The Material Space
We're stuck in it
I can remember my astonishment when I realized that air was a substance; not nothing. An empty room was full of air. Once you get the idea it's pretty obvious: we feel the wind after all. And we taste air every time we draw a breath. But I wasn't aware of air until that astonishing moment.
Air is material and we take material for granted in the same way I once did for air. But when you think about material closely it's way harder to understand than it seems at first glance. The issue here is that it is people trying to understand and people have a fairly restricted, though marvelous, range of capacities. As creatures we have 5 senses that work within a fairly restricted range and are bound by the human size and time scale. We get presented with a world of things; things like rocks or bananas or other people and we have cognitive capacities that we share with many creatures that informs us of the world at that scale. I think of this as our basic perception of the material plane. I guess that my astonishment at learning that air was a thing was that it was not a thing like my toys or the other things that filled my world. I couldn't see it and I couldn't bump into it: but it was there. Later I learned more about air. It's made of atoms zipping around. Imagine air trapped in a balloon. The image is of zillions of atoms all moving at high speed and bouncing off each other and the walls of the balloon. It's the ones bouncing off the walls that provide the outward pressure. That's obvious.
Isn't it?
Hmmmm - Just why are the atoms zipping around? Seems energy is involved. And energy is what exactly? (the teacher sez: shut up kid, and calculate :-) And then we wonder: What is between the atoms? Whoops - As Dorothy once said to Toto, "We're not in Kansas anymore." The scale where atoms are things is so far from the human scale that our basic perceptions and the ideas that emerge from them don't work any more.
As it happens though, our basic perceptions are not the only capacities that people have. We're intelligent and can learn and both of those are cumulative. The more we learn, the smarter we get. And we multiply what we learn by sharing it with others. And this is an accumulation that has been going on for a long time now. And we now have ways of checking what's between atoms. The surprising answer seems to be that there is no "between atoms". Instead of being like tiny marbles atoms are extended and fuzzy and overlap so there is never a space that is outside of an atom. Maybe there is never a space that is outside any atom.
Blinks at that - it always astonishes me - but I take it as a clear implication of quantum mechanics. If energy is hard to understand then QM is really hard to understand. But amazingly Feynmann's advice to "Shut up and calculate" works with QM too. Our contemporary world wouldn't work if the calculations didn't give useful answers.
Gravity has that characteristic too - it extends with diminishing influence without end.
As we look at the material space in finer and finer detail we can see evidence of emergence, but sort of in reverse from the way I usually talk about emergence. That way I start with (say) atoms and show how higher level properties like liquidity emerges from the properties of atoms but is not seen at the level of atoms. It makes no sense to talk of a wet atom even if it is part of a liquid. In the present case we can see more and more sophisticated perceptions emerging from our basic perceptions over time. This has happened over time as humans evolved. But it also seems reflected in the developmental process of each person as they grow.
Material space is what it is, whatever that is. It doesn't care. But we have emerged and we wouldn't have emerged if we didn't care what the material space we are in is like. And lucky us. We get to be astonished.
What do you think?
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.