Title: What Physicists Get Wrong About Reality
Subtitle: The unexamined metaphysics distorting modern science
Introduction: Physics Has a Philosophy Problem
Physicists like to say they don’t do philosophy. Many even claim to have moved beyond metaphysics altogether. But this declaration of independence is itself deeply metaphysical. It masks an allegiance not to the absence of metaphysics, but to a particular metaphysical tradition — one that treats reality as a ready-made, mind-independent world of things, into which science merely peers. This tradition, often referred to as "naïve realism" or "substance metaphysics," is rarely scrutinised by physicists themselves. Yet it profoundly shapes how they interpret even the most successful and well-confirmed physical theories, often leading to confusion, contradiction, and pseudo-paradoxes.
This is not a problem with the theories. Quantum mechanics and general relativity are not broken. The problem lies in the meanings physicists project onto these theories — meanings that are constrained by the metaphysical assumptions they refuse to examine. What is needed is not a new physics, but a new way of thinking about physics: one that treats science as a meaning-making activity, grounded not in substances but in systems, instances, and the construal of experience.
Metaphysical Inheritance and Unconscious Commitments
The historical development of physics has always been entangled with metaphysics. Newton's absolute space and time, for instance, presupposed a metaphysical backdrop in which motion and measurement could be universally grounded. Einstein, in developing relativity, dismantled this backdrop. Yet the tendency to reify space and time as "curved substances" or to treat spacetime as an all-containing container shows how easily old metaphors slip back in.
Similarly, quantum mechanics emerged from an explicit break with classical determinism. Yet physicists routinely ask where particles "really are" when they're not being observed, or what a wavefunction "really is" — as if the theory must describe an objective reality independent of observation. This insistence on mind-independent being turns interpretive questions into metaphysical traps. It also ignores a central lesson of quantum theory: that the act of observation is not a passive revelation of what is already there, but a constitutive event.
What physicists often call a "measurement problem" is, at root, a metaphysical problem: it arises only if we assume that reality must be fully determinate and observer-independent. But why should we assume that? What if reality is not a brute fact to be discovered but a structured potential that becomes actual only in the act of observation? What if physics is not a mirror of nature, but a semiotic system for making meaning from experience?
The Cost of Confusion
When physicists remain unaware of their metaphysical commitments, they end up mistaking philosophical problems for physical ones. This has led to interpretive cul-de-sacs: the many-worlds interpretation, for example, multiplies actualities in an effort to preserve a classical notion of determinacy. Other interpretations, like pilot-wave theory, sneak in hidden variables to maintain a metaphysical sense of realism. None of these "solutions" arise from physics itself; all are attempts to save a particular vision of reality.
The price of this confusion is high. It encourages bad philosophy, obscures the elegance of the theories themselves, and misleads the public into thinking that physics traffics in paradox and mystery. Worse, it blinds physicists to the real interpretive resources available within their own discipline. By refusing to think semiotically — to treat scientific theories as systems of meaning that organise potential and actual instances of experience — they cut themselves off from more productive ways of understanding the world.
A New Ontology for Physics
To move forward, we need to foreground the semiotic nature of scientific modelling. Physics doesn’t describe a pre-given world; it constructs meaning from interaction with the material order. Quantum states are not hidden realities but structured potentials. Space and time are not substances but dimensions of the unfolding of processes, defined by relational measurements.
In place of substance metaphysics, we need an ontology of instantiation. What we call "reality" is not a collection of things, but a dynamic system in which potentials are actualised in and through observation. This ontology does not undermine science; it makes its meaning explicit. It invites us to treat physics not as the pursuit of ultimate being, but as a disciplined way of making sense of the world.
Looking Ahead
In the next post, we will explore how this meaning-based ontology can illuminate the core concepts of quantum mechanics and relativity, showing how these theories work when we free them from metaphysical confusion. Far from being mysterious, they offer a coherent picture of a world in which meaning is not imposed from outside, but unfolds from within.
Stay tuned.
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