Dear Marion,

Thank you for your thoughtful reply to my reflections
about ethics.  Few readers would would take these abstruse
ruminations seriously: I am pleased that you are the exception.
For me, abstract considerations such as the ones with which
I importuned you, function also as a consolation; they
constitute a refuge from the challenges of day to day
existence to which I find myself increasingly unequal; yet
there is no reason to expect that my reflections should seem
meaningful to anyone other than myself. You deserve lots of
Brownie points for your efforts. I thought it was very
perceptive of you to adduce the flight restrictions occasioned
by the volcanic eruption as an example of inconstant and
unpredictable legislation, moreover, an interesting
intersection of the "laws" promulgated by authorities and
the "laws" of nature.  There's no disagreement between us.  My
only comment: Kant would never have permitted that a precept
so uncertain, so unpredictable and so changeable as the
regulations to which you alluded, be referred to as a "law".
Arguably one should try to maintain a distinction between the
arbitrary directive of a bureaucrat and that "universal" law,
of which it can meaningfully be said, as did Goethe, "Und das
Gesetz nur kann uns Freiheit geben." 

While the psychology and the politics of the "laws" that are
promulgated by the state seem rather transparent to me, the
cogency of the "truths" or "laws" of nature I find much more
difficult to explain. For purposes of analysis, I overlook
readily observable phenomena such as the effects of gravity,
the boyancy of floating objects, the surface tension of fluids.
These are readily ascertained, no matter by what names they
are called. Of interest are those "laws" of nature indicated
by presumptively incontrovertible "facts", which are nonetheless
beyond the range of my observation and experience. Such laws,
it seems to me, constitute the bulk of traditional science.

I begin with the observation that whatever I see, whatever I
hear, whatever I understand, must, if remembered, be assumed
to have modified my nervous system, to have altered my mind,
to have become a part of my intellectual persona. So also
the theory, the scientific "law" which I am taught. The mind
which has been altered by theory, which has been modified
by the "law" with which it was indoctrinated, is thereafter
susceptible to impressions to which it would previously have
been impervious, - and over a period of time these impressions,
these experiences, corroborate or controvert the "law" to which
they are responses. There is an unavoidable evolution of what
is deemed to be true. - The notions I have described seem to me
both contrived and obvious, and except for the fact that such
ideas are never stated, they would probably not be worth
articulating.

Stay well, and please feel no obligation to respond to my
extravagant notions. "Hirngespinste" is the appropriate name.

Jochen