Your point on laws and natural abstractions expresses nicely a big problem with postmodernism that was always there, but wasn’t clearly pointed out:
Natural Abstractions and more generally almost every concept is subjective, in the sense that people can change what a concept means, and are quite subjective, but that doesn’t mean you can deny the concept/abstraction and instantly make it non-effective, you actually have to do real work, and importantly change stuff in the world, and you can’t simply assign different meanings or different concepts to the same data, and expect the concept to no longer work. You actually have to change the behavior of lots of other different humans, and if you fail, the concept is still real.
This also generalizes to a lot of other abstractions like gender or sexuality, where real work, especially in medicine and biotech is necessary if you want concepts on gender or sex to change drastically.
This is why a lot of postmodernism is wrong to claim that denying concepts automatically negates it’s power, you have to do real work to change concepts, which is why I tend to favor technological progress.
I’ll put the social concepts one in the link below, because it’s so good as a response to postmodernism:
Your point on laws and natural abstractions expresses nicely a big problem with postmodernism that was always there, but wasn’t clearly pointed out:
Natural Abstractions and more generally almost every concept is subjective, in the sense that people can change what a concept means, and are quite subjective, but that doesn’t mean you can deny the concept/abstraction and instantly make it non-effective, you actually have to do real work, and importantly change stuff in the world, and you can’t simply assign different meanings or different concepts to the same data, and expect the concept to no longer work. You actually have to change the behavior of lots of other different humans, and if you fail, the concept is still real.
This also generalizes to a lot of other abstractions like gender or sexuality, where real work, especially in medicine and biotech is necessary if you want concepts on gender or sex to change drastically.
This is why a lot of postmodernism is wrong to claim that denying concepts automatically negates it’s power, you have to do real work to change concepts, which is why I tend to favor technological progress.
I’ll put the social concepts one in the link below, because it’s so good as a response to postmodernism:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mMEbfooQzMwJERAJJ/natural-latents-the-concepts#Social_Constructs__Laws