universe/laws?

I am reminded of something I heard once.

The past is history
The future is a mystery
This moment is a gift, and that's why we call it the present.

But when it comes to the linear model of time that we automatically apply to events we observe, it may be that it is merely a tool of our perception. The more I think on it the more it becomes clear to me that everything happens now, even the past and the future. It may sound paradoxical, but it is not. The alternative would be that something can happen in the future, but that is just a prediction of the present. Whatever we, in this moment, can predict will happen cannot happen before the moment we predict has become the present. Time exists only in perception.

When construed as passive, cosmological laws are invented -- they are conceptions and formulations by observing agents who are also creative thinkers. These laws are generalizations that describe recurring or reliable facts and events in nature.

When construed as active, laws are discovered, and would be capturing or representing rules that things are literally conforming to ("things" as defined in the broadest sense). These intelligible rules would not be more objects that exist in yet another place -- they would instead engender the very somewhere(s) and somewhen(s) in which things acquire an ontological and epistemological status. Such intelligible laws stop the endless repetition of explanations that require more explanations -- the insanity that results from worlds having their origins in other worlds, from spatiotemporal levels having their origin in other spatiotemporal levels.

For instance, if causation was an active rather than passive concept or generalization that the universe's existence was dependent upon and that its content was conforming to, then causation would be one of those supposed ultimate provenances and templates. There would be no "cause" for "causation" since it would be the very source of that necessity.

The "laws" of nature are actually just observations of its structure. Nature doesn't obey the laws, it is the laws.

dpmartin
One force of which every single thing is an expression. Living things can indeed chose, but what would that be worth if there were no choices? Our ability to chose is simply our command of a small fraction of this force, but both our choices and our limitations are given by it.

I am sure a name for this force already hangs on the tip of the tongue of everyone who reads this, but if we use it we simultaneously invoke centuries of dogmatic thinking which only serves to cloud the issue. Just try to form a concept of everything that exists as one singular unit. After all, we cannot rightly deny that it is....

What we often forget when talking about the big bang theory is that it was proposed by a priest. He was a physicist also, but he organized his scientific finds according to a linear model he knew from religion. A good example of how deep our conditioning goes. We have to shed it all to see clearer.

Monsignor Georges Henri Joseph Édouard Lemaître ( lemaitre.ogg (help·info) 17 July 1894 – 20 June 1966) was a Belgian priest, astronomer and professor of physics at the Catholic University of Louvain. He sometimes used the title Abbé or Monseigneur.
Lemaître proposed what became known as the Big Bang theory of the origin of the Universe, which he called his 'hypothesis of the primeval atom'.

I think this trap (as well as "infinite regression") is a result of our very nature. We have an almost genotypical need to think in terms of causation, but this doesn't prove that causes and effects exist in themselves (I think but never see them) or that determinism is a cosmological axiom. It's a paradigmatic assumption, and all assumptions, even those considered axiomatic, are fundamentally provisional.