 Are the laws of physics themselves physical? Do the laws of physics exist? If they do exist, what is the nature of their existence? If they don't exist, what are we talking about when we talk about the laws of physics? A couple of lines of reasoning about this that are really interesting. Let's say that the laws of physics don't exist. Some people say that what the laws of physics actually are is just a way of describing regularities in the phenomena that we experience or the regularities that we think we see in the world. But the laws of physics themselves don't have any real, mind-dependent, independent existence. But then the question is this. What is the cause of the regularity of the phenomena that we experience? What is the cause of the regularity that we see in the world? Why do the laws of physics describe phenomena in motion today and they will tomorrow and they did 150 years from now? Is it just coincidence? Is it chance? Or is it that the laws of physics are describing actually something? There's another line of reasoning though. If it's the case that the laws of physics do exist, then we run into this problem. Are the laws of physics themselves physical? Do they take up space? Are they made up of matter or energy? It seems like the laws of the physical world couldn't be in the system of the physical world. It seems like the laws of physics aren't physical. They're kind of metaphysical or one step more fundamental, if you will, than the physical laws. They're kind of what give rise to physical phenomena. But if that's true, that immediately implies some kind of non-physicalism, at least dualism, that what exists in the world, well, there's physical stuff and there's at least the laws of physics which kind of keep the physical stuff in check. Here's what I think. I think the laws of physics exist. They have a real existence, a mind-independent existence and they are non-physical. They are metaphysical. I like to think of them as algorithms. What I mean by an algorithm is this, that something that generates a particular output given a particular input, so if we're talking about motion, let's say, I've got holding my hand up here and then my muscles relax and the arm drops. Holding my hand up, relax my muscles and the arm drops. Well, the input, you might say, is the position of my hand, various facts and data about how much potential energy, let's say, is in this location of space and then as those inputs change, it yields a different output based on the laws of physics. So you can think about it like a car driving down the street. At any given time, that car has position, momentum, it's got gas in the gas tank that's exploding, energy that's created and then that information put into the algorithm generates motion and generates the output. One of the nice things, among others, one of the nice things that happens if you think about the laws of physics as a kind of algorithm is that it also can apply to the mental world. So it might be the case that based on particular information, maybe let's say information about the physical world, information gets put into the algorithm and generates the output which is conscious phenomena. So for example, wavelength in the physical world, wavelength of a certain size, a certain distance between peaks of a wave gets put into this mental algorithm. What gets generated is the representation of the color red, the seeing of the color red. So all the colors that I experience might be understood as outputs of an algorithm given a particular input. Now this theory doesn't come without its own problems, namely it gives up physicalism. We're saying there are more than just physical things in existence. There's also algorithms, also mental inputs. It doesn't answer the question, what is an algorithm? What is the ontological status of this algorithm I'm talking about? Well, I could say it's non-physical. It's the thing that takes the input and generates the output, doesn't put a lot of meat on the bones. I'll put a little bit more in the future. This is part of the theory of resolving the mind-body problem that I talked about over the last couple of weeks. But itself is not immediately intuitive because we don't have a kind of direct interaction, it seems, with these algorithms. What I would say is we experience the output of the algorithms, and sometimes we might experience the input of the algorithms, but we don't experience the algorithm itself. What do you guys think? Two questions. Do the laws of physics exist? Do they not? If they do exist, what is their nature? Are they physical? If they don't exist, then what is the cause of the regularity of the physical world?