Physicalism is the great ontological pillar of the modern world. It is the prerequisite and cohesive paradigm of reality for all science. Those who think differently, esoterically, or who hold a traditional view, are forced to account for this intrusive and powerful worldview, to describe their positions in terms relative to physicalism.
Ontological Precedence
Physicalism is a structure of layers where everything and anything is a thing made of things made of things. When Richard Feynman was asked how magnets work he said he couldn’t explain it because anything featured in an analogy or metaphor ought really to be explained in terms of magnetism or presumably some other fundamental force of nature. Explaining the thing which ultimately explains the terms used in the explanation may prove counter productive if not futile. He alluded to the order of precedence in physicalism. Physics comes first. It is the thing which explains.
In the simplest terms, physicalism is the idea that reality is completely described by the dynamics of fundamental physics. We call it fundamental precisely because it is thought to provide the ontological foundation for all things.
Progress in physicalism comes from theoretical physics. A new theory of physics shows how what we previously understood to be the deepest layer is really yet another emergence with respect to the deeper structure which was uncovered.
The objection of physicalism to most self-identified metaphysical claims is that really all those claims are doing is presenting bad competing physical hypotheses. That is to say that they do not explain what hasn’t already been explained, they don’t make new predictions, they aren’t falsifiable, or perhaps they may be dismissed by Occam’s razor.
Atomic Theory and Deconstruction
The word atom comes from Greek and means indivisible. As much as scientific insights have progressed, the core philosophy of ancient atomic theory is still recognizable in today’s physicalism. To understand the world, you must understand its constituent elements.
This way of thinking leads to an intuitive sense of the ontological primacy of physics. There is a simple inference that dissolves pretty much anything that isn’t the base layer of reality. If I want to check the reality of an apple for example, I look among those elements which make up the totality of all things and to my surprise I don’t find the apple there. Therefore the thing I’m looking for, in this case the apple, doesn’t exist in any durable final sense. The identity is emergent, transient, or secondary. The result is an insecurity about not just apples, but the notion of identity itself. For what is an apple if not a construct of the animalistic mind? As with apples, so it goes with authorities, customs, values, and even the self. The indifferent universe tumbles as it will and all meaning is an illusion.
So is born the notion of thinking about thinking, the world of frames, narratives, ideologies, different ways of slicing up the world of matter. Critical theory is essentially about employing the inference model I showed to a given frame. You don’t need to break things down all the way to physics. Pointing at an intermediary underlying mechanism is sufficient to declare the frame a construct and therefore arbitrary and not inherently legitimate.
The Edge of Physicalism
Because of deconstruction, physicalism has been corrosive to the world of values, indeed basically any kind of ontological dualism. Such is the influence of physicalism that even many mathematics professors are spooked by the apparent Platonic ontology of the object of their work. I think this is the gist of the Nietzschean death of God. We need a way for ideals and identities to carry ontological weight. It seems to me that there are two frontiers where new insights are waiting to be uncovered, or rather old wisdom to be reintegrated.
Firstly, physics is nested within a value-laden paradigm. Perception and truth-seeking are not neutral activities. Understanding the relationship between value and epistemology is one part. But then the whole epistemic complex including scientific methodology and the value structure is embedded in the very reality which it tries to describe. What does it mean for an abstract model rendered in a substrate to correspond with some external form? This sort of thing gets wonderfully loopy and challenging as we rub up against such things as Chalmer’s hard problem of consciousness. But understanding the structure of that loopiness is the first frontier on the edge of physicalism. There’s great work being done in cognitive science and artificial intelligence pushing on this boundary.
The second frontier is related but distinct. It has to do with understanding layered reality. This isn’t exactly physics although that might be a matter of semantics. The point is we can generalize patterns across the layers. There are dynamics which have more to do with the fact of layers than with the particulars of any one layer emergent or fundamental. There are dynamics that don’t care about the nature of the substrate so long as it is sufficiently “fruitful”, that is to say capable of manifesting a sufficiently broad range of emergent phenomena. Notions like emergence, Stephen Wolfram’s computational irreducibility, and Turing completeness appear relevant.
The following fields strike me as “meta-physically” important in the sense that they deal more with these transcendent dynamics rather than trying to find ontological bedrock. I didn’t order them in any particular way:
- theoretical computer science
- information theory
- game theory
- control theory
- category theory
- statistical mechanics
- chaos theory
Touching Grass 🫳🌱
There’s a hangup from the enlightenment where it is thought that everything must be expressed in static propositional terms. Albert Camus said that idealism has no faith in reality. Much of what has come to be known as post-modernism rejects the very notion of canonical truth. The paradox is that the propositional domain is in principle sufficiently powerful to reflect reality. This ought to be self-evident to anyone. That’s the whole point of propositions in the first place. Yet there are inherent difficulties in recreating the forms of reality with all their context and richness.
My sense is that in some ways information technology is breaking us free from old constraints of the propositional. In other ways it reveals dynamics of the propositional itself which are easy to miss.
For instance computers make it obvious that there are such things as abstract contexts of coherence. If I try writing bash script in the middle of my C++ code, the thing is not going to compile. This is the case in culture and philosophy as well but it’s much more difficult to maintain coherent boundaries between such diverse and intricately interconnected conceptual systems using only brains and books.
Increasingly, we must account for symbols and semantics taking energy and time. We can no longer think of knowledge as being this instantly accessible, detatched, static, mathematical implication. Nor can we think of it as an illusory mirage given the real world power technology affords us. Being embedded in reality means we need to use models, heuristics, and leaps of faith to solve our time-constrained problems. But it’s more than that. Even abstract inference itself requires a substrate, time, and space. Norman Wildberger heretically argues against the current understanding of long standing concepts in mathematics on this basis: continua, infinities, irrational numbers. I’m not sure I exactly agree with what he has to say. I admittedly have some learning to do. But there seams to be a change in the air so-to-speak. These kinds of insight hold for any level of reality and thereby begin to clear the post-modern framing problem.
The uncovered nature of the propositional seams to explode it as a category. Functional knowledge, fittedness, embodied knowing, contextual wisdom, suddenly a great diversity of media become functionally equivalent. Much of what is ordinarily thought of as being incompatible with physicalism likely interfaces with it through such an alternative context of coherence. Art, rituals, and mythology are not mere incidental expressions at some arbitrary layer of emergence. Rather they can relate truly universal existential truth, as intuitive or esoteric as that relation may be.
Accounting for the universal real world structure of agency. The varied, data-rich, and coherent contact with reality. Being able to take that seriously on the strongest epistemic terms. All this in contrast to narrow propositional formalism is the proverbial touching of grass.
From John Keats' Hyperion Book II (1884):
As Heaven and Earth are fairer, fairer far Than Chaos and blank Darkness, though once chiefs; And as we show beyond that Heaven and Earth In form and shape compact and beautiful, In will, in action free, companionship, And thousand other signs of purer life; So on our heels a fresh perfection treads, A power more strong in beauty, born of us And fated to exalt us, as we pass In glory that old Darkness