On March 21,
I delivered a lecture on “The Epistemology of Microphysics” at the 49
th
Annual Meeting of the American Maritain Association at Loyola Marymount University. You can read the lecture
here. The AMA also kindly presented me with its
Scholarly Excellence Award for 2026.
Many thanks to the AMA and all who participated.
Congratulations on the award, Ed! Well deserved and appropriate company you're in there: https://www.americanmaritainassociation.com/award-recipients
ReplyDeleteMany thanks, Kiel!
DeleteReally enjoyed reading the lecture. I think the point of higher realities and lower realities having similar epistemological challenges given their distance from our everyday realm of experience makes a ton of sense. The symmetry is satisfying, as well.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Tate. Off the top of my head, I don't know if anyone else has pointed out that symmetry in the context of microphysics, but it does seem natural once it occurs to you.
DeleteHearty Congratulations on Winning the Award Prof! Your work has been inspiring to many! Keep up the great work cheers!
ReplyDeleteThanks, Norm!
DeleteSpeaking about epistemology Prof, how do you draw the line on the reliability of our senses. For example if I said that the fact that colors appear in multiple instantiations is an illusion and there is in reality only one platonic object of each color that exists.
DeleteYou would probably say that if our senses are deceiving us in this radical way then it would undermine the very evidence for physics.
But there are other ways in which our senses deceive us that you presumably don't think undermines their reliability.
So how do you draw that line, generally ?
Prof ? :)
DeleteThe late great professor at UND Ralph McEnery was Director of the Jacques Maritain Center at UND. You received a very distinguished award, Dr. Feser, and you stand in the shadow of a giant.
ReplyDeleteEd,
ReplyDeleteExcellent talk. This is helping me re-frame some things. There's a lot to think about! As a Sci-Fi enthusiast, it might interest you to know that the American physicist Leo Kadanoff (1937-2015) credited the comic-book story "Lost in the Microcosm" with inspiring his breakthroughs in the field of critical phenomena in the late 1960s. In particular, his block spin transformation provided the basis for renormalization group techniques of the 1970s and gave an intuitive explanation of critical-point universality and scaling laws. Of course, atoms aren't that much like solar systems, nor electrons like planets or pool balls...but the story certainly set Kadanoff on the right trail!
I might leave another comment later more about the substance of the post since there is just so much here to chew on, but for now, enjoy the Sci-Fi connection. There is an interview where he talked about it, but the only youtube link that I had is now broken, unfortunately.
Really enjoyable essay, Dr. Feser! It reminded me of then Joseph Ratzinger's usage - in Introduction to Christianity - of wave-particle duality as an image of God as pure act as well as of the relations within the Trinity. I think your point about the use of analogy in microphysics is right on!~
ReplyDeleteCongratulations on the award
ReplyDeleteIt is a thought-provoking talk and subject.
ReplyDeleteHow far does our understanding go? Some people take the fact that some entities in microphysics are described abstractly and go towards a form of idealism, that the most fundamental entities are mathematical structures. But then, how do those mathematical structures crystallize into the world of our experience?
That is the question, how does the strange world of microphysics coalesce into the world which we know?
Reading over the talk again, it does a good job tying together and explaining a lot of material.
DeleteMore thoughts:
There are two main arguments made in the talk about why, as we penetrate deeper into the microscopic world, our understanding diminishes. One is that, because our intellects are most comfortable with the world of everyday life, as we go farther from that world, our intellects have greater difficulty in understanding things. This is not a distinctly AT argument; it would be agreed on by a variety of viewpoints. The second, a specifically AT consideration, is that as you go down the scale of being and approach closer to prime matter the objects are less intelligible in themselves. I suppose the idea is that because prime matter is pure potentiality, it has no essence which can be grasped by the intellect and so is unintelligible. So, objects close to prime matter are most properly understood in terms of their potentials to take on form.
From that perspective, the best way to acquire more knowledge of fundamental physics is by understanding different forms, rather than trying to probe the microphysical world at increasingly small scales.
Another view is that, at bottom, the mathematical descriptions are not a substitute for the essences of microphysical entities, rather, they *are* their essences. The Pythagoreans were right, the universe is mathematics (although not quite in the way they imagined). From this perspective, if our experimental apparatus is insufficient, then the way to make further progress is by studying the mathematical structures more closely. Not that just any structures would work, but if we can find the right ones, then they would allow us to understand the universe. One issue with this is, the objects in the everyday world are physical not mathematical objects, so how do mathematical structures come together to make physical objects?
