It is a tricky issue. Really, the only reason to suspect that quantum amplitude is the simple thing that exists ontologically, is that we have no hints (that I know of) that there exists something on an even lower level. It may be that there is something else (and maybe figuring out what this is will help us unify physics) but for the moment, since we don’t have any evidence to suggest that any particular thing is there, we conclude (pending further investigation) that there isn’t anything else there. But, I assign a fairly low probability to this statement, given the history of physics.
Yes, thank you for clearing up your point. I think that @orthonormal hit the nail on the head. What I meant to get at was not that my conversation partners care very much whether we can conclusively say that something does/doesn’t underlie amplitude. It’s more that they have their own favorite phenomena which they want to have similar status as quantum amplitude. It could be the power of prayer, the rightness of a political ideology, etc. They engage in the regress of “well what’s that made out of” only so that when I hit something at the bottom (currently amplitude), then they can say that separate magisteria allows them to claim with equal validity that their favorite phenomena are just like amplitude and are ontologically basic.
Really this about looking at any two phenomena we can observe and saying that there is some finer level that underlies them both and explains them. Many who dispute that want to press you about whatever the limits of knowledge are in physics and then argue that this justifies their metaphysical views that some other thing cannot be reduced.
On a tangent, this makes me wonder what has been said about mathematical models of the levels of abstraction/semantic resolution of reality. Is there any kind of meaningful total ordering of these levels? Could the different levels of reductionism be partially ordered? Are they observer-dependent. These are interesting questions.
It is a tricky issue. Really, the only reason to suspect that quantum amplitude is the simple thing that exists ontologically, is that we have no hints (that I know of) that there exists something on an even lower level. It may be that there is something else (and maybe figuring out what this is will help us unify physics) but for the moment, since we don’t have any evidence to suggest that any particular thing is there, we conclude (pending further investigation) that there isn’t anything else there. But, I assign a fairly low probability to this statement, given the history of physics.
Yes, thank you for clearing up your point. I think that @orthonormal hit the nail on the head. What I meant to get at was not that my conversation partners care very much whether we can conclusively say that something does/doesn’t underlie amplitude. It’s more that they have their own favorite phenomena which they want to have similar status as quantum amplitude. It could be the power of prayer, the rightness of a political ideology, etc. They engage in the regress of “well what’s that made out of” only so that when I hit something at the bottom (currently amplitude), then they can say that separate magisteria allows them to claim with equal validity that their favorite phenomena are just like amplitude and are ontologically basic.
Really this about looking at any two phenomena we can observe and saying that there is some finer level that underlies them both and explains them. Many who dispute that want to press you about whatever the limits of knowledge are in physics and then argue that this justifies their metaphysical views that some other thing cannot be reduced.
On a tangent, this makes me wonder what has been said about mathematical models of the levels of abstraction/semantic resolution of reality. Is there any kind of meaningful total ordering of these levels? Could the different levels of reductionism be partially ordered? Are they observer-dependent. These are interesting questions.