The law is beautiful.

Filtering the world, ambiguity of life, and the law.

Life, in its raw form, is chaotic. This may not be the case for a large slice of people, the yuppies, employed in larger firms like Deloitte, Google and Canva, with built-in social support for every class of problem (professional, fitness). But for those who are on the edges, the solo travelers, the entrepreneurs, who may not be in a framework which carves out so much variability, life can be an absolute jungle. To quote George Hotz’ Death of the Visceral:

[…] imagine winter circa 1645 in America. Several of your group almost dead from lack of food, tracking a deer, spotting it, shooting it with your bow, hitting but the deer is trying to run, fast twitch muscles charging and leaping, plunging a knife into its heart and knowing at that moment everyone is going to be okay. Heart rate calming laying on the warm deer.

The modern world doesn’t have any real experiences like this any more. Survival has become a technocratic plod, making the right boring and careful decisions. There’s only fake experiences like the above, video games, sports, and drugs. And things like reckless driving, which are just kind of stupid.

This variability, the uncertainty, the inherent risk, brings into it both good and bad emotions. On the positive, variety is the spice of life, and on the negative, outcomes that are negative and uncertain usually produce stress. After all, we are happy for an uncertain positive stimulus but an uncertain negative stimulus is fear-inducing.

This ambiguity of life can be extended far beyond episodic situations though. Because we live our lives somewhat as a hallucination. Every day we wake up and we go to work, and talk in a fairly regular way. There is a little bit of variety, everyone has moods, but generally speaking people have reliable tendencies. This might be called character, it might be called personality, either way - people behave in certain ways. And one way of modelling this is that we have an identity.

Where does identity come from? I don’t know. What is it? Maybe a bigger question is - how would you prompt an identity? How does the personal wardrobe of someone affect their identity? How does being surrounded by loving people, or surrounded by a different environment? How does access to wealth and power affect them? What about negative experiences? What about traumatic experiences? What about a series of traumatic experiences? What about fundamental conflicts between their current circumstance and their believed identity of who they are?

I think about this regularly, particularly from a psychiatric standpoint. I am not a trained psychologist, but I have some experience around people with significantly abnormal neurotypes, and my world model has been gradually shifting towards a point of view that emphasises cause-and-effect of experience. Namely - everything has logical causes, though the complexity of these causal chains can be quite large. For schizophrenia, the cause is unresolved mental incongruity, which is a sheer weight on the consciousness, causing it to split. For anxiety, the cause is unresolved stress, possibly a nervous system that has been shaken up by experience and is overwired.

These are then related to conscious experience, wherein we experience the world not presently but through a lens of ourselves. For example, imagine a hungry person receiving a 3-course dinner versus a well-fed full person receiving 3-course dinner. It is reasonably obvious to anyone - the hungry person would appreciate it more than the full person. Now let’s imagine instead of food, it is money. Imagine a person with $100K net worth receiving $100K, versus a wealthier person with $10M net worth receiving $100K. Of course, the less wealthy of the two might appreciate it more. But why?

Biologically there is no such thing as money. Animals don’t need money. You can’t eat money. So the money is a sensation, but of what? In the mind. And what does this sensation look like? You might imagine each person has an idea of their net worth in their head. And upon hearing of this prize, they sense its worth in relation to that.

Our identity is similarly just a sensation. We sense and perceive the world in relation to this purely imagined construct. One might call it hallucination, but it is so normal it may as well be considered concrete.

Coming back to life’s ambiguity, this mental model of our world can sometimes be fucked up. And sometimes it can be really tough to deal with. I’m dealing with it in some respects right now. And one thing I’ve been doing aside from this, on a seemingly unrelated note, is reading the law. What?!

The beauty of the law.

The law is beautiful. I never really thought about it before, but after reading it, it really is something. Because it is both logical and measured, and deals with what seems to be subjective parts of reality. Let me explain.

Law started as community norms expressed in ordinary speech—“don’t steal,” “don’t kill,” “return what you borrow.” These were broad, context-dependent rules that everyone understood. As societies grew, disputes became more complex, and power structures demanded consistency. Oral norms evolved into written codes (Hammurabi, Roman law, medieval charters), which required precise wording so rules could apply uniformly and avoid arbitrary judgment.

Over time, courts, legislatures, and scholars layered precedent, statutes, and commentary. Each new case or law refined definitions, carved exceptions, and reconciled conflicts. Language became highly technical because vague rules produced loopholes, unfairness, or endless disputes. For example, “property” had to be broken into land, goods, leases, easements; “intent” into negligence, recklessness, malice. Each refinement reduced ambiguity but increased complexity.

Why is it like that? Why did we separate property, and separate intent, for example?

Property: at first it meant “things you own.” But land behaves differently than cattle, which behaves differently than money or intellectual creations. Each creates different disputes (boundaries vs trespass vs theft vs royalties), so the law carved property into narrower buckets with rules for each.

