A Physical Description of Entities is the Realm of Physics, not Philosophy
At various points in the history of philosophy going right back to the ancient Greek problem of finding “the one in the many,” a tendency has existed where metaphysicians have attempted to elucidate the fundamental building blocks of reality—whether it be Leibniz’ monads, or the fire of Heraclitus. These philosophers are mistaken in their pursuit:
The task of identifying the nature of physical objects as they are apart from man’s form of perception does not belong to philosophy, but to physics. There is no philosophic method of discovering the fundamental attributes of matter; there is only the scientist’s method of specialized observation, experimentation, and inductive inference. Whatever such attributes turn out to be, however, they have no philosophic significance, neither in regard to metaphysics nor to epistemology.1
Peikoff highlights this by supposing that one day physicists are able to reduce every physical phenomenon down to so-called “puffs of meta-energy:“
At this stage of cognition, scientists have discovered that the material world as men perceive it, the world of three-dimensional objects possessing color, texture, size, and shape is not a primary, but merely an effect, an effect of various combinations of puffs acting on men’s means of perception.2
He then goes on to explain that:
- this does not invalidate the metaphysical status of sensory qualities, and;
- this does not negate the existence of entities.