dispositional Essentialism^[6] turned to the nature of things themselves. Laws arise because entities possess dispositions or powers as part of their essence: salt dissolves in water^[7] because solubility is built into what salt is. The law is not imposed externally but flows from a thing’s identity.

Across these views runs a shared thread: causation is tied to stability. Whether as divine decree, logical necessity, or stubborn habit, laws are taken to underwrite the predictability of the world. The differences lie in whether that underwriting is metaphysical bedrock, a regularity of appearances, or the expression of inherent capacities.

In each case, laws are treated as standing apart from the flux they describe—rules above the game, rather than the game’s evolving score.

Current Flashpoints

In the 20th and 21st centuries, the image of immutable cosmic statutes began to crack. Physics, complexity science, and philosophy of science each tugged at the old picture, revealing fault lines where 'law' looked less like decree and more like evolving agreement.

Emergentism^[8] asks whether the regularities we call laws might be byproducts of interaction, not preconditions for it. In complex systems—ecosystems, economies, weather patterns—stability often emerges only after countless reciprocal adjustments. Here, 'law' is not a starting point but an outcome, and one that can shift if the underlying exchanges shift.

Causal Powers vs. Statistical Regularities^[9] marks another fracture. Some philosophers maintain that powers—capacities embedded in things—are the true engines of causation, with laws simply summarizing their typical exercise. Others argue that what we see as powers are themselves just statistical effects of patterns across vast data. The tug-of-war continues.

Quantum Mechanics^[10] complicates matters further. At the subatomic level, causation becomes a matter of probabilities rather than certainties. The idea of a universal, exceptionless rule begins to falter—unless, as some physicists argue, the probabilistic laws themselves are the deeper determinism.

Complex Systems Science^[11] has perhaps gone furthest in reframing laws. Patterns like traffic flow, predator–prey cycles, or market oscillations can be predicted under certain conditions, yet they are not fixed; change the balance of inputs, and the 'law' dissolves. This has led some to see natural laws themselves as the most stable summaries of an ongoing negotiation between forces—a moving target dressed in the language of permanence.

The tension today is not just about whether laws are fixed or flexible, but whether the very category of 'law' can survive in a world where predictability is an emergent, contingent feature of power in motion.

Laws as a conference of difference

If the classical picture imagines laws as the architect’s blueprint, the Conference of Difference^[12] (CoD) sees them as the meeting minutes—summaries of what diverse powers have, for the moment, agreed to do.

In this model, existence is not ruled from above by fixed edicts, but unfolds as an unbroken negotiation among forces. Every interaction is a petition—sometimes adversarial, sometimes cooperative—where each participant seeks to preserve and extend its ability. This continual interplay is not chaos, because difference does not act alone; it acts with and against other difference, producing moments of balance. These moments, when equilibrium holds, are what we later write down as 'laws'.

Here, causation is not a one-way chain of dominos, but a reciprocal adjustment: an event alters the field of powers and that altered field reshapes the next event. The 'cause' is the conference itself—the structured engagement of abilities—while the 'effect' is the rebalanced state that emerges. In stable environments, these rebalances settle into enduring patterns. Over time, such patterns appear as if they were immutable laws.

Necessity, in this light, is not an external compulsion but a high degree of stability. When a pattern holds under vast variation of circumstance—planets orbiting stars, water freezing at a given temperature—we treat it as necessary. Yet its stability comes not from a cosmic statute but from the robustness of the underlying equilibrium. Disrupt the balance, and the 'law' shifts or disappears.

This reframing also dissolves the need for a metaphysical divide between 'law' and 'event'. Laws are not separate from the processes they govern; they are the processes’ most enduring agreements. The law of gravity, for example, is the name we give to the long-standing, highly stable power exchange between mass and spacetime curvature^[13]—a pattern so persistent that we forget it is an outcome.

In the Conference of Difference^[14] (CoD), causation is thus inseparable from reciprocity. Every cause is also an effect; every effect becomes a cause. The so-called 'laws of nature' are the shorthand for those reciprocal patterns that are resilient enough to endure through vast stretches of time and space.

This model does not undermine science—it sharpens it. Instead of asking: What are the laws? we ask: What power exchanges make this pattern so stable, and under what conditions might they change? Laws become less like axioms carved in stone and more like peace treaties: effective so long as the balance of power that sustains them remains intact.

Convergence & Divergence

Convergence:

• Both classical and CoD views see laws as patterns in the world rather than arbitrary inventions.
• Both treat stability as the key to predictability.
• Both acknowledge that laws and causation must connect deeply to the capacities of things.
• Both allow that science works by identifying these stable patterns, even if their origin stories differ.

Divergence:

• Source of laws: Classical views often place laws 'above' events—fixed rules that dictate what happens. CoD embeds laws within events as the outcome of reciprocal power exchange.
• Nature of necessity: Classical models may treat necessity as absolute (metaphysical or logical), while CoD treats it as stability—persistent but contingent.
• Causation: In many classical accounts, causation flows one way (cause → effect). CoD sees causation as inherently reciprocal—every effect reshapes the conditions that produced it.
• Change over time: Classical models tend to see laws as timeless; CoD allows that when the balance of powers shifts, so too can the laws.
• Epistemic stance: Classical science often frames laws as discoveries of eternal truths; CoD frames them as provisional summaries, subject to revision when the underlying equilibrium changes.

In short: classical theories often treat laws as the foundations of reality; the Conference of Difference^[15] treats them as the record of reality’s most enduring negotiations.

If the laws of nature are not eternal decrees but the most stable agreements in an ongoing exchange of powers, then science is our record-keeping of balance—not our decoding of divine statute. Predictability is born of stability, and stability is born of reciprocity. The real question is not: What are the laws? but: What sustains them—and what might unsettle them?

Next week, we’ll push further: if laws are provisional summaries of a moving balance, what happens to causation when that balance breaks? And can the universe be lawful in a world where flux, not fixity, is the rule?^[16]

The Gospel of Being

by John Mackay

A rigorous yet readable exploration of how existence functions—and how that relates to you.

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