Searching for the Ground: Mutation, Mind, and the Epistemology of Science

Abstract

In a quantum mechanical universe physical theories, for all the reasons we have explored, do not exist in any a priori sense outside of the mind which conceives and applies them. From this new perspective we can now appreciate the fact that the architects of classical physics were translating into mathematical language their visualizable macro-level experience with physical phenomena. As long as the mathematical description seemed completely in accord with the visualized phenomena, meaning that a one-to-one correspondence between every element in the physical theory and the physical reality appeared self-evident in experiments testing valid theories, there was no suggestion that extra-scientific assumptions were required or assumed in these theories. It was only after classical physics and its descriptive categories were extended into the realm of the unvisualizable in modern physics that the veil was lifted, and we could begin to contemplate nature in the absence of what Einstein called the “spectacles of the old-established conceptual interpretation.”