If we take into account the character of the laws of physics implied by the qual

itative infinity of nature,

however, we can immediately answer this question in the negative. For, as we hav
e seen, the notion of a law
that gives a perfect one-to-one mathematical correspondence between well-defined
variables in the past and
in the future, is only an abstraction, good enough to describe limited domains o
f phenomena for limited
periods of time, but, nevertheless, not valid for all possible domains over an i
nfinite time. Thus, as has been
pointed out in Section 8, the very entities with which physics now works, satisf
ying the currently studied
laws of physics, must have come into being at some time in the past, while chang
ing conditions, brought
about in part by the effects of just these laws, and in part by chance contingen
cies, will eventually lead to a
stage of the universe in which new kinds of entities satisfying new kinds of law
s will come into being. On a
smaller scale, we see also that new levels, such as that of living matter, have
come into being, in which
characteristic new qualities and new laws appear. Thus, we are not justified in
making unlimited
extrapolations of any specific set of laws to all possible domains and over infi
nite periods of time. This
means that the description of the laws of nature as in principle completely reve
rsible is merely a
* In the case of the quantum theory, we must also replace the wave function, ?,
by its complex conjugate, but this does
not change any probabilities of physical processes, which depend only on |?|.
110 CHARACTERISTICS OF A MECHANISTIC PHILOSOPHY
consequence of an excessively simple representation of reality. When we consider
the mechanical laws in
their proper contexts of ever-changing basic qualities, it becomes clear that ir
revocable qualitative changes
do take place, which could not even in principle be reversed. This is because, f
or systems of appreciable
complexity, the fundamental character of the laws that apply cannot be completel
y separated from the
historical processes in which these systems come to obtain their characteristic
properties.* The possibility
of such a behaviour is especially clear with regard to living matter, for here t
he very mode of being an
organism and the basic qualities and laws which define this mode of being arise
in the process by which the
organism comes into existence, and passes through the various stages of its life
. Thus, it is quite impossible
that a human being could become a human being except by a process of growth, thr
ough embryo, childhood,
adulthood, etc. But when one analyses processes taking place in inanimate matter
over long enough periods
of time, one finds a similar behaviour. Only here the process is so much slower
that the abstraction in which
we conceive of matter as having properties that are independent of its specific
historical development is
usually quite good as long as one considers periods of time which are measured i
n units smaller than
billions of years.
The importance of considering the impact of qualitative changes on the basic mod
es of being of things is
also seen when we consider the predictions of the heat death of the universe, whic

h were especially