The construction of the world
1. The world is to be understood as a continuum, from the smallest to the largest. It doesn’t matter whether matter is quantized or not. It makes no sense to believe that different laws of nature should apply to the microscale than to the macroscale. The same is true for determinism and indeterminism. Why should macrosystems be deterministic while microsystems are supposed to be indeterministic? It’s an observation problem. While we see determinism in macrosystems, we believe that microparticles move purely randomly. This seems to be because we don’t see a connection between macro and micro objects. There can’t be such a thing. This is because entities can only determine each other within a certain range of orders of magnitude. For example, a planet cannot determine a grain of sand and vice versa. The so-called indeterminism of the quantum world (Copenhagen interpretation) is an observation and measurement problem.
2. Our observation of the world is not synonymous with its laws, because the very fact that there is an apparently infinite convergence between our thinking (‘knowledge’) and nature suggests that we never fully understand nature, and eventually the better always replaces the worse paradigm. This means that in a few hundred years, what we consider scientific progress today will have long since become obsolete.
3. We transform the phenomena we observe into ontologies. The ontology view: Electrons have an intrinsic charge and spin that are quantized. These properties are not determined by their environment or interactions with other particles, but are part of their fundamental nature.
The Phenomenology View: The quantization of energy can be interpreted as a consequence of the limited resolution of our measuring instruments. In reality, energy and mass could be continuous, but our instruments are not precise enough to detect this.
What we explore with our technological possibilities does not have to be the end of knowledge. This is most likely also true for quantum physics.
4. Each ontology we formulate represents a particular section of reality. We describe the micro world with our means and use certain tools for it, and we describe the macro world and use completely different tools for it. The description of reality is always dependent on our techniques, which in turn depend on the object of knowledge. If we had to study the microworld with cruder tools, we would get completely different results and would have to recognize them as the state of the art.
When we speak of an emergent system, e.g. the brain, we are talking about a very specific functional context and not another. We don’t mean individual molecules, but an entire brain and the phenomena associated with it, i.e. not the phenomena associated with individual molecules. Different theories do not argue about whether a brain is more than the sum of its parts, but only about the perspective from which the brain should be seen. As soon as we change the perspective of individual molecules to the entire brain, the result of the investigation also changes.
So there is no ontology of the brain ‘by nature’, there is only our perspectives. So if we ask if the emergent brain also exists independently of our observation, then the answer must be that there is this brain, but how we observe it depends on our modal existence. So, emergence means that we observe features that we don’t see unless we observe the whole brain. Emergence, then, is not an abstract property in itself, but a property for us. We define and interpret emergence as a certain quality that would not exist without us.
7. Our knowledge of nature only makes sense in the context of a particular functional context. It is only in this context that we ask questions of nature or reality. Our brain has different properties than its individual parts. But these qualities only make sense to us because we look at it in a certain context.
The structure of the world exists for us as a neural construction. This construction converges with reality, as we are products of that reality. However, it only converges from our point of view. That is, the world does exist, but how we perceive it depends on our modal existence. If we were a mechanical reflex of our environment, we would be able to draw direct linear conclusions about the world. But since we are self-organizing subjects and thus relatively autonomous in relation to the world, our ‘knowledge’ of the world is relative.
9. Within this framework, every rational activity makes sense to us. And it is only in this context that we gain knowledge of the world. If we experience things that cannot be classified in this context, we tend to call them supernatural. Then we look for rational or, if we don’t find them, irrational explanations.
10. Our interpretation of the world is based on axioms that we constitute on the basis of empirical experience in everyday life and science. You could say they are the result of an entity’s exchange with its environment. The question of how realistic these axioms are is not a question of adaptation, but of survival. Because adaptation does not automatically mean survival, and survival is also possible with less than optimal adaptation. Here, too, there is a tolerance range, and our knowledge of the world reflects this tolerance range at all times.
Conclusion: The structure of the world exists in a material way, but epistemically it exists only within a context of meaning, and this results directly from the drive to survive and indirectly from the totality of our desires and fears. Independent of us, the world doesn’t make sense to us. Therefore, there is no ‘in itself’, but only ‘for us’.
