Both of these are true - There is no god. There is a god. - And both are false.

[Jim__]

18. Is the article "What is Real" by Meinard Kuhlman?

I read that article in Scientific American after reading your post. It reads similar to your description - if it's not the same they must be part of a series. Kuhlman called the new idea Ontic Structural Realism. Massimei Pigliucci has written a couple of columns on this (as a book review of Every Thing Must Go ) part 1 and part 2

An excerpt from one of Pigliucci's columns:

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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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Causality has been a troubled concept since Hume’s famous deflating analysis of it, but quantum mechanics — and, again, all the other currently viable candidate physical theories — simply tell us that at the lowest level of analysis the concept breaks down, it doesn’t do any work for the physicist. Philosophers have noted for a while now that fundamental physicists talk about laws and mathematical descriptions, but they don’t talk about causes very much, if at all. And modern physics explains why: at bottom, there are no causes.

But wait a minute! Are Ladyman and Ross telling us that causes and objects are illusory? Is this yet another instance of people claiming that things that we think exist and play a crucial role in our understanding of the world do not actually exist? Are we to do away with tables and people, just like some pundits these days want to argue that free will, consciousness, morality and so on, are illusions, because none of them have a place in fundamental physics? Are Harris, Rosenberg and other modern nihilists right after all??

Nope, they are not. (Here begins the payoff of all the hard work we’ve done so far.) Let’s take causality first. According to Ladyman and Ross it is a concept that is eliminated in fundamental physics, but needs to be retained by the special sciences (from biology to economics). That’s because causality makes sense only in systems for which there is temporal asymmetry (a before and an after), and that — while not being the case for physics — is very much the case for the special sciences. L&R do not treat the concept of causality as an “illusion” to be dispelled once the special sciences are reduced to physics, because no such reduction is in the cards.

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