Yet a third view is that the entities of microphysics are physical entities and that the best way to understand them is by physical reasoning, using the categories of our ordinary world. One reason for holding this view is that, it is reasoning about these entities as physical objects, which interact with the world in ways analogous to ordinary objects of everyday experience, which helps to construct mathematical models and interpret experiments. Also, if the microphysical objects are less than the objects of everyday experience, then one might think that they would be comprehensible using similar notions. It would make sense if much about the nature of angels is mysterious, but according to the Aristotelian classification, the rational soul has the properties of sensitive and vegetative souls in addition to its own distinct properties. And indeed, human beings can understand plants and animals.
Really feel awful about missing this lecture. Congrats on the award.
ReplyDeleteCongratulations to Ed for the award!
ReplyDeleteI know he has touched on it in Scholastic Metaphysics as has Oderberg in Real Essentialism, but would be interesting to have more modern Thomist material on parts and wholes, more specifically on the notion of entities being "virtually present" when forming part of a greater substance. This plays a very important role in the Thomist world picture yet is rather under-explored--one thinks of Whitehead's observation that an electron floating free is categorically different from an electronic forming part of his table.
I am increasingly critical of the presumptions of Thomist epistemology, not least because all the knock-down arguments against Imagism apply to that position equally when applied to particulars as to universals. Imagism is the origin of almost every terrible philosophical idea from Humeanism to Behaviorism (Hello, Mr Duck-Rabbit). The epistemology of a Scotus is on this basis far superior to that of an Aquinas, though can also support many of Aquinas' positive metaphysical conclusions.
Beyond inter-scholastic debates there is a worry that this kind of causal approach might reduce all properties to powers and dispositions of some kind, like some of the Australian realists who wanted to abolish categorical properties entirely. Not that this is a priori bad, it might be good for some issues like the separation of God and the Divine Creative Act, but it initially looks very strange.
Great job on the work-up of atomic theory. Beautiful job with the analogy business, and very deft addition to the ideas with the triplex via!
ReplyDeleteI was hoping you would do an equally smash-up job pulling into the picture quantum mechanics, and how it modified our view of the atom, but you almost completely glossed over the details in their entirety. You mention Pauli but not the Pauli principle, Heisenberg's model of the atom but not Borh's, uncertainty but not as Heisenberg's and not why it was interjected into the framework or what it achieves.
I can see that it might have required a lot more work, maybe too much length. Maybe. But I think that the article might have been improved significantly by tackling the uncertainty principle head on, as a major player in the argument, not an also-mentioned. Also, where determinism survives or falls in the mix, the Copenhagen account, other major elements of the issues.
Maybe Version 2 of the talk?
Thanks, Tony. It's a working draft, and one I couldn't make any longer given the time limit I had at the conference. Also, some of the issues you raise are more about metaphysics, whereas the paper was focused on the epistemological question of how unobservables can be known.
DeleteAnyway, I've addressed quantum mechanics in Aristotle's Revenge.
Could you answer my question also Prof :)
DeleteNorm,
DeleteI read your question but I can't really make sense of it. Maybe if you re-stated it in a different way some of the more knowledgeable commenters will respond.
Hi Bmiller
DeleteWe'll the question is basically, what if the multiplicity of things that can exist as multiple instantiations is an illusion. For example in the world we live in there can be multiple red objects, where in red is instantiated in each one of them or the red you experience at point t1, or the red you experience at point t2.
The question is basically what if all these instances are just illusions and there happens to be only one platonic object red.
What if it's impossible for there to be multiple instantiations of the same type.
.
My broader question to Prof though was that how does one draw the line between what is acceptable deception of the senses and what is a radical deception of our senses to the point where it would undermine empirical evidence for science.
DeleteSo for example our senses tell us there are multiple instantiations of the same quality, if this was actually a deception would it be radical enough to undermine the reliability of our senses.
Why don't other kinds of illusions undermine it in the same way like stick in water looking bent etc.
Maybe it could have something to do with the fact that in the latter case we have a sensory reference for what is reality and what is just an appearance.
And in the case I posited and that of heraclitus as well , there is no sensory reference point for how it really is, so we are just stuck with the false sensory deliverance with no way to figure out what the right one is ?
Might it be for reasons like that Prof ?
Norm,
DeleteIf the question is why Aristotle rejected the Platonic theory of forms, I think it was because of the Third Man argument among other reasons.
