The Metaphysical Basis

Posted this exact same essay on Google docs sometime last month, my blog really should have seen it first, but oh well 🤷🏿‍♂️

The Metaphysical Basis

A tree is not made from atoms, there is only a tree.

The scientist argues, “That is nonsense, atoms exist if only you'd use an electron microscope to view them!”

To which the intelligent philosopher responds, “Either view, the tree or the atoms, depends on how you look at it. The tree might as well be a "pixel" of green if viewed from outer space and all other views cease to exist!”

I imagine the scientist finding the philosopher's "fallacious" proposition irritating, obviously these three different states of the tree exist! There is a tree; there are atoms of this tree and there is a view of the tree from space.

But then, there is no disembodied human eye looking through an invisible electron microscope to see the atoms of the tree when no one is trying to view the atoms; nor is there a disembodied eye viewing the tree from an invisible spacecraft. 

"But then the atoms exist if you view it or not!" protests the scientist. 

But an atom in what sense? An atom in relation to who or what? Clearly not the atom seen under the electron microscope, that view is relative to the apparatus viewing it in that particular way. There is no atom relative to the base human eye which, at best, sees the brown bark via the visible light spectrum.

"The objective atom! The atom that exists in of itself!" says the scientist, clinging to his ever slippery understanding of the atom. "Ah-ha" he says, "This is the atom that exists when no one views it" smirking sheepishly.

 ̷D̷o̷e̷s̷ ̷t̷h̷e̷ ̷s̷p̷i̷r̷i̷t̷ ̷h̷a̷v̷e̷ ̷e̷y̷e̷s̷?̷ ̷

I̷n̷ ̷h̷e̷a̷v̷e̷n̷ ̷h̷o̷w̷ ̷w̷i̷l̷l̷ ̷y̷o̷u̷ ̷s̷e̷e̷?̷

Does an atom have an eye? So how can it perceive itself? What is an atom to itself?

If you subscribe to the very conventional view that nothing but humans have conscious experience then the atom exists only when miraculously viewed by a human eye by chance lest it exists in less than darkness. 

What power in the human eye to bring things in and out of existence! But then, should not all our wardrobes open up into Narnia? But alas, they do not. 

“The atom must exist without the human viewer!” says the scientist once again. But then it exists in less than darkness, in other terms, non-existence as reality occurs only when "viewed".

"The omnipresent eye of God! It views all atoms!", the scientist recalls his Christian upbringing and wonders if he could have been wrong all along.

And what type of eye is that eye? A human eye? or an electron microscopic eye? or the myriad of other animal eyes? "The girl with kaleidoscope eyes" -The Beatles

A single particle in a universe the void of anything else stays stationary and does not exist. Only in relation does a thing exist; a relation which is "experienced".