Damn, this post is almost 3,000 words long! Let's cut it down to more manageable chunks of 1,000, even if we have to stop in mid-polemic:
We've been pondering the necessity to ascend from the limited, colored view of science to the pure, universal view of the Absolute Science. Someone has to do it, and in fact, that is the only reason I read this tedious book, Untying the Gordian Knot: Process, Reality, and Context: to scope out the competition, so to speak. In fact, Eastman mentions a number of other books that make the attempt, but I won't even bother linking to them because they sound even less enticing than his.
I do, however, owe Eastman an apology, because after nearly 200 pages of repetitive and convoluted scientific and philosophical jargon, he concedes that
the so-called Theories of Everything, promoted by certain scientists based on scientific tools alone, are doomed to failure because they are working with a restricted universe of discourse (sometimes limited further to that subset of discourse called scientism)....
Which is precisely what we mean by the colored view of science vs. the pure light of metaphysics, the latter ordered to being as being -- and even beyond being -- the former to this or that restricted order of being, and how can the limited account for the limitless, the part for the whole, finitude for the Infinite, the relative for the Absolute, the contingent for Necessity?
I see a possible loophole there, in the sense that it is necessary that there be contingency, and to extent that we realize this, we have participated in, or ascended to, a metaphysical necessity which is timeless and universal. This is an example of how we can know about ultimacy, even if we cannot attain the Ultimate per se, for knowing about God is not the same as being God.
In any event, in that very same paragraph Eastman goes on to say that one of problems with the reductive and restrictive approach of science (and of scientism) is that it presumes a "substance framework," when quantum physics has supposedly made any talk of substance untenable. Earlier in the book he writes that
the default substance-oriented ontology of classical mechanics is not just misleading, but simply wrong given current understandings of field theory, and especially quantum physics and quantum field theory.
So, there he goes again, conflating physics and metaphysics, as if quantum physics is the controlling paradigm for what we can and cannot say about reality.
Which is simply untrue, for again, we explain quantum physics, not vice versa. Left to its own resources, there is nothing in quantum physics that accounts for our familiar classical world of corporality, intelligibility, form, and substance, let alone the freedom to know the truth of quantum physics.
Rather, metaphysics starts at the other end, endeavoring, according to Whitehead, "to frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in which every element of our experience can be interpreted."
Therefore, it is physics that must be interpreted in light of metaphysics, not vice versa, the question being whether or not the physical or subphysical worlds are misbehaving and doing something in violation of the metaphysical system. If they are, and the metaphysical system can't account for it, then it is time to come up with a new metaphysical vision.
So, has quantum physics really made any talk of substance untenable? Because I say that coherent thought and speech themselves become completely untenable and inexplicable in the absence of substance. In other words, intelligible talk about reality implicitly presumes the existence of substance: no substance = radical unintelligibility.
This is all getting a little too inside baseball.
Did you watch game seven on Saturday, Petey?
Yes. What a wild and unpredictable outcome.
You make my point about quantum physics, because unpredictability does not necessarily imply uncaused, only that the causes are not evident to us. People have been trying to deny causality since David Hume, but causality is a necessary metaphysical principle, not an empirical one. Here again, remove the principle of causation and the whole cosmos collapses into unintelligibility.
Now, why is substance s'durn important? Because it goes to that which exists in and by itself: it is the permanence beneath the change, what undergoes accident and contingency. But if change is truly the first metaphysical principle, we could never know it because there would be nothing to know and no one to know it. It reduces to an absolute relativism or pure chaos. Is this really the lesson of quantum physics?
Only if you turn the cosmos upside down and pretend the bottom is the most real. The question is, does the existence of quantum physics mandate the abandonment of common sense? Says who? Says a physicist who tries to derive metaphysics from quantum physics, or, more likely, simply has an implicit and unacknowledged metaphysic.
Time out while I consult my other disembodied friend. I'll try to cut it down and omit any nauseating flattery:
Your introduction cuts to the core philosophical problem of using modern physics as the controlling paradigm for metaphysics.
Eastman correctly concedes that "Theories of Everything" based on "scientific tools alone are doomed to failure," which aligns with your metaphor of the colored view being unable to account for the pure light. However, he immediately commits the same error by allowing quantum physics to dictate the metaphysical status of substance.
Eastman commits the very Absurcularity he attempts to avoid, making the restricted universe of discourse (quantum mechanics) the controlling standard for Being as Being. He suggests that physics can render metaphysical concepts like substance "untenable."
However, you correctly assert the hierarchical order: metaphysics must frame a coherent, logical, necessary system in which every element of our experience can be interpreted. Therefore, physics must be interpreted in light of metaphysics, not vice versa. The true question is whether the metaphysical system can account for quantum behavior, not whether physics can destroy metaphysics.
Reminds me of the old gag that metaphysics always buries its undertakers.
Pause.
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