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Quantum physics reveals there is no such thing as things

There is no such thing as individuality in the quantum realm

Olimpia Lombardi, 07/25/25

Editor;s Notes：Quantum physics doesn’t just rewrite our equations—it dismantles our ontology. From uncertainty to entanglement, the theory breaks the classical idea of the world as made of individual objects with identities and properties. In the quantum realm, philosopher of science Olimpia Lombardi argues, there are no separate things—only an undivided whole. On the most fundamental level, there is no individual.

When we talk about what it is that makes up the world, we tend to talk of the “building blocks” of reality. When we ask what kind of thing those things are—the question of their ontology—and what properties they possess, we might picture solid, distinct individual pieces, like particles, that make up the fabric of reality. It is precisely these features that break down when we talk about quantum systems. Can we still understand objects as being individual, completely definite, and distinguishable when we look at the world through quantum physics? There are several reasons to answer no.

Ontological categories

Quantum theory introduces a deep break with respect to the classical view of reality. To understand the extent of this, we first must recall what an ontological category is.

A category is not a class defined by a concept, like “yellow” or “round,” gathering objects together because they possess certain properties in common. Nor is it a taxon, like “mammal,” classifying objects into well-defined kinds. Categories are prior to classification, since they are what endow reality with a certain structure: the conditions of possibility of any classification.

Ontological categories are shown by language structure, telling us whether reality consists of individual objects, properties, relations, and causal links. The ontological category of individual has its linguistic correlate in “singular terms” (‘this’, ‘she’, ‘the richest person’, etc.) that serve as logical subjects, complemented by properties represented as linguistic predicates. The most traditional metaphysical picture underlying classical physics is that of an ontology of individuals and properties. Quantum mechanics challenges this picture due to four features: uncertainty, contextuality, non-separability, and indistinguishability.

 Uncertainty

The first challenge comes from quantum uncertainty. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle can be expressed very simply: quantum systems always have incompatible properties, properties that cannot simultaneously acquire precise values. This is not trivial; the incompatibility between properties is an essentially quantum feature, completely absent from the classical world.

The paradigmatic example of incompatible properties in quantum physics is the pair of position and kinetic momentum (mass times velocity). In classical mechanics, the state of a system at some time is given by its position and momentum, both of which are completely determined. The state at a given time uniquely fixes the state at all subsequent times, so that the trajectory of the system is completely determined by the state at the initial time. In quantum mechanics, by contrast, the Heisenberg Principle states that if the value of the position of a quantum system is determined, the value of its momentum (and therefore its velocity) is not, and vice versa. Consequently, it is not possible to assign definite trajectories to quantum systems. Consider an electron at a given initial time: its state at that time does not simultaneously determine the values of its position and momentum; therefore, the motion of the electron cannot be “tracked” through space and time in so that we could say that, if the electron was at a precise position at the initial time, it will be at another precise position at a later time.

The Heisenberg Principle is also known as the “Uncertainty Principle.” This imbues the phenomenon of incompatibility with an epistemic connotation: if we know the value of one property with precision, we cannot know the value of an incompatible property with precision, e.g. if we know exactly where an electron is, we cannot know how it moves, expressing a limitation of knowledge and not an ontological feature of the quantum domain. The epistemic reading of the principle, popular in the early days of the theory, faces an obstacle that arose from a formal result demonstrated in 1967, long after the theory’s first formulations.

Contextuality

The second challenge involves contextual properties. According to the epistemic reading of the Heisenberg Principle, quantum mechanics could always be completed by assigning definite values to all properties; this was Einstein’s idea in 1935, when he asserted the “incompleteness” of quantum mechanics. The coup de grâce for the idea of incompleteness was the 1967 Kochen-Specker Theorem, which demonstrated the logical impossibility of completing the theory with definite values for all the system’s properties.

This is not just an epistemic limitation that could be overcome by somehow assigning definite values to incompatible properties; rather, any assignment of definite values to all properties leads to a logical contradiction. This formal feature of quantum mechanics, not perceived by the founding fathers of the theory, is a consequence of the theory’s mathematical structure. Kochen and Specker’s result is a theorem within the formalism of quantum mechanics and, therefore, if quantum theory is accepted, we must also accept that the uncertainty principle is not the expression of imperfect knowledge. It is regrettable that Einstein was no longer alive when the theorem was formulated, as we will never know his reaction to this result, which is stronger than the Heisenberg Principle.

Let us compare classical items with quantum items with respect to this quantum feature. For a classical object, if it has the property of position, it will necessarily have some definite position: even though we may ignore the precise position of the object, we do not doubt that it is in some position, regardless of the object’s other properties. However, in the quantum case, given that the properties of position and momentum are incompatible, if the system has a definite value for kinetic momentum, it does not have a definite value for position. The system has no definite position, because if we assigned one, no matter what it was, we would generate a logical contradiction within the theory.

