The Ontological Status of Natural Laws: Reading My 2007 Notes from 2025

I. From the 2007 Notes

In the summer of 2007, I wrote a short series titled Are There Physical Quantities in Physical Laws?
The question was deliberately twisted. It treated “laws,” which are statements or relations, as if they were things possessing physical attributes. In a logical sense, this might appear to be a category mistake. Yet what I was really after was not a linguistic puzzle but the ontological status of natural laws themselves.

Where does the law of conservation of mass exist?
Where, in the world, does the law of energy conservation reside?
If such laws are not physically real, then physics is written in terms of something that does not exist in the physical sense. This paradox led me to Henri Poincaré’s conventionalism: the view that the laws of nature are not found in nature but are artifacts of cognition, the Artificial through which human beings organize their experience.

At that time, I regarded natural science itself as an adaptive device of the species Homo sapiens. Once the human body had largely ceased its biological evolution, we began to adapt not by changing our physiology but by transforming our symbolic and conceptual systems. Science, too, was one of those evolving artifacts. Hence, the shift from geocentric to heliocentric cosmology, or from Newtonian mechanics to relativity and quantum theory, could be seen as a process of conceptual evolution rather than a march toward an ultimate truth. Each theory was not the optimum solution, but merely one among many feasible solutions permitted by the interface between human cognition and the world.

Thus, when I asked whether physical laws “exist,” my point was not skeptical relativism but an attempt to articulate the biological constraints of human knowing. Natural laws are not material objects, but they acquire a peculiar kind of reality because the human mind, as a biological organ, evolved precisely to model the world in such law-like terms. In other words, laws do not exist within nature; they exist within the structure of how we, as natural beings, construct nature. That was the horizon I reached in 2007.

II. Self-Annotation from 2025

Reading these notes eighteen years later, I sense both their immaturity and a certain prophetic intuition. In 2007 I lacked the vocabulary to express what I was reaching for, but in retrospect my line of thought anticipated what is now known as structural realism and informational realism in contemporary philosophy of science.

Today I would say that natural laws are not physical entities but relational patterns that preserve the recursive structure of the world. They are not matter, but the form through which material processes sustain their coherence. The “reality of laws,” then, refers not to the existence of things but to the persistence of relations—something close to what Heisenberg once called Form.

What I then named “the Artificial” can now be reinterpreted as language as interface. Through language we construct our world, and we inscribe within it the forms we call laws. Language functions as an evolutionary membrane between mind and world; physical laws appear as stable ripples or folds on that membrane.

From this standpoint, my youthful question—Does it make sense to ask about the physicality of physical laws?—was in fact an early attempt to explore the physical and informational basis of cognition itself.
Laws are neither outside nature nor merely within the mind; rather, the order of nature is folded into our symbolic activity as living beings.
To unfold that hidden topology—to make visible how our language mirrors the world’s structure—remains the joint task of philosophy and science today.