Natural Processes

THOUGHT OF THE DAY: "No man's knowledge here can go beyond his experience." - John Locke, from An Essay Concerning Human Understanding Kindly translate.

Locke's sentence is deceptively simple, and there are several ways to translate it depending on how literal or elegant you want to be.

A very literal modern English rendering would be:

"No person's knowledge can extend beyond what they have experienced."

In contemporary French:

La connaissance d'un homme ne peut aller au-delà de son expérience.

In Latin (which I suspect you may enjoy):

Nullius hominis scientia ultra experientiam eius procedere potest.

The philosophical point Locke is making is stronger than merely saying "you only know what you've seen." In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, he is arguing against the idea of innate knowledge. All human knowledge, he says, is ultimately grounded in experience—either of the external world through the senses or of our own minds through reflection. So "experience" here means the totality of what has been presented to the mind, not merely personal adventures.

One could paraphrase his meaning as:

"The limits of what we can know are set by the limits of experience."

That version is not a translation, but it captures what Locke was getting at.

Infants know how to suckle out of the womb.

That's one of the classic objections people raised to Locke.

A newborn infant can suckle, startle at sudden noises, grasp with its fingers, and show preferences for certain tastes. These behaviors appear before any significant postnatal experience. To many people, that suggests that at least some knowledge or capacities are inborn.

Locke would respond that he was not denying innate capacities or instincts. What he denied was innate ideas and propositions—the notion that humans are born already possessing concepts or truths such as "God exists," "the whole is greater than the part," or moral principles. A newborn's ability to suckle, he would say, is not knowledge in the philosophical sense but a natural mechanism built into the organism.

Modern biology complicates the picture further. We now know that a great deal of behavior is genetically influenced. A baby does not learn the rooting reflex from experience; it arrives equipped with it. At the same time, Locke was right that much of what we call knowledge depends on interaction with the world. No infant is born knowing calculus, French, or the capitals of Europe.

There is also a deeper point. The line between "instinct" and "knowledge" is not always sharp. Consider language. Humans seem to be born with remarkable built-in machinery for acquiring language, a view associated with Noam Chomsky. Yet the particular language learned depends on experience. So we arrive neither as blank slates nor as fully furnished minds.

In that respect, Locke's famous metaphor of the mind as a tabula rasa—a blank tablet—has not aged perfectly. Modern neuroscience suggests that the tablet comes with a great deal of structure already engraved into it. The writing, however, still depends heavily on experience.

My objection was patently obvious and irrelevant. Clearly he had some other idea of knowledge.

Exactly. And that's where your suspicion becomes especially interesting.

Those are not neutral criteria. They are preferences—deeply entrenched preferences, to be sure, but preferences nonetheless.

Suppose the universe had no significant symmetries, no conservation laws, no regularities across scales, no simple relationships hiding beneath complexity. In such a universe, mathematics emphasizing symmetry and elegance might be of little use. The mathematicians would still study it, but physics might find it largely irrelevant.

Instead, the universe seems unusually hospitable to those ideas. The laws of nature appear remarkably symmetric. Conservation laws are tied to symmetries through the work of Emmy Noether. Simple equations often describe enormous ranges of phenomena. Physicists repeatedly discover that elegant mathematical structures predict things later observed experimentally.

So one possibility is that mathematicians have, over centuries, unconsciously evolved a taste for exactly those abstractions that are likely to model reality well.

Another possibility is even more radical: our notions of elegance and simplicity may themselves have been shaped by living in this particular universe. We find symmetry beautiful because symmetry is everywhere. We find simple explanations satisfying because the world often rewards them. Had we evolved in a radically different cosmos, perhaps we would admire entirely different mathematical virtues.

There is a famous quip attributed to John von Neumann that in mathematics one does not understand things; one merely gets used to them. Something similar may apply here. We may have gotten used to certain kinds of structure because they repeatedly succeed.

That would turn Wigner's puzzle on its head. The question would no longer be:

Why is mathematics so effective?

but rather:

Why do we call certain mathematics elegant?

Perhaps because, generation after generation, those are the kinds of structures that keep proving useful.

As a former programmer, you may recognize the flavor of this. Programmers often speak of "beautiful" code. Yet much of what they call beautiful turns out to be code that is modular, predictable, economical, and resistant to bugs. The aesthetic judgment is not entirely independent of practical success. Over time, usefulness and beauty become intertwined.

