What we would like to know is why do the planets obey gravity? There might have been no planets. But given that there were going to be wandering stars, could they not just follow a random walk? But even doing that would require a program.

Besides the planets, we also had the Sun and terrestrial gravity and possibly communication satellites to consider. But why and how would these phenomena be placed under just one lawful regime? What necessity drives this invention? It has to do with the continuity and/or depth of nature as an aesthetic and as a constraint. It has to do with the conceivability of the world, something that also pertains to our dreams.

That the world be conceivable is a tautology. That it be so conceivable is a marvel. God has clearly pushed the envelope of logical possibility. What enforces these logical constraints? Does logic have a life of its own, independent of mind or is it the condition or ground for mind?

Logic would be a necessary principle of self-organization in order for there to be coherence and experience.

I would agree with McDowell when he states in his Mind and World that we cannot separate coherence from experience. Incoherent experience exists only parasitically wrt normal experience or as its virtual background where it lends itself to creative potentiality as in artistic styles of dementia.

If logic did not already exist, then experience would have invented it and probably did. Logic does not limit experience, but merely provides a convenient skeleton or body for it. Our bodies do have a biologic of their own. Our bodies simply instantiate a convenient biologic. Atoms and bodies belong to the same metaphysical category.

Should the process of instantiation be metaphysically problematic? Not unless we suppose there is a divide between concepts and experience. Our bodies are embodied in experience, and necessarily so. That is not to prohibit bodiless experience, but that would have its own domain, only loosely attached to ours, as we see in dreams, for example.

Does all this settle the issue of planetary motion? It does if we can think of the world as a logical and natural extension of our bodies, which seems to be a logical way to look at things. Anthropomorphism comes with a very respectable intellectual pedigree, so let us not spite our nose for our face.

Which is just to say that when this book is balanced, we will turn out to have been the busiest beavers of all, but we already knew that.

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rev. 5/28/98