Or is it how can we tell illusions from what is real/concrete?
I can understand if the question on multiple instantiations feels a bit eccentric Prof,
Deletebut atleast the question on empirical evidence and physics seems straightforward enough. Is there a reason having to do with the framing that you may not be taking up the question Prof ? Usually you do offer some brief comments.
The question is basically what degree of deception do you think suffices to say that our senses are positively undermined.
Hi BMiller
DeleteWell the first question is sort of like what if our external world just consists of platonic forms rather then those platonic forms being in a third dimension.
The second question is how radical does sensory deception have to be for us to question it's reliability. For example if we see a mirage or if we see a stick looking bent in water, we don't take that as evidence to doubt our senses. If the world really consisted of these platonic forms and that we see multiple instantiations of different things as an illusion would that radical enough to undermine our senses.
I wanted to know what criteria Prof uses,
Would his logic behind it be something like, our senses tells us that there are indeed multiple instantiations of various things around us, like multiple instantiations of red green and they occur so frequently that if it were an illusion of would mean most of what we see is an illusion.
I just wanted him to confirm that..
The question is basically what if all these instances are just illusions and there happens to be only one platonic object red.
DeleteWhat if it's impossible for there to be multiple instantiations of the same type.
Norm, I can (with distaste) wrap my head around the idea that many, or even most instances of a type are illusory. But I can't for the life of me come up with a sound basis for believing definitively that it's IMPOSSIBLE for there to be more than one. I mean, where would you get an argument for that?
But beyond that, why not go whole hog and say that ALL of the "instances" are illusions, there aren't any real instances at all? (Kinda Berkeley-eque?) If all but one are illusory, what's to prevent that last one also being illusory?
That doesn't even begin to get into the epistemological problem of how to LOCATE the "one" single real instance. I mean, the one might be a billion light-years away, and we could never find it. Or too small to see with the naked eye. Or...anything. If there's (to be conservative) a trillion green things within a light year of us, and ALL but 1 are illusory, there's no real hope of finding the ONE to do experiments that would help us figure out the difference between the illusions and the real one: you're odds of ever coming upon the real one to experiment on are so low as to make it pointless to try. If ALL of the experiments we ever try were only tried on illusory ones, we could never ground our belief "there's a real one out there" on anything substantial, it would be speculation at best.
As to the deceptiveness of senses at times: one of the points against it being universal is the coherence of more than one sense or effect for the same object. E.G. the ball looks round, and it also feels round, and it also rolls like it's round. (And (eventually) we discover it also reflects like it's round...) If the senses were all illusory, presumably the illusions should be chance effects rather than founded in reality, there couldn't be any basis for coherence of multiple senses on the same object. (The alternative, that they are illusory, but there IS some causal factor making the illusory effect not a chance result but systematic...that probably runs to other problems, doesn't it?)
Hi Tony well yes, I agree with your arguments. Thanks for engaging sincerely and giving me some attention. I really appreciate it.
DeleteAlso Tony
DeleteThe reason I am assuming all but one are illusory, or it could even be that somehow all these various instances are actually one instance is because I am assuming the a hypothetical position where color is supervenient on mathematical structure. Usually on these eccentric views there can be only one type of each mathematical structure. Hence one type of each color.
But I think your way to look at it is right, assuming a color realist view then ,it would be impossible to know which instance is true and which one doesn't exist.
Even if color existed only in our consciousness, it would be impossible to know if the color we saw at T1 is true or T2 is true.
Thank You. That makes a lot of sense. I wonder if Prof would agree with you though, he seems to be ignoring me. Maybe you could request him on my behalf
The Aristotelian approach to basic questions (which also grounds the scientific approach) is to start with what we have and try to explain that. What we start with is "multiple instances of red". We don't know for sure what that implies yet, but we don't START with "mathematical structure that explains red". We can always get into a situation where "the appearance we started with is misleading" when we get to problems, but that's not where we should start.
DeleteAnd the root idea here isn't "our senses are generally reliable", that's not what the approach is claiming AT FIRST. It's rather that "our sense reports need explaining", and even if they can be misled, that doesn't do away with the need to explain the reports. So, questioning the reliability doesn't move us any farther forward, on its own. And assuming their UNreliability is just unfounded (as a starting point) as assuming definitively that they are wholly reliable.