Does this mean it is impossible to simultaneously assign definite values to the properties of a quantum system under any circumstances? No: it is possible for the properties of a system that are compatible with each other, those which form a “context.” In quantum mechanics, the assignment of definite values to properties cannot be performed globally, to all properties of the system simultaneously, but is always contextual.

This quantum feature generates great ontological perplexity as it violates the “Principle of Omnimode Determination” historically widely accepted in philosophy. The idea is that, in any individual object, all its determinables are determinate: if the determinable “color” applies to an object, the object necessarily has a certain determinate color, say, red, regardless of its other determinate properties such as round, solid, etc., and regardless of our knowledge of what that determinate color is. While this intuitive principle holds in the classical world, quantum contextuality throws it into crisis: according to the Kochen-Specker Theorem, a quantum system always has determinable properties that are not determinate, that is, that do not have precise values.

Non-separability

The third challenge concerns quantum entanglement. Certain interactions between quantum systems lead to a state of the composite system, resulting from the interaction, which cannot be “decomposed” in terms of the states of the component systems. In these cases, the state is said to be “entangled,” and therefore “non-separable.” This central feature of quantum mechanics leads to challenging consequences.

Entanglement leads to surprising correlations between the properties of distant non-interacting systems, such as those of the famous Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) experiment. Taken at face value, EPR correlations strongly suggest non-locality, that is, non-local influences between spatially distant systems, i.e., systems between which no light signal can travel. However, since this idea is incompatible with special relativity, which says no causal influence can travel faster than the speed of light, the exact nature of those quantum correlations is subject to ongoing controversy.

According to certain interpretations, EPR correlations imply a certain action-at-a-distance which, nevertheless, does not allow sending information at a superluminal velocity. From another perspective, those correlations are consequences of the holistic nature of quantum systems. Separability implies that, if a physical object is constructed by assembling its physical parts, then its physical properties are completely determined by the properties of the parts and their relationships. Holism, by contrast, is the characteristic of physical objects that are not composed of physical parts, but are indivisible wholes, so that EPR correlations are correlations between properties of a single holistic object. From this perspective, it has been claimed that entanglement is evidence that the whole universe has ontological priority with respect to its parts: the parts derive their identity and properties from the whole, rather than the other way around.

The terms ‘locality’ and ‘separability’ can be clearly distinguished. The “Locality Principle” asserts that the state of a system is unaffected by events in regions of the universe so removed from the given system that no physical signal could connect them. The aim of the Locality Principle is to rule out physically objectionable kinds of action-at-a-distance. The “Separability Principle” is, by contrast, a fundamental ontological principle: it asserts that the presence of a non-vanishing space-time interval is a sufficient condition for the individuation of physical systems. Einstein's dissatisfaction with quantum mechanics is closely related to the violation of the Separability Principle: “If one renounces the assumption that what is present in different parts of space has an independent, real existence, then I do not at all see what physics is supposed to describe.”

Indistinguishability

The final challenge involves identical particles. As we have seen, quantum contextuality is manifested in a single quantum system, and quantum non-separability appears when two systems interact and their states become entangled. Quantum indistinguishability, on the other hand, appears when statistical conclusions are drawn about a collection of many systems.

Most discussions about the ontological commitments of quantum mechanics focus on the challenge posed by the indistinguishability of so-called “identical particles”—particles with the same state-independent properties—to the ontological category of individual. The usual story begins by counting how many ways of distributing two identical particles over two states are possible. The classical answer is given by the Maxwell-Boltzmann statistics, where there are four possible distributions of two individuals over two states, each with a probability of 1/4. By contrast, in quantum statistics (Bose-Einstein and Fermi-Dirac), the exchange of identical particles does not lead to a different distribution since they are “indistinguishable.” Although the theory has formal resources to deal with quantum statistics, from a conceptual viewpoint the problem is to explain why exchanging particles does not count as a different distribution in the quantum case.

Consider the case of two photons, distributed over two states. Here, there are only three possible distributions: (i) either both photons are in the first state, (ii) both are in the second state, or (iii) each photon is in a different state. Each of the three quantum distributions has a probability of 1/3. This means that the particles are indistinguishable: it cannot be said that one particular particle is in one state and the other in the other state; it can only be said that there is one in each state.

Indistinguishability cannot be thought of as a mere limitation of our knowledge about the identity of particles because, if that were the case, there would still be four ways to distribute the two systems over two states (see the classical example in Figure 1). Quantum indistinguishability is an ontological feature of quantum systems: it is not merely epistemic indiscernibility, since an epistemic feature cannot have consequences in the real world regarding how physical systems behave statistically.

Figure 1.

