It’s debatable whether there’s a lack of evidence. What do you mean, exactly, by “a lack of evidence”? We have the entire body of physics, which is extremely successful in modeling, manipulating, predicting, and explaining physical phenomena. Some might even argue that it’s a nearly complete accounting for all of Nature, with just a few kinks left such as the question of what happens in the center of a black hole and how stuff behaved during the first 10⁻⁴³ seconds of cosmic inflation.
However, I would personally agree that the efficacy of physics doesn’t necessarily imply that reality is “based on physical law.” For any given physical law, we don’t know why things behave according to that law. Or if we do, we don’t know why things behave according to the laws that explain that law, etc. All we really know are patterns of how reality tends to behave wrt cause and effect.
And also, if reality is fundamentally based on physical law, what force is there that makes reality continue to adhere to that physical law? Further physical laws? And what force is behind the effecting of those physical laws? Ad infinitum.
So, it’s entirely possible that there’s an entire spiritual reality that underlies this cause and effect. For example, maybe we’re all parts of a collective consciousness that continually creates perceived reality second by second in accordance to what best serves everyone’s purpose(s).
Or, maybe we’re all basically asleep and blindly creating reality according to what we expect, and we’ve come to expect less and less magic and more and more mechanism, hence reality appears non-magical and mechanistic to us.
Or maybe we each create our own reality according to our wishes, but through the magic of a multiverse in which everything that could possibly happen does happen, we get to simultaneously share our realities with others who happen to have made the exact same choices in what reality should comprise…
Or maybe the only reason reality appears uniform and mechanistic is because we exist on a huge scale—our bodies contain trillions of cells, and those cells each contain trillions of atoms—so the underlying essentially non-mechanistic life is perceived by us in its purely aggregate form, which means its behavior is largely described by statistical mechanics.
So, why do people believe reality is based on physical law as opposed to any of the above possibilities and more?
- I think people prefer the easiest, simplest, and most direct answer, especially when other answers can’t be empirically verified…
- One could argue that the only possibility that accords to Occam’s razor is that reality is fundamentally based on physical laws.
- One could argue that the only possibility that accords to Occam’s razor is that reality is fundamentally based on physical laws.
Personally, I don’t think it’s that simple.
For one, you have to crudely dismiss tons and tons of personal mystical and paranormal/parapsychological experiences people have—virtually everyone’s had them—for your “dataset” to be wholly compatible with physical law.
Two, physicalism isn’t so much a particular physical theory, but more of a worldview or outlook, a paradigm, an epistemic approach to the world/existence. What if we ought to assume reality is as rich and full and magical as we can possibly imagine given the data at hand? We could still apply Occam’s razor where it obviously makes sense, such as, for example, using it to throw .out the pilot-wave theory of quantum mechanics.
- Most people aren’t imaginative enough to see how various spiritualist explanations could be behind physics as we know it.
- People prefer mundane explanations to “fantastical” ones, I suppose because they’re less unsettling. People don’t want to be jarred, and they especially don’t want to be jarred awake. (I put “fantastical” in quotes because exactly what counts as being fantastical or not depends on one’s fundamental episteme…)
- People desperately want to believe that they can assimilate and understand all of reality under some simple paradigm/set of principles. To think that reality is fundamentally spiritual or psychological or whatever is essentially the same as believing in magic, and of course mystery. People abhor a mystery just as much as nature abhors a vacuum. We’ll do anything to come up with a “rational” explanation for anything we witness as soon as possible.
- Since the advent of Newtonian mechanics and its extreme success in predicting physical phenomena, we’ve become accustom to seeing reality as being fundamentally mechanistic. This has only increased as physics has become more and more “complete.” And intuitively, a thing cannot be both mechanistic and alive. So, we’ve become accustom to seeing reality as being less and less alive. Even our own living flesh is seen as made up of dead matter. The sun is now seen as “just” a big ball of gas, etc. This is unfortunate because it deadens us and deadens our reality. And anyway, the point I’m making is that spiritual interpretations of the universe/existence are fundamentally alive, and hence they’re anathema.
- I wrote about more reasons people disbelieve in spirituality, magic, psi, etc. starting at the sixth paragraph in https://myriachromat.wordpress.com/2022/01/23/psychism/.
So, I guess that’s all I have to say about that.
