[OBJECTIVE SCIENCE.COM] [As I explained in Part 3 of this series,] the basic attitude of twentieth century physicists is that we shouldn't bother trying to understand the causal mechanisms underlying the equations. Doing so will get us -- in Richard Feynman's memorable description -- " 'down the drain' into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped." [10] Physics, then, is left as merely the manipulation of mathematical symbols describing subjective observer-processed appearances.

This kind of superficial description of appearances is what -- and all -- quantum mechanics and relativity offer. The equations themselves, of course, seem to be correct; they do indeed correctly describe the "appearances". But the fact that physicists have rejected the possibility of explaining them -- that is purely Kant's influence. Kant convinced physicists that no causal explanation of the equations is possible. [11]

Notice again the shared premise of the Platonist and Kantian versions of the Primacy of Mathematics. Both regard the material world of entities as not fully real, so that something external to physical matter must be responsible for the orderly behavior of physical objects. The Platonists find this orderer in a supernatural realm, while the Kantians find it in the inherent conceptual categories of our minds.

Both find it in consciousness.

Thus, in both of its basic forms, the Primacy of Math reduces to the Primacy of Consciousness -- the idea that consciousness imposes identity and structure on an otherwise chaotic world. The two sides merely disagree about whose consciousness -- god's or man's -- does the ordering.

Obviously the primacy of consciousness means the complete annihilation of physics, whose basic subject matter is the identity and structure of the physical world. Once this world is dismissed as irrelevant or inaccessible to physics, manipulation of (increasingly meaningless) mathematical symbols is all that is left for physicists to do.

Of course, the majority of physicists don't explicitly grasp this connection to the Primacy of Consciousness. They sense only that "both sides" -- that is, both the Platonists and the Kantians -- are sending out the same basic message: down with the physical world, down with causal explanations, down with real understanding of physics' mathematical formalism. Thus physicists, who explicitly scorn the field of philosophy, have ironically accepted as "uncontroversial" philosophy's most dangerous, most irrational ideas -- ideas which must in logic lead to the downfall of physics and science as such.

Physicists generally believe a myth that the "refutation of reality" was based on experimental results in the early part of the 20th century, and had to be swallowed -- with a solemn nod to objectivity -- by scientists who were basically committed to a Primacy of Existence viewpoint. In fact, the truth is the exact opposite of this myth. The rejection of the physical world in favor of superficial mathematical formalism was slowly fed to physics from philosophy. And in the end it was philosophically-minded physicists (Bohr, Heisenberg, Jeans, Mach, and countless others) who firmly entrenched the Primacy of Mathematics into the structure of physics itself.

***

So what is needed to put physics back on the correct path? Clearly the first step is to reject the primacy of consciousness in all its forms, and all its consequences -- including especially the Primacy of Mathematics.

What is needed is to institute the primacy of existence fully and consistently, starting with the Aristotelian identification that only concretes exist. There are no floating properties, actions, relationships, or abstractions -- there are only entities with definite properties, etc. Identity is not something that is externally imposed on the material world: "Existence is identity." [12] Or, as Dr. Leonard Peikoff writes:

Causality, in the Objectivist viewpoint, is a fact independent of consciousness, whether God's or man's. Order, lawfulness, regularity do not derive from a cosmic consciousness (as is claimed by the religious "argument from design"). Nor is causality merely a subjective form of thought that happens to govern the human mind (as in the Kantian approach). On the contrary, causality -- for Objectivism as for Aristotelianism -- is a law inherent in being qua being. To be is to be something -- and to be something is to act accordingly. [13]

Hence, the properties and actions that are quantified in the mathematical laws of physics, must ultimately be understood as properties and actions of entities. Contrary to today's dominant view, a theory in physics is not merely a set of equations. Equations permit a description of actions and properties, but a complete theory should explain the actions as well, by giving a causal account of the physical processes involved. The examples mentioned in the introduction - the trajectories of planets in the sky, genetic inheritance, and the behavior of ideal gases -- should serve as a guide. In these examples, the observed mathematical regularity is not accepted as a final theoretical dead end, but is studied and eventually explained by the underlying structure and identity of the physical entities involved. This is the correct progression.

What is needed, in short, is a return to the type of physical explanations that dominated physics prior to the 20th century, and which still dominate in the philosophically more healthy sciences of chemistry and biology -- this time with the full philosophic proof of their propriety. Only this will allow physics to progress beyond its current state of mathematics-obsessed superficiality.

The discovery of a mathematical formalism which quantifies an observed regularity in nature is not an insight into some higher world, nor is it the most one can hope for in an observer-created universe. Rather, it is only the first step in a long road of explanation and understanding -- if only physicists will have the philosophical courage to follow it.



References:

[10] Feynman, The Character of Physical Law, page 129.

[11] For more details on the actual steps by which Kantian philosophy filtered down to the founding fathers of QM and Relativity, see David Harriman's lectures on "The Philosophic Corruption of Physics" or his forthcoming book on the same subject.

[12] Ayn Rand, Galt's speech, For the New Intellectual, 125

[13] Leonard Peikoff, Objectivism, 17

Copyright 2001 Travis Norsen/ Objective Science. All rights reserved. Permission granted to link to this article only; but, permission is not granted to republish it. 

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