QUANTUM METAPHYSICS - E-thesis

Collingwood’s opinion of the revolution currently taking place in our conception of reality is
justified. If we examine only the developments taking place in philosophical or biological
circles, the revolution can, in tune with him, be identified as having started two hundred years
ago. Since that time, an ever-increasing number of holistic and organic ideas of reality have been
presented alongside the mechanistic concept of nature. In my opinion, these alternative
conceptions have anyway been peripheral to the mainstream of scientific-technical culture and,
for example, physical research. The mechanistic-deterministic research program created at the
turn of the modern era was in practice quite sufficient for research up to the 1900s and its
generally-accepted presuppositions still continue to exert a powerful influence on the world-view
adopted by our culture. If the most fundamental concepts of the mechanistic-deterministic
paradigm such as the particlemechanistic idea of the world as fundamentally consisting of “dead
matter” or the idea of external objective observers turn out to be incorrect, ahead of us lies evenmore
radical change than that which Collingwood expected.
The particle-mechanistic model of reality resulted from a combination of ancient Atomism and
the mathematical portrayal, but as will be addressed in greater detail in the following chapter of
this thesis, this model of reality can, in the light cast by quantum mechanics, be considered less
than perfect. If a conception of reality is understood as a wide-ranging research programme,
some kind of ontological-epistemological metaparadigm with which the activities of a specific
period and scientific concepts are in tune, the precise research carried out by physics can stepby-step
to either strengthen or prove incorrect those wider philosophical hypotheses which
concern the nature of reality. In the final analysis, fundamental metaphysical presumptions
concerning the understanding of reality can be expected to move forward. Even if the ontological
and epistemological assumptions of classical physics views continue to mould the generallyaccepted
basis for the use of ”healthy common sense”, difficulties in the interpretation of
quantum mechanics have highlighted problems associated with the particlemechanistic way of
thinking. The fundamental metaphysical assumptions concerning the nature of reality have
become subjects for discussion. As a result of this discussion, speculations by ancien thinkers
concerning the basic substance of reality and its subdivision are once again of current interest.
This makes it appropriate to examine again the criticism directed at the ancient Atomism by
Plato and Aristotle.
Development based on the mechanistic-deterministic paradigm has not confirmed the correctness
of its fundamental presuppositions concerning the nature of reality, since the functionality of a
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