Jim, I have misunderstood your position, I think. Are you agreeing with me that there are prescriptive laws, but that you think a mind must be behind them?
Jim B. wrote:But how can anything be prescriptive absent intentionality and mind is what I'm asking.
I do not know. I do not think ignorance is a good reason to conclude God.
What would the scope of the explanation have to do with it? If prescriptiveness involves intention, purpose, a goal, that would fly in the face of the predominant scientific world picture which rejects those things.
Forget the scope; I misunderstood your point.
So to go back a bit, you said before:"Every other case of prescriptiveness I can think of involves mind or consciousness somehow."
What prescriptive laws are you thinking of here? Are these legal laws? Legal laws are very different to the laws of nature (and really are more like guidelines, in that people can and do ignore them sometimes).
I would say they keep together not directly due to God's will. I think Sgt. Tomas would say different. They do so because they are following a prescriptive law.
If reality is devoid of purpose, I don't see where the prescriptiveness would come from. The consistency and regularity, if they are prescriptive, would suggest a mind behind it all. If they are merely descriptive, that would not suggest a mind behind it all. If everything was in flux, the hypercontingency that met talks about, that would suggest to me the mere randomness of things happening, just brute contingency. If you hear static on the phone line, you assume no one is talking. You listen for order and structure in the noise to sift out an intelligent signal.
I think the consistency and regularity indicate that there are prescriptive laws. Whether there was a mind behind those laws is unknown. However, all the minds we know about are continent on matter, which in turn is continent on those laws, which suggests to me that mind cannot be behind it all.
But are the laws evolving along with the wave function or is the function evolving in accordance with the laws?
The latter. But I now realise this is consistent with your position, so is probably not relevant.