Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized

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By Mike Perry

Review of  Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized by James Ladyman and Don Ross, with David Spurrett and John Collier (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)

As immortalists we hope to be in the world for a good long while, thus we are interested in the nature of reality. Reality determines, among other things, what our prospects are for our own longterm survival. We wish to know under what conditions the original self can be said to survive. For example, does the self survive if the original body perishes but an exact, functioning copy is made, or if something is created that functions very similarly but is physically different, such as a mind upload? Cryonicists will also wonder if there is any problem if extensive repairs to their physical remains are necessary, so long as something closely resembling their original self is reconstructed and brought to healthy consciousness. The volume here reviewed, though not directly concerned with cryonics or immortalism, offers the position that it’s the pattern that counts rather than the material substrate, and in fact, strictly speaking, material objects don’t exist. If this is accepted, the metaphysical outlook improves for survival through such means as mind uploading or imperfect cryonics.

Do material objects exist? How do we find out? Though science is certainly crucial in telling us about the world we inhabit, a vital role is also reserved for philosophy, which addresses such issues as what scientific principles and methods should merit our trust and what values and goals should be served by our developing, science-based technology. Metaphysics in particular, concerned with “what actually exists” and among other things, with unifying science, would seem to have a vital role to play. As the volume here reviewed points out, however, metaphysics now is rather moribund and seems in danger of dying, mainly because it has not kept pace with modern science.

The authors propose, quite reasonably, “that the only kind of metaphysics that can contribute to objective knowledge is one based specifically on contemporary science as it really is, and not on philosophers’ a priori intuitions, common sense, or simplifications of science.” To carry out the development of such a metaphysics is a tall order. Contemporary science presents a very strange, hard-to-fathom view of reality, through quantum mechanics accompanied by general relativity. In addition, science is a moving target, which raises the prospect that one’s best efforts will sooner or later be obsoleted even as previous scientific theories are found to be, strictly speaking, invalid and not descriptions of reality as it really is.

The authors accept this challenge and construct a metaphysics which takes account of modern science both in its depth, as seen in physics, and also its diversity, seen in such fields as biology and economics. The book will be a difficult read if you, like me, are not someone who is well-versed in the works of contemporary philosophers who have themselves grappled at length with the main issues of this book. In fact a great deal of text is taken up throughout with referencing these other thinkers and their often conflicting opinions. This was sometimes hard to follow but many interesting ideas still were reasonably intelligible. (I had the feeling that a more popular-style book that used more illustrations from everyday life with more accessible treatment of the strange anomalies of physics would be in order.)

Two principles inform the authors’ work throughout as ground rules for their project. The principle of naturalistic closure (PNC) requires, roughly, that a new metaphysical claim must be grounded in fundamental physics and must in addition lead to a first-time or improved scientific explanation for one or more phenomena, a betterment that would not occur in absence of the claim. The primacy of physics constraint (PPC), on the other hand, requires that sciences other than physics must conform in their principles to physics, while physics is not similarly required to respect the principles of these other sciences.

Both principles thus are based around physics yet the authors do not take the view that other sciences are necessarily reducible to physics, only that they must never conflict with physics. Physics in turn presents a bizarre world view, in comparison to familiar notions from the past. Most notably, the existence of individual things is called in question by such observable phenomena as particle entanglement. If two photons far apart can have their properties instantly affected by each other, do they possess individual natures? Do they really exist as “things” at all? Entanglement can and does occur between other particles including atoms, and extends to larger material objects. Do these things really exist? While it may be possible to uphold the existence of particles and material objects more generally as things or “particulars” in traditional fashion, the authors submit that this approach now seems highly artificial and problematic at a serious philosophical level. What they propose instead is “relations all the way down”—there are relations between what appear to be objects or things (subatomic particles for instance) but these “objects” are virtual only and resolve into further relations, whose “objects” or relata in turn resolve into further relations, ad infinitum. As the title proclaims, every thing must go.

If this is taken seriously, material objects are nonexistent, and all that actually does exist is “structure”—relations between virtual objects, or in other jargon, “real patterns.” The authors propose the term Ontic Structural Realism (OSR) for their system of real patterning as it applies to fundamental science (physics), while the application to special sciences they label Rainforest Realism (RR). Putting the two together yields their comprehensive system known as Information Theoretic Structural Realism (ITSR). The real-patterns approach in particular is shown to avoid one basic pitfall, that of being dependent on specific details of particular scientific theories. Patterns can persist and retain validity if new discoveries replace one fundamental theory with another one, within limits. The authors are cautious enough to allow that their proposed system will not necessarily be found valid in the end, but might need replacement. Meanwhile its robustness in the face of possible changes in scientific theories is a plus.

The idea of patterns or information as the substrate of reality will fit well with the hopes of those immortalists who believe in substrate-independent minds and are hopeful of one day uploading their essence—captured in information—into a computational device. (A great way, perhaps, to free oneself of the ills of a bodily existence, including the aging process.) Cryonicists should similarly not worry about anything beyond information loss in assessing their chances of resuscitation. Inasmuch as the metaphysical basis of this thinking is grounded in modern physics, we must at least take the patternist view seriously, and it can serve as the basis of cautious optimism about our future prospects for transcending our present limitations.