'What Is Physical Reality?' Viewed Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Penrose (2004: 1028):

Indeed, we may well ask: what is physical reality? This is a question that has been posed for thousands of years, and philosophers throughout the ages have attempted various kinds of answer. Today we look back, from our vantage point of modern science, and claim to take a more sober position. Rather than attempting to answer the ‘what’ question, most modern scientists would try to evade it. They would try argue that the question has been wrongly posed: we should not try to ask what reality is; merely, how does it behave. ‘How?’ is, indeed, a fundamental question that we may consider to have been one of the main concerns of this book: how do we describe the laws that govern our universe and its contents? 

Yet, many readers will no doubt feel that this is a somewhat disappointing answer — a ‘cop-out’, no less. To know how the contents of the universe behave does not seem to tell us very much about what it is that is doing the behaving. This ‘what?’ question is intimately connected with another deep and ancient question, namely ‘why?’. Why do things in our universe behave in the particular ways that they do? But without knowing what these things are, it is hard to see why they should do one thing rather than another.

Blogger Comments:

From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory, physical reality is the construal of experience as first-order meaning: material phenomena, which include things, processes ("behaviours") and their circumstances. This is distinct from physics, which is the reconstrual of first-order meaning as the second-order meaning (metaphenomena) that realise theory. As such, the laws of physics (metaphenomena) do not "govern" the contents of the universe (phenomena) any more than a map (metaphenomenon) "governs" a territory (phenomenon).

From this perspective, 'why?' is the interrogative form of two distinct types of cause: 'reason-result' and 'purpose'. Physics does model the 'reason-result' type of cause, with earlier processes being the reasons for the resultant later processes. The 'whats' are the participants in those processes. The 'purpose' type of cause, however, only applies to beings with intentions, within the universe. The purpose of the universe is the purposes of its intentional beings.