Jordan Peterson's use of the idea of "successful" animals and animal functions might also be useful here. Animal activity in response to sense stimulus can be characterized as "successful" or "unsuccessful" on the basis of things like "did the animal survive" and "did the animal achieve a pleasurable result (e.g. eating food)." If the senses are reliable most of the time, this would cohere with animals having many successes, even somewhat reliable records of success. If the senses were in principle merely random chance events, regular success would be unexplainable. System structures that responded to sense stimulus as if those stimuli were utterly meaningless would be more successful than response structures that respond as if they mean something, and this is contrary to what we observe. [This might not be a definitive proof.]
Finally, I wonder about the rationale within the suggestion that if "color is supervenient on mathematical structure", there can only be 1 instance of each structure. Take the most basic mathematical feature we could assert, number. Is there only ONE possible set of 4 things, and only one possible set of 5 things, and so on? That's not remotely feasible. Why then would it apply to other mathematical structures? I would suggest that it makes more sense - even on the basis of number itself - to say that "to be a mathematical structure" just is to be indeterminate as to how many times it is expressed in real things. And that this - if not a manifest principle - is at least more plausible than its opposite.
Tony
DeleteUsually, the motivation for these eccentric Pythagorean adjacent views are physical theories.
So given that let's say the scenario I am describing is true, wouldn't that undermine the evidence for those physical theories. If all the multiplicity of colors we see for example is an illusion except for one and didn't exist, we wouldn't know what is real the one as you say.
I am grateful for you pointing that out Tony.
Would also appreciate any comment of Prof Feser tho :)
Sorry I wrote my name as Tony by mistake I got confused. I was addressing Tony.
DeleteAlso Tony in your opinion what level of deception would be required to conclude that the senses are unreliable. What would be the criteria for doing so
Deletewhat level of deception would be required to conclude that the senses are unreliable. What would be the criteria for doing so
DeleteThat's a good question, but better to re-phrase it not as "deception" but as "not pointing to a real condition as experienced." let me explain: when you intentionally construct, in your imagination, an image of some specific thing, say a red triangle, your imagination itself neither asserts nor denies "this red triangle is a real existent outside of the imagination". It is your mind that does this. Apply the same to your senses: if the eyes report "red 3-sided figure", the report ITSELF is not a claim "there REALLY IS a red 3-sided figure as a real existent outside of my sensory experience." What we want to know, then, is something like (a) how often when the eyes report "red 3-sided figure" is there in reality a something that reasonably a answers to "it is in fact a red 3-sided figure", or (b) how often is there a real something else that really IS NOT a red 3-sided figure in any intelligible sense but still (somehow) gave rise to the sensory report, versus (c) how often is it that there is no real existent at all that gave rise to the sensory report and the report was wholly manufactured without external foundation; and added to the questions of those divisions of experience, WHAT FACTORS distinguish the 3 divisions and give rise to them as different kinds of experience?
I would suggest that while regularity of certain kinds is certainly at play in our ordinary, non-scientific thought about when our senses are accurately reporting something that is both real (outside the senses) and like the report (really red in some intelligible sense when reported as red). Possibly it takes scientific analysis to nail down rigorous foundation for such regularity to tell us that the senses are "usually" reporting accurately.
Certainly scientific analysis (including experiment) shows us more clearly both THAT there are cases where the senses do NOT report accurately, and also pinpoints specific factors that can be catalogued as to WHY the senses in those cases are not reporting accurately. This leads to at least a minimal basis, at least a possible position that when such factors are not present, the senses are reliable. I think that coherence, in the combined notion of different senses providing reports that are coherent together, together with rational analysis that excludes "the sense organ was just reporting something that has no basis in reality" because using the report as if accurate leads regularly to successful action goes the rest of the way to grounding the conclusion that senses are generally reliable when there are no intervening factors.
It would be especially ironic to have scientists conclude FROM EXPERIMENT that "the senses are wholly unreliable as to any real conditions of real things", as such a conclusion undermines the scientific method altogether. So, even if my proposed argument model is not quite sufficient, by itself, to ground an acceptance of senses as usually reliable, that should leave the state of the question "we have not yet stated FULLY sufficient basis for usual reliability", not "we have thus definitively established complete unreliability."
My impression is that Aristotle did not give, or would not have given, much if any credence to the idea that we should look for theories that unify seemingly unrelated phenomena; and that he wouldn't have seen such a thing as a point in a theory's favor, necessarily. He saw the world as radically heterogeneous, requiring different methods for different fields of inquiry, and that was that. Is that right, or am I misreading Aristotle?
