[Interesting Ian]

Originally Posted by Michael Chui

That feels wholly nonsensical to me. Governance is the management of a population by a subset of that same population. It demands sentience and control, neither of which are possessed by "physical laws". We don't say that the commutative property of arithmetic governs addition simply because 1 + 2 = 2 + 1. It's not having a say-so over arithmetic: it's just a generalized observation.

The word "law" has never been a good choice in science. There's a poetic flair to it that's annoyingly ambiguous in today's postmodern society.

Allow me to clarify. Take gravitational force. We tend to think this as being a real force, or in other words there is this existent called gravitational force which constrains the Earth to orbit the Sun and compels objects near the Earths surface to fall. More generally all physical change in the world is the result of real existing forces. So physical laws, or at least the forces described by physical laws, constrain reality to behave as it does. And of course physical causation refers to real causes existing in nature. When one snooker ball hits another the second ball moves due to the innate power of the impact of the first ball.

On the other hand arguably "physical laws" are simply a description of the unfolding of events. In this case the word "law" is inappropriate. Something like gravity would then just simply be a means to mathematically describe physical processes in the world. But of course in this case we have no explanation of why physical processes unfold the way they do. We can't say the Earth orbits the Sun due to gravity since all physical laws are merely descriptive.

I don't see this as being a problem at all though. But it does have interesting implications for the free will debate. Thus I would argue that we are immediately acquainted with our own causal agency. But in this case mental causation and physical causation are of 2 entirely differing natures. Only mental causation refers to a real causal power existing in nature. In this case there cannot be any question that we have free will unless one means by "free will" something obscure.

And yet, there is no evidence that human beings, or anything else, are progenitors of cause.

I think this is absolutely wrong. We have no evidence that anything physical is a real progenitor of cause (although it could be a useful metaphysical hypothesis). But I suggest we are directly acquainted with our own causal agency. Indeed to deny this is to embrace epiphenomenalism and I would argue that epiphenomenalism is incoherent (I can provide this argument if you wish).

It is fairly well-established that human beings do not appear out of thin air: they are born and raised. They are effects of a cause, known as reproduction.

Our physical bodies are, but we are not the same as our physical bodies.

Previous to this, it is postulated that they are effects of a different cause: evolution. Evolution is presumed to be the effect of abiogenesis, or whatever the fashionable theory is today, which is in turn a result of atmospheric effects which resulted from the coalescence of some nebula's space dust into a solar system, which probably came from some half-crazed phenomenon we like to call the Big Bang.

We are made of star stuff, as Carl Sagan says.

Our physical bodies are.

It says nothing about consciousness. Nothing about choice. Only predictability, that it is possible to determine the cause of actions.

I would recommend looking up the literature on mind-altering drugs. I've never read the stuff myself, but I think that would be a good source to discover that mental functions can be altered by very physical actions. That hardly seals the case: it does not suggest that all mental functions are sourced from physical changes. But it's a starting point.

The hypothesis that consciousness is wholly produced by physical processes is suggested by mind/brain correlations certainly. But it certainly doesn't entail this hypothesis, and there is a great deal of evidence and many reasons to doubt it. (I won't go into them at this point as it would take me 10's of thousands of words!)