Re:Are there intrinsic properties at the most fundamental le...
by westoncb on Tuesday August 14, 2018 @01:47PM
(#17760170)
I'm not going to purchase the PDF, but this sounds problematic already:
> More precisely, I will claim that 1) according to quantum field theory, the most fundamental objects of matter are quantum fields and not particles, and show that 2) according to the Standard Model, quantum fields have intrinsic non-relational properties.
That only works as an answer to the larger question at hand (whether the "structure of physical reality is genuinely relational" or not), if we accept another philosophical claim implicit in the argument's structure: that mathematical abstractions (e.g. quantum fields) are potentially interchangeable with reality itself, rather than just descriptions.
If you instead hold that any abstraction is just a description, and not literally a building block of reality, than this only tells us whether the structure of a physical theory is 'genuinely relational'—not whether physical reality is.
> More precisely, I will claim that 1) according to quantum field theory, the most fundamental objects of matter are quantum fields and not particles, and show that 2) according to the Standard Model, quantum fields have intrinsic non-relational properties.
That only works as an answer to the larger question at hand (whether the "structure of physical reality is genuinely relational" or not), if we accept another philosophical claim implicit in the argument's structure: that mathematical abstractions (e.g. quantum fields) are potentially interchangeable with reality itself, rather than just descriptions.
If you instead hold that any abstraction is just a description, and not literally a building block of reality, than this only tells us whether the structure of a physical theory is 'genuinely relational'—not whether physical reality is.