Democritus and the Landing Zone

The physical sciences look to ontology - a branch of metaphysics - for principles and rules that explain the world in which we live, move and have our being. 

Today's dominant ontology can be traced to Ancient Greece and a philosopher by the name of Democritus. Democritus claimed: 'The vulgar/naive believe in (qualities;) colour, the sweet and the bitter, but in reality there is only atoms and the void.' 

That dominance is relatively new, however. It was not until the well known Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) began arguing that only shape, number, movement and contact exist in an object itself, there was any hint Aristotle's hitherto dominant Substantial Form was going to be sidelined in preference for primary reality being devoid of 'colour, the sweet and the bitter'. These were downgraded to merely secondary.

This usurpation of the senses had collateral implications too. The great thinker Aquinas made a point of reconciling Aristotle with the teaching of the Catholic Church. He did this ingeniously by positing that Aristotle's potency to act was an 'act of being' that came from none other than the creator Himself. Promoting separation of primary and secondary qualities was akin to closing the door on God reminiscent of an astrologer's remark to Napoleon: I had no need of that [God] hypothesis Sir!

Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) the Cambridge mathematician who co-wrote 'Principia Mathematica' with the august philosopher Bertrand Russell was speaking out of turn when he argued that there was something fundamentally misconceived about that which the ontology of the physical sciences had become. Modifying Galileo's thinking, it was Rene Descartes (1596-1650) who posited that reality was dualistic comprised of external things (res extensa-extended substance) and things of the mind (res cogitans-thinking substance). Whitehead inveighed against this ontology arguing for interdependeance and interconnectedness: a more holistic and dynamic understanding of the universe.

Whitehead's tour of US and UK universities between the two world wars did little to alter the Enlightenment's preference for Cartesianism. It seems as though scientists had taken to, and preferred a realism that had little to say about qualities as these could not be mathematically measured. There was also an underlying worldview that was Nagalistic - God should ne'er be allowed His foot in the door. However, as the credibility of quantum physics grew and grew owing to its power to predict experimental outcomes, a brilliant academic by the name of Wolfgang Smith (1930-2024) published a book entitled 'The Quantum Enigma - Finding the Hidden Key'. 

The philosophical implications of quantum physics as it developed in 1920s cannot be over stated. Smith published 'The Quantum Enigma' in 1995 arguing that in order to 'find the hidden key' to the measurement problem/collapse of the wave function, one had to cut away residual Cartesian ontology in preference for an holistic ontology drawing on scholastic pre-Enlightenment thinkers.

Meanwhile, it had been business as usual as Descartes' grip of the ontology of the physical sciences would not budge. Whitehead put it best when he wrote:

"The result is a complete muddle in scientific thought, in philosophic cosmology, and in epistemology. But any doctrine which does not implicitly presuppose this point is assailed as unintelligible". 

By 20th century the Democritian ontology had evolved to become comprehensively atomised. Blending in with Darwinian evolution the public are told they are no more than sums of parts of atoms and particles speeding through space and time to no end, for no purpose.

The trend proclaiming the real world is only matter, energy and evolution; hoisted scientists' colours to the mast. And yet, when visual perception is placed under the empirical microscope those colours do not conform to an atomised ontology.

Sir Francis Crick (1916-2004) the Nobel prize winning neuroscientist, looked empirically at how vision operates. In this work he came up against what is known as the 'binding problem'. It seems that he and other scientists can show how an image is broken down and transferred to the brain's cortexes. However, they know not how that image is put back together again.

Not all scientists however were held in the vice-like grip of the muddled approach articulated by Whitehead. James J Gibson (1904-1979) an acclaimed psychologist built his career on understanding visual perception. His work with the US military during WW2 looked closely at how flying an aircraft could be explained by visual perception. In short, Gibson's ecological approach emphasised that visual perception is a direct process, where pilots perceive their environment directly without the need for cognitive processing or mental representations. Humpty Dumpty is put back together again but not by 'all the king's horses and men'.

Smith came to know about Gibson's work after his first edition of 'The Quantum Enigma'. However, he later said:

"I think the academic community has honoured him and made him a member of the Academy of Science and so have greatly honour him and they have done so because they have not recognised how dangerous he is to everything they stand for because if they really were to understand Gibson they would realise to quote my friend Alexander Utziger that for 30 years they’ve been talking nonsense because he destroyed that materialist ontology [Cartesian] which underlies our academic sciences.

So we find ourselves back safely in the hands of Substantial Form or Thomistic hylomorphism (matter-form) summed up for us again by Smith:

Without Substantial Form there is no being; and without being there is nothing! Not even quantum particles.

Happy Landings!