{"id":8216,"date":"2017-10-09T23:12:30","date_gmt":"2017-10-10T03:12:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=8216"},"modified":"2017-10-09T23:27:49","modified_gmt":"2017-10-10T03:27:49","slug":"apples-and-atoms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=8216","title":{"rendered":"Apples and atoms"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The long conversation<\/a>\u00a0in the New York Review<\/em> between\u00a0Riccardo Manzotti\u00a0and Tim Parks is bearing fruit<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Manzotti<\/strong>: The view that only the smallest constituents, atoms, are \u201creal\u201d is called smallism in science, or nihilism in philosophy, and it clashes with everyday experience and common sense in the most blatant way. As Democritus suggests, it\u2019s self-defeating because it is conducted only with the aid of the senses, which it claims have no reality. The world we live in is a world of objects. Apples exist, too!<\/p>\n

Parks<\/strong>: But an apple is made of atoms.<\/p>\n

Manzotti<\/strong>: To be made of something is not the same as to be identical with it. …\u00a0We live in a time when scientists seem to like nothing better than to expose our everyday view of reality as delusional. They say, \u201cYou see the color red, but in fact, out there are only atoms; there are no colors. You hear music, but out there, there are no sounds,\u201d etc. This gives them the authority to describe an entirely different reality, in which deciding between chocolate or strawberry ice cream, say, is nothing more than a matter of warring cohorts of neurons transferring their electrical charges and chemical processes this way and that, while outside your brain there is only a flavorless world of atomic particles. It\u2019s a vision that denies not only our existence \u2014 as people choosing between ice-cream flavors \u2014 but also the existence of the things we experience: the banana sundae, a new car, paintings, planets, smells, seas. All these macroscopic objects cease to be real. They are all merely subjective. Merely the product of your brain.<\/p>\n

Parks<\/strong>: But what if that\u2019s the truth of the matter?<\/p>\n

Manzotti<\/strong>: It is not the truth. It is a profound misunderstanding. The notion that objects exist relative to each other, brought into existence by each other, does not clash with any scientific finding or demonstrated result. Only with smallism, which, again, is an idea, a theory, not a scientific finding. There are atoms, but there are also macroscopic objects, and the key to understanding why both categories exist and are equally real is that they exist relative to different things.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Image: Michele Dorsey Walfred<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The long conversation\u00a0in the New York Review between\u00a0Riccardo Manzotti\u00a0and Tim Parks is bearing fruit: Manzotti: The view that only the smallest constituents, atoms, are \u201creal\u201d is called smallism in science, or nihilism in philosophy, and it clashes with everyday experience and common sense in the most blatant way. As Democritus suggests, it\u2019s self-defeating because it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8216","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8216","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8216"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8216\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8221,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8216\/revisions\/8221"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8216"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8216"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8216"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}