What Holds It Together?

Reality is not a chaos. It holds together, and it runs on laws. So it is natural to ask what holds it together, and what forces the rules to keep holding. The question is real, and it splits into three, and the three parts do not get the same answer, or the same confidence.

What holds it together logically

At the logical level, arguably nothing external holds it together, and nothing needs to, because the glue is non-contradiction itself. Whatever exists at least does not cancel itself out, and that floor is self-enforcing: a contradiction describes nothing, so nothing can be in one. No enforcer is required for a world to hang together to the extent of being consistent. (There is a minority view, dialetheism, that some contradictions are true; I set it aside here, but honesty requires naming it.) That much is close to free.

What sets the specific laws

Here the floor gives out, because consistency gets you a coherent world but it does not pick this gravitational constant over another. What sets the particular laws is wide open, and the candidates are all real positions:

• Brute regularity (Hume). The laws are just the patterns that happen to hold, with nothing underneath enforcing them. No glue, only regularity.
• Governing laws (Dretske, Tooley, Armstrong). Laws are real relations of necessity between properties, which make the regularities hold. Something does govern.
• Dispositions (Bird, Ellis). Things have powers, and the laws are simply what things must do given their natures. The glue is the nature of the one thing itself, not a rule imposed on it from outside. This is the reading that fits the framework best: the laws are the grain of the wood, not commandments nailed onto it.
• Mathematical necessity (Tegmark). Reality is a mathematical structure, and the laws hold because they are theorems. The glue is math.
• A sustaining mind (occasionalism, Malebranche). An intelligence holds every regularity in place. This is the director aspect, and it is exactly where belief re-enters, because a sustaining intent lies past all proof.

What keeps it in being at all

The third part is the deepest: why does it keep being, instead of winking out? If the ground is necessary, it needs no sustaining, because the necessary cannot lapse. If the ground is contingent, something could have stopped it, and then a continuous holding is required, and you are back to the director, and to belief.

This is the aspect the traditions call the sustainer, the director, dharma, the Logos, the cosmic dance: the ongoing rather than the origin. Different traditions specialize in describing it, which is why it belongs on the map as its own aspect.

Held at weight

• The logical floor, that the world hangs together because it is consistent: very high, and self-enforcing.
• The specific laws: open. Dispositionalism is the best fit for a framework built on one thing with a nature, but governing laws, brute regularity, and mathematical necessity are all live.
• The moment-to-moment sustaining: open, and the other doorway, alongside the origin, through which a director and belief return. Free if the ground is necessary; owed if it is not.

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Part of The Open Questions. The tagged version, with the positions and sources, is in the Library: The Sustainer.