A Physical Description of Entities does not Negate The Metaphysical Status of Sensory Qualities

The metaphysical status of sensory qualities has it that a sensation is an interaction between two entities, namely the organ of sense perception and the thing that is being perceived. Peikoff highlights that this is true even if a physical description of entities is found by supposing that physicists one day reduce every physical phenomenon down to “puffs of meta-energy:“

If everything is made of meta-energy puffs, then so are human beings and their parts, including their sense organs, nervous system, and brain. The process of sense perception, by this account, would involve a certain relationship among the puffs: it would consist of an interaction between those that comprise external entities and those that comprise the perceptual apparatus and brain of human beings. The result of this interaction would be the material world as we perceive it, with all of its objects and their qualities, from men to mosquitoes to stars to feathers.

Even under the present hypothesis, such objects and qualities would not be products of consciousness. Their existence would be a metaphysically given fact; it would be a consequence of certain puff-interactions that is outside of man’s power to create or destroy. The things we perceive, in this theory, would not be primaries, but they would nevertheless be unimpeachably real.¹