ReplyDelete(This is just an observation and question--in no way is it a criticism of the lecture, which is concerned with other things and does not address this question at all).
I don't think this is an accurate representation of Aristotle's way of thinking. He grounds his ethics in a (fairly elaborate) model of "what kind of thing man is" - with special attention to the details of man's soul - to say "what does happiness consist in". And he uses an extensive library of observational data about kinds of things, to contrast with man as a kind of thing, to pinpoint what makes man's nature specifically his and not belonging to other things nor mere accidents to his being. And he uses "what do men say" about basic questions as one of his starting points from which to reason about such ethical questions. That is, he grounds his ethical conclusions from data and reasoning from biology, anthropology, music, and cultural studies to guide him. And he certainly uses mathematical disciplines like geometry and arithmetic to help ground his philosophical categories and his principles of being, non-being, potential being, which ground his natural philosophy studies. In a word, he is more described as "integrative" than "fractured" in his approach.
Delete"The remedy is to reject the advice of Dawid and others to abandon modern physics’ traditional insistence on experimental verification. But this will entail rejecting also the hubris of supposing that physics will inevitably hit upon some final “theory of everything.” As when we approach the divine apex of the hierarchy of reality, so too when we approach the basement, our vision is likely to become less clear rather than more."
ReplyDeleteI came to realize that it doesn't matter which topic Ed writes about; he has a peerless capacity for clarity and conciseness. Never change, Ed -- and keep on the good work!
Ed,
ReplyDeleteThis is a fantastic talk/essay.
While you don't address the question of scientific realism directly, it seems to me that this does have implications for that question. For example, in Ernan McMullin's "A Case for Scientific Realism", Fr. McMullin notes that anti-realist arguments draw heavily from the history of basic mechanics. He discusses Larry Laudan quite a bit, but Thomas Kuhn's strongest arguments against understanding scientific progress in a realist way also concern basic mechanics. (To summarize the argument way too aggressively: there is no coherent ontological progression from Aristotle to Newton to Einstein, and in some respects Einstein is closer to Newton than either is to Aristotle. Yet each improved on the last in doing everything else we want a scientific theory to do. In light of this, can we really be confident that as our theories progress, our ontology gets better?)
Now, McMullin points out that the history of biology, chemistry, geology, etc. is not like this; that basic mechanics is different. But he never really says why it is different. My sense is that this essay/talk gives very thought-provoking answers to those questions. Moreover, part of the reason that arguments from basic mechanics seem so compelling is a kind of implicit reductionism on the part of many who think about science. The idea is that if we have this uncertainty about the "basic building blocks of reality", we must be at least as uncertain about the composites that they form. From the point of view of a Thomistic metaphysics, this is all wrong. Trees, people, and dogs are *more* definitely something, not less, than the electrons that make them up.
There are many interesting avenues to explore there, and I'm sure I'll enjoy thinking them over.
Thanks again for a very good talk. I wish I could have been there.
(Part 1)
ReplyDeleteCongrats on the award, Ed!
In addition to the general ways you laid out here, there are a couple of specific ways in which findings about the microphysical world mesh extremely well with A-T metaphysics that I'd like to highlight.
The first, which you alluded to, involves the way that microphysical particles exhibit a wave-particle duality, meaning that that some aspects of their observed behavior is best captured by mathematical models treating them as bits of matter (eg billiard balls) of our experience, whereas other aspects can only be accurately modeled as waves.
In particular, I think it's important to note what it is specifically about microphysical particles that is wavelike, namely their extensional property, their location in space. That is, these particles appear not to have an actual single location like a billiard ball does. Rather, they have a range of possible locations where they potentially could be, which only resolves to a specific actual location when they interact with and become incorporated into the world of substances with actual locations that we experience. This range of possibilities is modeled mathematically by a wave called a "probability wave."
Now, in statistics, probabilities concern our subjective ignorance. For instance, I may say that the probability of drawing a straight flush from a deck of cards in one try is 0.00154%, but this only reflects my ignorance about the deck of cards, not the deck of cards itself. If I knew what order the cards were in prior to drawing, I would be able calculate either a 0% probability or a 100% probability of drawing a straight flush from it. Hence, one may suppose at first that a particle's probability wave - its probability of being in any given location - is just a matter of our ignorance about where it is, but that the particle actually has a single actual location at all times.
