The God problem (part 2)

[Jim__]

20. There is a philosophical theory that is something like your idea about the nature of matter.

Massimo Pigliucci gives a comprehensible description of it in a 2 part essay. The first part of the essay describes the terminology (mostly realism and anti-realism as it applies to philosophy of science), and the second part gets into more detail about the what we can understand about matter.

An excerpt from the second part of the essay:

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And we now get to ontic structural realism, the position endorsed by Ladyman and Ross, and which is beginning to convince me (with some reservations here and there). This is how they themselves put it:

Ontic Structual Realism (OSR) is the view that the world has an objective modal structure that is ontologically fundamental ... According to OSR, even the identity and individuality of objects depends on the relational structure of the world. ... There are no things. Structure is all there is.

Hence the title of the book: Every Thing Must Go! Now, before you go all New Agey or Buddhist on me, please note that Ladyman and Ross derive their metaphysics from the best physics available. The details are fascinating, and in themselves make the book a must read, but essentially their claim is that all currently viable theories in fundamental physics — including quantum mechanics, string theory, M-theory and their rivals — have in common principles like non-locality, entanglement and such, which point toward the surprising conclusion that “at bottom” there are no “things,” only structure.

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