Natural Order and Science

[The Grand Nudger]

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.

Idk.....Benjamin, to me..... lol, seems more real and less metaphor than either of those two.

 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.

Metaphors are tools we use to describe things, they aren't a fundamental particle - or anything even remotely approaching it. Recall for a moment how metaphor was initially invoked. That our inability to describe natural order without metaphors regarding proscription implies a proscriptor or the incoherency of any other conclusion. This wouldn't be true even if we couldn't describe the natural order any way other than proscriptively...which we can and do. The abject -ignorance- of that statement is insulting to the very laws it purports to reference. They are descriptive to begin with.

You, instead, are wondering if things are less physical than they might seem. You needn't use the term metaphor; you have better terms, and the very concept of a metaphor has been abused enough as it is.

My question is this, and I don't believe anyone has a good answer: how are we to tell the difference?

When I use a lion metaphor to describe something, that doesn't turn whatever I've described into a lion, nor does it make a lion appear, nor does it make whatever I've described subject to any logical implications of lionhood or lion presence (and this one is important in context).  That's just a couple of ways  to tell.  

What would be the mechanism, or the process, of determining whether things are top-up or bottom down?  

You mean........ how could we tell whether or not raindrops are being driven by a rainmaster?  That you ask this as if it were a profundity leads me to suspect that we're unlikely to see eye to eye on this one.  Fairies might paint the dew on the morning flowers as well. Meh.

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?

We could wonder and hope on the one hand, or do work on the other.  You know my preference.  

This question comes up a lot in our views about almost everything.  Is a human being the expression of DNA,

yes?

or is DNA the possession of the human being, to be carried like a torch until reproduction?  

yes?

Is "table" the reality,

yes?

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?  

yes?

You see paradox where there is none.  

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?

None of those things you mentioned were mutually exclusive, they were frame shifts in subject.  From expression, to possession.  From reality, to scale.