Frank Parker
2 min readSep 23, 2023

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You seem to be teasing us, here, with what amounts to little more than a semantic argument. The English language, and its North American adaptations, is full of words that mean different things in different contexts.

"The laws of nature" is a way of describing, in English, predictable patterns of cause and effect in the universe as we perceive it. Society's laws, on the other hand, are rules which are collectively devised and agreed to in an attempt to control the somewhat less predictable behaviour of human beings. Ironically, they are based largely on those aspects of human behaviour which can be predicted with a fair degree of accuracy. So, for example, the threat of loss of freedom can generally be predicted to be a deterrent to certain kinds of behavioiur which the majority of those around us regard as unacceptable.

Without the predictability of nature, human beings would be unable to create anything. Imagine a world in which a sharp object made from a hard material did not always pierce and cut a softer material. Everything that is man made depends on this simple fact in order to shape materials and create useful and/or beautiful objects.

That is probably not the best example, but it serves to illustrate that we depend upon the predictable consequence of the coming together of certain conditions in order to make anything, from buildings that don't fall down* to garments that keep us warm and dry.

We can be certain that two plus two equals four because each of the words in the statement have an unambiguous meaning which is embodied in the words themselves. Words like 'law' and 'behaviour' have rather more amorphous meanings, depending upon the context in which they are used.

As I said at the start, a law of nature is a statement that a certain specific event will always be followed by another specific event. A heavy object will always fall to the ground, unless supported, for example. Such behaviour is predictable because of the billions of observations we can repeatedly make in which such sequences of events occur.

We can't make the same predictions about human behaviour, although the high degree of predictabiility in human behaviour does make it possible for other humn beings to control us. So we make laws that state, for example, that if you're caught taking something that does not belong to you there will be certain unpleasant consequnces.

Such laws are not immutable and cn be changed if the humans making the law are changed.

And those who desire to sell us things or ideas can use certain triggers to convince us to do or believe things that careful thought might suggest are not in our own best interests.

*I'm not sure if the inventors of RAACS predicted a limited life for the material. If they did, it seems that certain authorities who used tne material ignored those predictions.

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Frank Parker
Frank Parker

Written by Frank Parker

Frank is a retired Engineer from England now living in Ireland. He is trying to learn and share the lessons of history.

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