Humeanism and Exceptions in the Fundamental Laws of Physics

Abstract

It has been argued that the fundamental laws of physics do not face a ‘problem of provisos’ equivalent to that found in other scientific disciplines (Earman, Roberts and Smith 2002) and there is only the appearance of exceptions to physical laws if they are confused with differential equations of evolution type (Smith 2002). In this paper I argue that even if this is true, fundamental laws in physics still pose a major challenge to standard Humean approaches to lawhood, as they are not in any obvious sense about regularities in behaviour. A Humean approach to physical laws with exceptions is possible, however, if we adopt a view of laws that takes them to be the algorithms in the algorithmic compressions of empirical data. When this is supplemented with a distinction between lossy and lossless compression, we can explain exceptions in terms of compression artefacts present in the application of the lossy laws.

Compressibility and the Algorithmic Theory of Laws

“…If we like, we can take something similar to Lewis's "Humean Mosaic" as the basis from which all the data originates. The laws of nature then emerge from this basis as the algorithms in its shortest description (Wheeler, 2012(Wheeler, , 2016(Wheeler, and 2017. However, this view does not commit us to adopting Lewis's particular version of the atomic facts: we need not, for example, construe them as being about intrinsic natural properties attached to space-time points.…”

“…The algorithmic theory of laws has the resources to explain what is going on here. As I have argued elsewhere (Wheeler 2012(Wheeler , 2017(Wheeler and 2018, it is prudent for an advocate of the algorithmic theory to follow computer science in acknowledging two kinds of data compression. The example of algorithmic compression given in section 1 is an example of "lossless compression": given the algorithm (and any other singular input data) it is possible to return the original string intact, without any information loss.…”