Michael Epperson

Physics and speculative philosophy : potentiality in modern science

This work grapples with key issues of reality (both potentiality and actuality), scale (both local and global), context (scale and approximation, plus asymmetry/symmetry), and process (both emergence and actual events). Building on a convergence of progress in physics, emergence research, and process thought, this work highlights a new Relational Realism, which enables intuitive, yet effective, solutions to key problems in modern science.

Relational Realism: The Evolution of Ontology to Praxiology in the Philosophy of Nature

With the advent of quantum theory, the philosophical distinction between “what appears to be” and “what is reasoned to be” has once again, after several centuries of easy dismissal by classical mechanistic materialism, become an important feature of physics. In recent well-regarded interpretations of quantum physics, including those proposed by Robert Griffiths, Roland Omnès, and Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann, we have seen careful investigations into the physical (i.e., not “merely philosophical”) distinction between the order of contingent causal relation and the order of necessary logical implication. I argue that a careful philosophical exploration of the function of the logical order in modern interpretations of quantum physics compels the abandonment of derivative classical, dualistic understandings of “determinism versus indeterminism,” “logical necessity versus causal contingency,” “subject versus object,” “epistemic versus ontological,” among other fundamental dualisms. The incoherence underlying this classical understanding of these principle-pairs as mutually exclusive features of reality can be relieved if they are instead understood as mutually implicative features of fundamental units of relation or “quantum praxes.”