Truth HQ by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

T R U T H H Q

Physics certainly accepts the reality of everything being known only through relation. But physics – and science more generally – finds this situation intolerable. Scientists long for

some ‘real’ thing that will ground reality and keep it from being merely about the qualities of the things we perceive. They long for what they call a ‘substrate’ – something that exists in its own right and can be shown to exist. In fact, we would be best to call it an ‘ultimate substrate’. It would not be just another step in an infinite regress of trying to discover what things are made of. It would be the ultimate ground, the primary stuff of the universe, the final destination, the ‘thing-in-itself’. In short, and perhaps surprisingly, what science seems to be looking for bears a striking resemblance to the ancient notion of essence.

Essence though is a concept equally as difficult as substrate. To approach it, we are best to examine a few other words that had specific meanings in ancient thought – often different meanings to the way we understand the terms today.

Let’s start with substance. What is a substance? Well, to modern thinking, it’s just what I’ve described above as a thing. But the ancients generally did not see it this way. The ancients took substance to mean ‘matter plus form’. There’s a great many ideas that spring from this simple statement.

First, we can note that the word ‘form’ might be used here with one of two different meanings. The more straight-forward meaning is to see form as we would use it in everyday speech today – that is, as a three-dimensional arrangement or shape. On this meaning, the formula – substance equals matter plus form –

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