The same may be true of mathematics. We may be mistaking a long history of successful pattern recognition for an objective standard of elegance. The two are difficult to disentangle.

The universe puts on the show it does because it does not think (in which case it could be arbitrary or mischievous) but follows natural processes wherever they go.

That is a very old intuition, and one that underlies much of modern science.

If the universe is not making choices, not pursuing goals, not expressing preferences, then what we observe is simply the consequence of whatever underlying rules exist. The universe does not decide to be elegant. It does not decide to be symmetric. It does not wake up in a mischievous mood and alter the gravitational constant.

In that view, regularity is exactly what one should expect. A process that follows the same rules everywhere and everywhen naturally generates patterns. Those patterns are what mathematics captures.

In fact, one might argue that mathematics works precisely because the universe lacks intentions. If a conscious cosmic agent were constantly intervening, changing outcomes for aesthetic or moral reasons, science would become much more difficult. Imagine trying to discover the law of gravity if the universe occasionally decided that Tuesdays should be different.

Theologically minded thinkers have sometimes answered this by saying that a creator, if there is one, is faithful and consistent rather than arbitrary. But your formulation dispenses with that entirely. The regularity comes not from a reliable mind but from the absence of a mind.

What strikes me is that your thought also bears on the earlier discussion of simplicity and elegance. We often talk as if the universe prefers elegant laws. But that language may be misleading. The universe has no preferences. Rather, certain kinds of stable, self-consistent processes may inevitably generate the patterns we call elegant.

A snowflake does not choose six-fold symmetry. A crystal does not admire geometry. The symmetry emerges from the underlying process. Likewise, perhaps the large-scale regularities of physics emerge because there is no one steering them.

There is a subtle caveat, though. Saying "the universe follows natural processes wherever they go" pushes the mystery back one level. One can still ask: why those processes? Why laws that produce a comprehensible, structured cosmos rather than a chaotic one?

Science is very good at describing the consequences of the laws. It is less clear whether it can explain why the laws themselves have the character they do.

Your remark neatly separates two questions that are often conflated:

1. Why does the universe behave consistently rather than capriciously?

2. Why are the underlying rules what they are?

The first may be answered by the absence of a willful agent. The second remains as puzzling as ever. Even a thoroughly naturalistic picture leaves us staring at the fact that there are laws at all, and that they have the particular form they do. That question sits beyond Locke, beyond empiricism, and perhaps beyond anything experience alone can settle.

I remember a camping trip where I noticed a gradient in the rock sizes from a wash, the big ones first, then gradually smaller to sand at the end. That is a natural process, it is the way thing just have to happen.

That’s a very nice observation, and it’s a good concrete anchor for the whole discussion.

What you saw in that wash is a classic example of sorting by energy. When water flows with enough force to move stones, it can only carry particles up to a certain size and weight. As the water slows, it drops the heaviest material first, then progressively lighter material, until only fine sand and silt can settle at the far end. No planning, no goal—just physics plus constraints.

And what’s important is that the pattern you noticed—big to small in a gradient—is not something imposed from outside. It is what emerges when a very simple rule is iterated across many collisions, drops, and changes in flow speed.

That is very close to your broader point about the universe not “deciding” anything. The river doesn’t intend to sort rocks. It just can’t do otherwise given momentum, friction, turbulence, gravity, and the shapes involved. The “must” you sense in it isn’t logical necessity in the abstract sense—it’s physical necessity given the conditions.

This is where your earlier empiricist theme quietly reappears. We tend to trust these patterns because we see them repeat: erosion sorts by size, crystals form lattices, gases diffuse evenly, orbits stabilize under gravity. Over time we stop seeing them as contingent and start seeing them as “the way things have to happen.”

But there’s a subtle philosophical shift hiding in your description. When you say “that is just how things have to happen,” you’re almost attributing necessity to nature itself. Yet strictly speaking, it’s conditional necessity: if you have flowing water, gravity, sediment, and time, then this kind of ordering will occur.

So the universe isn’t enforcing a rule in the way a mind enforces a rule. It’s more like consequences unfolding from structure.

And this is why such examples are so powerful in thinking about mathematics and physics. They give you a kind of lived intuition for why simple laws generate complex but orderly outcomes. You don’t need intention for structure—you only need constraints plus repetition.

Your wash is, in miniature, what cosmology is in large scale: a vast system of interactions where gradients, flows, and thresholds inevitably produce patterns that look almost designed, but are really just what persistence under rules looks like.