Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

process — which suits the analogies quite well.

The structuralist ideas have an impact on the notion that mathematics ‘corresponds’ to physical reality. Arguably, under structuralism, it’s mathematics and physical laws that determine how reality appears to us because these are just building the underlying and more fundamental level beneath, which is the ‘true’ stuff of the universe! Meanwhile, the relational qualities of mass, energy, charge and spin fit into the same predicament — take them away and there seems to be no substance. The puzzle, in these terms, also relates back to what was said earlier about ‘the silence of physics’ — physics can only tell us about the qualities of the world, not about its underlying reality. Yet another way of describing this is to say that physics can only tell us about ‘relational properties’, so sheds no light on any truly intrinsic properties (essence) or whether intrinsic properties actually exist. Space, time, mass and charge are all relations — they need a substrate. This is where ideas of narrative and essence creep in. Structuralism is a great narrative for how the universe really works — going beyond what current observations can tell us (and maybe beyond what we can ever know). Meanwhile, a yearning for everything to be reduced to particles (or energy, or consciousness) is a desire for an essence. It is to look for a ‘substrate’ to nature. We will be drawing out the meaning of this in more detail later.

An intriguing question can be asked at this point — and that is: If we know of things only through their qualities — then what exactly is there left

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