question

 

.

Particle physics has taught us that every atom in the periodic table of the elements is an arrangement of just three basic particles: protons, neutrons, and electrons. Every object you have ever seen or bumped into in your life is made of just those three particles.

At a fundamental level, there aren’t separate “living things” and “nonliving things,” “things here on Earth” and “things up in the sky,” matter” and “spirit.” There is just the basic stuff of reality, appearing to us in many different forms.

Naturalism is a philosophy of unity and patterns, describing all of reality as a seamless web. [It] presents a hugely grandiose claim, and we have every right to be sceptical. When we look into the eyes of another person, it doesn’t seem that what we’re seeing is simply a collection of atoms, some sort of immensely complicated chemical reaction. 

[…] At the moment, the dominant image of the world remains one in which human life is cosmically special and significant, something more than mere matter in motion. We need to do better at reconciling how we talk about life’s meaning with what we know about the scientific image of our universe.

[…] There’s an older thought experiment called the Ship of Theseus. Theseus, the legendary founder of Athens, had an impressive ship in which he had fought numerous battles. To honor him, the citizens of Athens preserved his ship in their port. Occasionally a plank or part of the mast would decay beyond repair and have to be replaced. We have a question of identity: is it the same ship after we’ve replaced one of the planks? If you think it is what about after we’ve replaced all of the planks, one by one? And (as Thomas Hobbes went on to ask) what if we then took all the old planks and built a ship out of them? Would that one then suddenly become the Ship of Theseus?

Narrowly speaking, these are all questions about identity. When is one thing “the same thing” as some other thing? But more broadly, they’re questions about ontology, our basic view of what exists in the world. 

What kinds of things are there at all?

—Sean Carroll
The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and The Universe Itself

.