Natural Order and Science

[bennyboy]

Not without a hefty amount of equivocation.  In any case, your response would seem, to me, to indicate that we agree here.  I think that the manner in which we express our ideas says things about the way we express our ideas...not, as Chad implies..and as you and I object to.."the facts of anything in their most essential terms".

--edit--

Your last post ended up being more a springboard than the thing I answered.  If the quote and my response to it seem to have a disconnect, that's why



Here's the thing, though.  The metaphor isn't just a tool.  It's what we are-- Benjamin is probably no more real or any less a metaphor than Achilles or Zeus.  What if it is the metaphors that are the reality, and that all the "stuff" in the universe is in a constant scramble, falling over itself to express those metaphors as they unfold in time?  A photon as a metaphor, as an imagined representation of paradox in action, makes sense-- as a concrete thing, not so much.

My question is this, and I don't believe anyone has a good answer: how are we to tell the difference?  What would be the mechanism, or the process, of determining whether things are top-up or bottom down?  Given a perfect parity between physical objects, their properties and the rules that guide them, how can we decide whether the physical properties we describe are ABOUT stuff, or whether the stuff is really just the mechanism which the properties use to manifest themselves?

This question comes up a lot in our views about almost everything.  Is a human being the expression of DNA, or is DNA the possession of the human being, to be carried like a torch until reproduction?  Is "table" the reality, with all the little QM parts just being coerced due to their simple nature into doing their little dance in the right configuration, or were they the only reality all along?  These views, I think, are mutually exclusive, and yet they are both viable.  They are both true, and at the same time not really true.

Are we just spinning the yin/yang wheel and picking sides for no other reason than just having nothing better to do?