Here’s a discussion Ayn Rand had about the ultimate constituents of entities. It’s from Appendix - Philosophy of Science, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, Expanded 2nd Edition:
– Discussion begins here –
Properties of the Ultimate Constituents
Prof. E: Could you argue, on metaphysical grounds, that all observed properties of an entity are ultimately explicable in terms of, or reducible back to, properties of their primary constituents?
Ayn Rand: We’d have to be omniscient to know. The question in my mind would be: how can we [as philosophers] make conclusions about the ultimate constituents of the universe? For instance, we couldn’t say: everything is material, if by “material” we mean that of which the physical objects on the perceptual level are made - “material” in the normal, perceptual meaning of the word. If this is what we mean by “material,” then we do not have the knowledge to say that ultimately everything is sub-subatomic particles which in certain aggregates are matter. Because suppose scientists discovered that there are two different kinds of primary ingredients - or three, or more? We would be in the same position as the pre-Socratics who were trying to claim that everything was air, water, earth, and fire because that’s all they knew.
Prof. E: You see the question is whether the concept of “potentiality” might not be irreducible. That is, whether the ultimate constituents of the universe, if and when we ever reach them, would have to be definable solely in terms of their mode of action.
Ayn Rand: No, in fact the opposite will be true. The only thing of which we can be sure, philosophically, is that the ultimate stuff, if it’s ever found - one element or ten of them - will have identity. It will be what it is. You could not say that it is pure action: the concept wouldn’t apply. If you come down to the ultimate particles of the universe and say they are pure action, they don’t have any identity, they don’t have anything except the capacity for action - the term “action” would not apply. By “action” we mean the action of an entity.
Prof. E: But suppose one were to raise the question epistemologically, rather than metaphysically. Granted that the ultimate constituents are something, are entities and have an identity, still is it possible for us in theory ever to know any more about them than the kind of action they take?
Prof. B: They’d have to have size, for one thing, and shape.
Ayn Rand: If they are particles. What if they are solid flows of energy, but each is indivisible, and it moves, but it’s one entity, moving from left to right and vice versa?
Prof. B: That depends on what “energy” means, because whatever the nature of energy is, that’s the nature it would have.
Ayn Rand: Exactly.
Prof. E: No, I was switching this to epistemology.
Ayn Rand: But the confusion there would arise in applying concepts based on the macroscopic level of observation to the submicroscopic, subatomic level. If you use macroscopic terms which do not apply on that level, the misapplication will destroy all your perceptual level and your whole conceptual structure.
Prof. B: So you are saying that the ultimate constituents need not be particles, like solid balls, but whatever they are, one is not to refer to them as being actions without entities.
Ayn Rand: Exactly. And I was also objecting to your saying they will have to have extension, for instance, or shape. We can’t claim that.
Prof. F: But suppose we agree that whatever they are, they will have identity - they will be what they are and so on. But mustn’t we also say something else: that we cannot define this identity solely in terms of their relationship to other objects?
For instance, suppose that one of the ultimate properties of an entity is charge. Suppose you couldn’t find any way of defining “charge” except in relationship to other entities. Now wouldn’t that be grounds, metaphysically, for saying therefore charge is not an ultimate property of matter?
Ayn Rand: I am not sure I even understand the logic. Why?
Prof. E: Presumably he would argue that a property which is defined in terms of a relationship between two entities presupposes and is a consequence of the attributes of that entity which give rise to that relationship. And therefore, if charge is definable only in terms of an entity’s relation to others - its effects on them - then charge couldn’t be a primary, it would have to be a derivative from something else in the entity that gives rise to that kind of effect.
Prof. F: Thank you. That’s exactly what I meant.
Prof. E: But then we are in bad shape here, because to grasp what the ultimate entities are, you have to strip off their actions, their potentialities for action, and their relations to other entities - then by what means would you ever get to know what they are?
Ayn Rand: Not only that, you are obviously making advance conditions for what that primary has to be. You are being Hegelian or Rationalistic in that sense. You cannot say philosophically what conditions you will ascribe to that which is not known. We cannot know by what means we will grasp something not known today. A hundred years ago you couldn’t have conceived of the cloud chamber, the first instrument by which scientists could observe atoms simply by observing their effects on something. You couldn’t have made the rule that unless you can touch, see, smell, and measure a given entity with a ruler, it cannot exist. That would have been crude materialism of some kind. You couldn’t, a hundred years ago, have prescribed the means by which you would discover twentieth-century knowledge. And yet in making any kind of conclusions about the ultimate stuff of the universe, you are necessarily committing that error. You are prescribing conditions of what something not known to you now has to be.
The important thing here is this. You cannot say that you would define an atom by means of its charge, or that you would look further, or what you would do, because you have no way of knowing in what form you will become aware of that primary stuff. It might be through ten different instruments, and the interaction of one upon another, which would only tell you how you became aware of it. You wouldn’t yet have defined it, metaphysically. All you could say is, “It is a something, which I discovered by the following method.”
The only thing that concerns philosophy is that we can say: whatever it is, it will have to be what it is, and no contradictions claimed about it will be valid - as for instance, the current theories about a particle that goes from one place to another without crossing the places in between. Now you see that is metaphysically impossible, and you don’t have to be a scientist to know that. A philosopher can tell you without ever entering a laboratory that that is not possible. But for a philosopher to attempt to define what kind of particle it has to be, or how we will determine its properties, that is unwarranted and Rationalistic. That is the province of science, not philosophy.
You see it isn’t the job of philosophy to tell us what exists, it’s only to tell us what has to be true of everything that exists [identity] and what are the rules by which you can claim knowledge. And in regard to the constituent elements of the universe, all we can say is that they would have to have identity. That we can prove. Any other conclusions we cannot draw philosophically.
– Discussion ends here –
In the above, Miss Rand states that:
- The ultimate constituents may not be particles with size & shape just like entities in the macroscopic level. They could be solid moving flows of energy.
- At the subatomic level, a particle cannot go from one place to another without crossing the places in between. That is metaphysically impossible.
So if 2 instances of the ultimate constituents are moving towards each other in submicroscopic space, then at some point in time, they will be so close to each other that the space between them would be too small for anything to occupy it. Neither another instance of the ultimate constituent nor anything smaller than an ultimate constituent, since there could be nothing smaller.
In that case, wouldn’t the (relational) space between the 2 moving instances of the ultimate constituent, at that point in time, contain literally nothing? Or would it be no different from having nothing in a pocket at the macroscopic level?