On 31 December 2013 09:43, Stephen Paul King <stephe...@provensecure.com>wrote:
> Dear LizR and Brent, > > I will try to go at this from a different direction. What exactly does > "fundamental level" mean? Does there have to be "something fundamental"? > Consider Leibniz' monadology: strip it of the anthropocentrism and > religiosity and one obtains a nice "any one thing is made from combinations > of other things" concept that has no need for something fundamental. > Obviously there doesn't HAVE to be "something fundamental"*. Lots of religions, for example, posit two almost-fundamental things - Yin and Yang, God and the Devil, the dark and light sides of the Force, and so on. However, physical theories have been extremely successful at using reductionism, which tends to lead one, ultimately, towards there being something fundamental. All the unifications - electricity and magnetism, mass and energy, space and time, the four forces merging into one - all indicate an explanatory arrow in which two or more things turning out to be aspects of one simpler thing. Continue this long enough, and you should eventually hit the last turtle. * (By the way, I'd feel happier replying if you'd miss out all the unnecessary quote marks. It looks like you're trying to hedge against being pinned down into actually taking a viewpoint when everything under discussion has to be "quoted" for no obvious reason...) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
