A Physical Description of Entities does not Negate Their Existence
There exists a tendency in philosophy to attempt to negate the existence of something by providing a physical explanation of it.1 Peikoff highlights the error of this by supposing that physicists are able to one day reduce the physical constituents of reality down to “puffs of meta-energy:“
A thing may not be condemned as unreal on the grounds that it is “only an effect,” which can be given a deeper explanation. One does not subvert the reality of something by explaining it. One does not make objects or qualities subjective by identifying the causes that underlie them. One does not detach the material world as we perceive it from reality when one shows that certain elements in reality produced it. On the contrary: if an existent is an effect of the puffs in certain combinations, by that very fact it must be real, a real product of the ingredients that make up reality. Man’s consciousness did not create the ingredients, in the present hypothesis, or the necessity of their interaction, or the result: the solid, three-dimensional objects we perceive. If the elements of reality themselves combine inevitably to produce such objects, then these objects have an impregnable metaphysical foundation: by the nature of their genesis, they are inherent in and expressive of the essence of existence.
Such objects, moreover, would have to be discovered by anyone who wished to know the full nature of the universe. If somehow, like the fictitious atoms of our example, a man were able to grasp the puffs directly, he would still have to discover the fact that among their attributes is the potentiality, when appropriately combined, of generating a world of solid objects, with the qualities of color, texture, size, shape, and the rest. He who knew the puffs but not this potentiality would not know an aspect of reality that we already do know.2