How careful do we have to be deriving laws from our empirical observations… deriving laws that we think must be true because we have observed them to always be true.
I believe this is analogous to Hempel’s Paradox, otherwise known as the raven paradox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven_paradox .
I wonder what, out of everything we think we know, must actually be true. Is there anything we can really say with 100% confidence? What truths can be derived by examining what happens when a proposed truth is not in fact true?
Perhaps not an “arbitrary mess of surface rules,” but why not just one of an infinite number of possible laws.
We have but only begun to gain an EMPIRICAL understanding of our world.… why should our observations equate to what must be a higher truth governing all possible other universes.
However, if we restrict ourself to what we think we know about our world, it is hard to imagine the extent of what else must also change to accommodate a match failing to strike. Nonetheless, new phenomena and discoveries over the years have continually forced us to abandon our current theories about our existence. What do we really know for sure about this world anyway?