Philosophy Recommendations

[HappySkeptic]

If he were any type of physicist, he wouldn't say that the "world" of things doesn't contain concepts and relationships.  

All of physics is relationships.  That's all it is.  And human "concepts" describe relationships we perceive within the world, which must already exist for us to have "concepts" about them.

This definitely hinges on a chicken-or-egg kind of question about the properties of the universe and our concepts concerning the properties of the universe.

Your Platonic view is a common one with science fans: the laws of the universe were always there waiting for us to discover them and name them. It's essentially the Garden of Eden story, except with things like atoms and formulae instead of the birds of the air and the beasts of the field. We need to acknowledge that what we know about phenomena and the order we "discover" in it involves a lot of effort by historically and culturally embedded agents. We've found ways to conceptualize natural phenomena that are useful to researchers, as well as lucrative for the corporate and military interests who employ them. But the fact that we still use terminology like order and forces and laws should make it clear what sort of ideological imperatives motivated the development of the modern scientific programs that created the knowledge base we have today.

Incidentally, I don't want to imply that Gabriel himself subscribes to this kind of constructivism; in fact, as a realist he goes out of his way to bash constructivism at every turn. But he certainly believes that science is a for-us-by-us construct rather than a portal to the eternal and unchanging Truth: The "external world" or nature or the "universe" are no longer privileged domains of facts when it comes to our grasp of what it means for something to exist. There are plenty of relevant and important concepts that wouldn't exist if we weren't here to create them.

His argument can be summed up as saying that there are an infinite number of ways to conceptualize relationships.  I'm not sure this is true, but it is certainly a huge set, if not infinite.

He then argues that these concepts are "actual reality", and do not exist in the underlying universe as "something in space-time".

From a scientific point of view, this makes no sense.

First, concepts can either be about "actual" observed relationships, or they can be about imagined relationships that do not exist.  Observed relationships, like the Earth being bigger than the Moon DO exist in spacetime.  

The philosophical Jiu-Jitsu of changing the words "observed relationship" to "concept" makes it seem like the relationship only exists in our mind.  No, the Earth is bigger than the Moon, and this affects their orbits, what objects fall into them, and results in the Moon not having an atmosphere.  Unless Gabriel is a Sophist, those relationships exist whether he thinks of the "concept" or not.

There is a tendency for religious (and it seems philosophers) to reject physical reductionism, because so many of the relationships we see in the world (especially involving living things) is difficult to explain in reductionist terms.  That is because of emergent properties.  State changes in systems, especially chaotic systems, result in properties that are only understandable in principle (though perhaps can't be calculated) from the reductionist principles, the description of the system, and knowledge of the past system state.

Yes, reductionism only gives you the to most basic tools on which all the interesting things get built up.  But, all those interesting things owe their existence to a complex mapping of fundamental quantum relationships.  Yes, the ways these interactions can combine are huge (though I don't think infinite). That doesn't mean those "actual observed" relationships do not already exist in the universe.