Verified by 
Key points
- Physics is science's metaphysics, but we haven't yet grounded life in physics.
- Scientists often assume that replicating DNA and natural selection explain selves and effort, but they don't.
- Without a grounding for life in physics, researchers are free to think like alchemists.
- Science may be on the verge of grounding life within physics.
The term metaphysics was coined as the title for one of Aristotle’s books 400 years after he wrote it. Meta sometimes means after. Students were to read his metaphysics after his physics. Ironic, since his metaphysics is about what comes before physics. Or at least confusing.
Less so when you consider the range of things that meta means. Its definitions are all over the place. It originally meant after, behind, beyond, between, in the midst of. These days, it means about, as in metacognition, thinking about thinking.
Today, metaphysics often means zooming way up and out, escaping physics altogether to declare the absolute beginning-to-end eternal way it all works. The metaphysics section of a bookstore is where you’ll find supernatural, woo woo, new-age books, books grounded not in physics and nature but in magic and miracles, where anything goes. Having escaped physics one can believe anything, and fans of such metaphysics do. Without physics to ground us, there’s no standard for settling what’s true. One man’s metaphysics is another man’s malarky.
Metaphysics without physics is like a wild card. You can believe anything. And a trump card, since you can always trump folks by saying “Yeah, but you don’t see the whole picture like I do.” Some of us think that’s fine. Live and let live. Let a thousand metaphysics bloom. Others battle over whose metaphysics trumps whose.
Meta also means changed or altered, as in metaphor or metamorphosis. Metaphysics, including Aristotle’s, is about how change happens, the fundamental and overarching laws of change.
Some early metaphysicians were also alchemists trying to change lead into gold. Lead is metaphoric of gold since they’re both heavy, soft metals. Alchemists thought they could change cheap lead into profitable gold and came up with all sorts of woo-woo metaphysical principles to guide their efforts, none of which worked.
Still, it was a fruitful exercise in futility. Little by little, the alchemists began to ground their pursuits in physical reality, the natural laws of change discovered by the likes of Newton.
As such, alchemy was like the fabled father who, when sent to prison, told his sons that he had buried gold for them in a field. They never found any but, looking for it, they loosened the soil and soon were farmers making a real profit.
Physics including the bits we’re still working out is science’s current metaphysics. It imposes rigor that enables us to settle debates and make progress in the physical sciences—chemistry, astronomy, geology, and the rest. In engineering, too. The profitable technological breakthroughs that make our lives so different from Aristotle’s are the product of us not letting 1,000 metaphysics bloom, instead grounding ourselves in physics.
OK, but what about us? Is physics the grounding metaphysics for the life and social sciences too?
It could be but isn’t yet. Instead, scientists treat the life and social sciences as somehow simply different from physics, with its own rules, never mind why.
That may seem just plain wrong to you. After all, isn’t DNA a chemical? Don’t biologists ground their work in organic chemistry, which, in turn, is grounded in physics?
They do and they don’t. Physics doesn’t yet explain the kinds of changes unique to life and mind. Most fundamentally, we don’t yet have a physics-grounded explanation for an organism’s struggle for existence, its functional interpretive effort to keep itself working in its environment.
Strictly physical objects exist by durability. Living beings must hustle to remain in existence. You know the drill. You do work today to stay in shape so you can do work tomorrow. You do that in a universe where things tend to stop working, falling into disrepair, degenerating if they aren’t maintained.
Rather than doing whatever, we living beings confine ourselves to work that works to keep us working in our workspace. Our effort is a subset of all possible physical work not yet explained by physics though it could be.
Nor by natural selection, and Darwin knew it. To explain speciation, he assumed the struggle for existence and even describes it as “breathed into life,” which is at best metaphoric, at worst, woo woo. Nor does replicating DNA explain the struggle for existence. DNA is a molecule. Lots of molecules replicate but, no, they’re not struggling for their own existence.
Physics isn’t yet a metaphysics that explains our existence. Without one, most folks act like alchemists, coming up with anything-goes supernatural explanations divorced from physics. God, a higher power, soul, spirit, vibes, energy.
Even our life and social scientists are stuck acting like alchemists. To talk about our effort they posit all sorts of unexplained forces and elements—consciousness, mind, agency, motivations, DNA as information-bearing, as if these molecules possess some special nonphysical substance other molecules don’t have, or molecular hormones as triggering appetites without saying how.
There’s no reason we couldn’t discover a strictly physical metaphysics that explains our struggle for existence. For the most part, we haven’t looked for it, settling instead for equivocation, hopping freely between physics-talk and life-talk.
That may be changing though. Terrence Deacon, a Berkeley biologist, has developed a strictly physical explanation for how chemical change, grounded in nothing but physics, becomes chemistry that limits itself to work that works to keep itself going.
The effort organisms make is strictly physical work, but not just any work. Organisms limit themselves to work that works to keep them working within their workspace. The struggle for existence and all the other motivated functional interpretive work we organisms do emerges as chemistry that limits itself to that kind of work. That would be the origin of the struggle for existence, of selves trying to do anything.
As the Nobel prize-winning chemist Ilya Prigogine said, “We need an understanding of nature such that it is not absurd to say that it has us as its products.” in other words a physical metaphysics that grounds not just the physical sciences but us, too, and helps us settle debates not just in supernaturalism but in the life and social sciences as well.
This article as a video:
References
Sherman, Jeremy (2017) Neither Ghost Nor Machine: The emergence and nature of selves. NYC, NY: Columbia University Press.