Intent: originally just “did you mean it.” But a thief and a reckless driver cause harm differently. To punish fairly, law had to separate negligence (carelessness), recklessness (disregard of risk), intent (purpose), and strict liability (no intent required). Without these distinctions, punishments would be either too harsh or too soft.

One great example of this in property I learnt last night is profit-à-prendre:

a nonpossessory interest in land similar to the better-known easement, which gives the holder the right to take natural resources such as petroleum, minerals, timber, and wild game from the land of another. Indeed, because of the necessity of allowing access to the land so that resources may be gathered, every profit contains an implied easement for the owner of the profit to enter the other party’s land for the purpose of collecting the resources permitted by the profit

Explained simply - someone sells you the right to collect resources on a piece of land. By design, you cannot collect the resources without accessing the land. As such, there is an implied easement.

Imagine the law without this precise and measured distinction. People would say “well I sold you this right to mine here but you don’t own the land so I can shoot you for illegal trespassing” or something similarly illogical. This is the beauty of the law.

I have been fascinated for a few years about reading legal cases and rulings and understanding the rationale behind them. The law was never pitched to me in this way, but after beginning to dive deeper I’ve begun to understand it is actually quite legible, especially to an engineer such as myself. There is a hierarchy of logic and doctrine which anyone can begin to understand. These legal primitives are invented and used in many specialised subdomains.

Logical argument: modus ponens/tollens, analogy, distinguishing, policy-based reasoning, precedent-based reasoning.

Standards of proof: criminal—beyond reasonable doubt; civil—balance of probabilities (with Briginshaw-style caution for serious allegations).

Sources & precedent: constitutions, statutes, regulations, common law; hierarchy of norms; stare decisis; ratio vs obiter.

Procedure & justiciability: subject-matter/personal jurisdiction; standing; ripeness/mootness; pleadings; burdens of production/persuasion.

Interpretation: text, purpose, context; mischief rule; principle of legality; canons (ejusdem generis, expressio unius).

Evidence: relevance vs unfair prejudice; hearsay and exceptions; privilege; best-evidence rule; exclusionary rules; presumptions (rebuttable/irrebuttable).

Liability models: intent/knowledge/recklessness/negligence; strict liability; vicarious liability; joint/several liability; contribution and apportionment.

Causation: factual (“but-for”, substantial factor); legal (proximate/remoteness, foreseeability, novus actus).

Contract: offer, acceptance, consideration (or reliance), intention to create legal relations, capacity, illegality; conditions vs warranties; frustration/impracticability; parol-evidence control.

Torts: duty, breach, causation, damage; standards of care; negligence per se; res ipsa loquitur; economic torts; defamation; privacy.

Crime: actus reus/omission, mens rea, concurrence; inchoate offences and complicity; defences (self-defence, necessity, duress, insanity); double jeopardy; presumption of innocence.

One of the things I find most beautiful about this is that the law can measure and consider the world in such a way to come up with consistent answers, despite the world’s inherent uncertainty, ambiguity, multiple perspectives, and unreliable observers.

As much as this seems weird to say, what if all of your experience could be interpreted through such a calm, measured, uncertainty-bearing framework? Such that you had a perfectly crisp answer to any anxiety or situation.

Maybe this is the load-bearing framework that religion used to offer us. For me, I find it quite an interesting prospect.

Aside from basic norms such as fairness, there is a greater ability to “let go” or “forgive and forget” which is quite important to adopt as part of maturing emotionally. Even being said, it is hard. And there is a greater question which asks, well, we don’t just “forgive and forget” criminals, do we?

What is it about private life and relationships that makes them so different? After all, if the law is developed from community norms, these apply in both public and private contexts.

In a certain sense, the law regulates social interaction to support social cohesion, and this can be applied at the societal level, at the family level, and at the relationship level. LindyMan talks about this as “the relationship domain”.

There are attributes to the relationship domain that only people inside can see. For example, there is an invisible scoreboard always on. This is why relationship problems look so bizarre to people from the outside. They don’t see the all the previous agreements or issues. Each partner trying to modify behavior or “get back” at the other one for past slights. To keep everything even. The relationship domain has its own logic.

Paradoxically, there is more freedom inside a relationship than outside of one. Your only job is to ensure the happiness of another single person. As long as they do not leave you can dress up like anything you want, you can have crazy opinions and you can act with extreme independence. The only limitation is not sleeping with other people.

The single domain is different. While you are free to date other people, you also can’t deviate too much from the norms of wider society. You are less free because you have to be engage in a marketplace. You’re part of society and your local environment. you haven’t built another world with your partner. You exist in whatever world is out there. Whatever culture you were born in.

I find these questions very relevant in my own life, wondering about different situations and trying to resolve them. In the coming weeks I will go on a 10 day Vipassana retreat which I’m told is a deeply clarifying experience. I should be reflecting and writing a post afterwards to compare my thinking then vs. my thinking now. Until then.