The Problems of Metaphysics
Many of the problems facing today's metaphysicians concern the fundamental structure of reality, the underlying material substance and the creative process that gives individual objects their shape and form, their qualities or properties.
Apart from appearances and the sense data of
experiences, what is the
underlying reality, what is there "really?" What "
constitutes" a material object? What is its "principle of
individuation?" Does a concrete object maintain its
identity as it moves in
space and time?
A surprising number of today's metaphysical questions were first asked over two millennia ago by the ancient Greek philosophers. It is shocking that so little progress has been made toward definitive answers to some of them.
Perhaps it is because metaphysics is a search for
certain knowledge that is
beyond the material world, not derivable from experience, and eternally
true (in any "
possible world"). Such knowledge is limited to
immaterial ideas in logic ("A is A"), mathematics (7 + 5 = 12), and some sentences or propositions that are true by (conventional) definition.
Can unchanging eternal ideas and truths provide us any knowledge about the constantly changing material world? Most metaphysicians today stress
necessitism and see no place for metaphysical
possibility. The "possible worlds" of David Lewis and other include no genuine possibilities. They are
deterministic and eliminatively materialist.
And what is the existential (or ontological) status of these
abstract ideas? Do numbers exist? If so, is their kind of existence different from that of material objects? Do the past and present exist? Are there
immaterial minds apart from material brains? How could they interact?
Although many metaphysicians claim to be exploring the fundamental structure of reality, the overwhelming fraction of their writings is about problems in analytic linguistic philosophy, that is to say problems with words. Many questions appear to be verbal quibbles. Others lack meaning or have no obvious truth value, dissolving into paradoxes.
Based on current practice, we can sharpen the definition of a
metaphysician to be an analytic language philosopher who discusses metaphysical problems.
By contrast, a
metaphysicist is an
information philosopher who is familiar with modern physics, chemistry, and biology, as well as the interpretation of quantum physics. The fundamental structure of reality today must confront the mysteries and puzzles of quantum reality.
For example, the
wave function of a quantum particle is pure
information. Some
interpretations of quantum mechanics are fundamentally metaphysical, problems for a metaphysicist.
Note that many metaphysical problems are dichotomies, with either/or debates, suggesting that a common underlying theme is some kind of
dualism, almost always the dualism between materialism and idealism (pure abstract information).
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