But there are multiple lines of evidence that the probability wave of a particle's location is something objectively real, not just a statistical representation of our ignorance. For instance, these particles diffuse through openings like waves. Most tellingly, in the double-slit experiment, when a single particle's location probability wave is split into two, both waves interfere with each other in a way mathematically identical to how parallel waves in general interfere. This implies that the "probability wave" representing the particle's possible location is objectively real and not simply an abstract mathematical representation of our subjective ignorance, as abstract mathematical representations of our ignorance can't physically interfere with things in the real world.
(Part 2)
ReplyDeleteBecause of this, I think it's technically incorrect to call a microphysical particle's location wave a "probability wave" as it represents something real with real causal power in the world, and not mere probabilities which are a function of our subjective ignorance. The only way to make sense of it, I think, is to bring in A-T philosophy's concept of potentiality. It's more correct to say that microphysical particles have a "potentiality wave." Rather than having a single actual location in space like the substances of our experience have, microphysical particles have a range of potential locations they could have were they to become incorporated into a substance. This range of potential locations is objectively real, not a subjective byproduct of our ignorance, which is why it can physically interact with and exert causal power on things in the world. When that particle is incorporated as part of a substance, one of its potential locations becomes actualized.
All of this meshes very easily and seamlessly with your point that fundamental particles like fermions are much closer to prime matter (that is, pure potentiality) than are substances of our experience. They're so close, in fact, that properties that we take to be basic and universal to physical objects of our experience, such as location, exist only in a potential way in these particles when they are on their own. In fact, it may be more accurate to refer to them as "vectors of potentiality" or somesuch rather than "particles," since the latter naturally leads one to think of them as akin to billiard balls or something similarly misleading.
(Part 3)
ReplyDeleteThe other aspect of microphysical physics that I think reinforces A-T philosophy in a very specific way is quantum indeterminacy itself, and this one I don't think I have seen any other A-T philosopher point out yet.
As A-T philosophy tells us, all of the cause operating in a given moment in time have merely instrumental power, except for the Act of the Unmoved Mover. For instance, in the rock-stick-hand thought experiment, the rock is only able to move by virtue of the stick pushing it, the stick is only able to push the rock by virtue of the hand pushing it, the hand is only able to make the stick push the rock by virtue of the arm holding it up and pushing it, etc. No cause in the chain of causes can explain why the rock moves, because just as the rock's change in location can only be explained by appeal to external causes acting on it, so the action of each of those causes (eg, why the stick changed from not pushing the rock to pushing it, why the hand changed from not making the stick push the rock to doing so, etc) can only be explained by external causes acting on them. Ultimately this must terminate in the Pure Act of the Unmoved Mover (God), which actualizes ALL change happening at each moment without being caused by anything else.
What I've just laid out is of course the standard-issue A-T account of causation. What I don't think I've seen anyone explore is the implications of this account for questions of determinism/indeterminacy at the most fundamental level of physics. What, after all, determines how God acts at each moment? Well, by definition, nothing does external to God Himself. Why? Because to determine something is to exert causal influence over it, but God's act of actualizing all change at each moment is Pure Act - that is, it's purely self-actualizing and all other causal power is "downstream" of it - hence nothing can exert causal power over it and thus nothing can determine it.
(Part 4)
ReplyDeleteThat means that we could never, in principle, find any rule or equation or anything else that would determine how God's Act will manifest at the root of all change in any given moment. What this means is that God's Act as it manifests at each moment must be indeterminate in principle from our perspective as creatures. It's not truly indeterminate, because it is determined by God Himself, and God is not playing dice, because even that implies something external to God determining His Act. But it means that it's necessarily indeterminate from our perspective because the very existence of Pure Act entails that we could never in principle find anything that determines it.
How does this fit into microphysics? Well, just as we should expect to see more and more potentiality in fundamental particles as we dig towards deeper and deeper approximations of prime matter if A-T metaphysics is correct, so we should expect to see causes that are more and more indeterminate in principle as we dig deeper and deeper through more fundamental chains of causation towards the Act of the Unmoved Mover. And in both cases, this is exactly what we see. In the days of Aristotle and Aquinas, they could not see matter smaller than visible substances, and they could not trace causal chains much past the hand pushing the stick pushing the rock. But the implications they worked out match uncannily well we what we see now that we can.
(End)
Lawd have mercy, Deuce. I give you an "A" for the effort you put into that.
Delete