It is precisely the ontological nature of quantum indistinguishability that has led many authors to claim that identical quantum particles, being indistinguishable, violate the “Principle of Identity of Indiscernibles” which states that if two individual objects have all their properties in common, then they are actually the same object: without any actual differences between them, their numerical distinction has no basis in reality. Quantum mechanics constitutes a strong challenge to the validity of this traditional principle of metaphysics for reasons that are not exclusively metaphysical.

Because of this not merely epistemic indistinguishability, quantum particles cannot be named, that is, they cannot be identified by means of labels: it is not possible to speak of particle “a” and particle “b”; it is only possible to say that there are, for example, two particles. Precisely for this reason, traditional logical systems, which include variables and individual constants, are not suitable for speaking of indistinguishable particles.

On the ontological category of quantum systems

After this review of the ontological challenges of quantum mechanics, we can return to the initial question: what kind of entities are quantum systems?

Classical systems can easily be subsumed under the ontological category of “individual”. An individual is an entity that possesses properties, but requires additional characteristics to be such. Principal among them is “numerical identity”, which is a relation that an object has only to itself. There are two ways in which numerical identity is manifested: as “synchronic identity,” which identifies an individual by distinguishing it from all others at a certain time, and as “diachronic identity,” which reidentifies an individual over time. On the other hand, in an individual, all determinable properties are always determinate: it is not possible for an individual to lack all the determinate properties corresponding to a determinable property. In turn, individuals form aggregates, in which they can be counted. In the case of individual material objects, they can be identified by their spatial and temporal position: under the assumption of impenetrability, it is not possible for two material objects to be in the same place at the same time.

Quantum mechanics challenges the ontological category of “individual” of traditional metaphysics: unlike classical systems, quantum systems do not fit comfortably into such a category. Both synchronic identity and diachronic identity cannot be ascribed to a quantum system: synchronic, because a particle cannot be named or labeled to distinguish it from other particles in the case of indistinguishability; diachronic, because the Heisenberg Principle prevents the system from possessing a definite trajectory that would allow it to be reidentified through time. Quantum contextuality inevitably leads to quantum systems having determinable properties that are not determinate. Non-separability and entanglement impose obstacles to the possibility of identifying a quantum system by its spatial and temporal position. Finally, when quantum particles are aggregated, they cannot be reidentified in the aggregate and, consequently, cannot be counted: strictly speaking, an aggregate of quantum particles cannot be represented by a set in traditional set theory.

In conclusion, the ontological category of individual turns out to be inadequate to deal with quantum systems. Different strategies have been deployed to recover this category; however, in general, each of them focuses on a particular problem and proposes a specific solution to that problem. Perhaps, if all the ontological challenges posed by quantum mechanics were considered at once and a single global solution were sought for all of them, it would be rather more difficult to retain the category of the individual for the quantum ontological domain.


Olimpia Lombardi is a philosopher of science whose research involves ontology in chemistry and in quantum mechanics.

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貝因教授不愧是哲學系出身；「範疇」混亂不說，基本概念都搞不清楚。

Kind of confusing

Is consciousness like jazz, something hard to pin down? Or is it more like the biology of dolphins, odd but natural?

Tim Bayne, Edited by Edited byNigel Warburton, 07/17/25

It’s not just AI systems that raise questions about consciousness – the products of synthetic biology do too. In recent years, researchers have discovered how to grow cerebral organoids – self-organising three-dimensional cellular systems derived either from human pluripotent stem cells or, more recently, human fetal cells. Increasingly, organoids are being fused to create ‘assembloids’, complexes of interacting organoids. For example, Sergiu Pasca’s laboratory at Stanford University has created an assembloid that models the human spinothalamic pathway, a neural circuit critical for the transmission of sensory information from the body to the brain. Does this assembloid merely model the generation and transmission of sensory information, or might it actually have conscious experiences of its own?

Although questions about consciousness in assembloids and AI systems are novel, they are instances of a more general question that is as old as the study of consciousness itself: what kinds of entities have the capacity for consciousness? It’s now generally accepted that mammals and birds are capable of consciousness, but there is little consensus about consciousness in fish, reptiles, amphibians, cephalopods or insects. Pressing questions about the distribution of consciousness arise even within our own species. For example, there are long-standing debates about whether consciousness might be present from (or even before) birth, or whether it arises only weeks, perhaps even months, after birth.

Most discussion of the distribution problem has focused on how we might identify consciousness in systems that are very different from ‘us’. There is, however, a more fundamental issue raised by the distribution question: what do we even mean when we ask whether bots, bees or babies are conscious? This is not an epistemic question but a semantic one. Although semantic questions are often derided as sterile and unfruitful (‘That’s just semantics,’ typically said with a withering roll of the eyes), they are unavoidable. If we’re going to take seriously the question of what kinds of systems belong with us in the ‘consciousness club’, we need to ask not only what ‘consciousness’ means, but how it comes to mean what it does.

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我自認為頗受笛卡爾的影響；我說「自認為」是因為：我不知道我對他著作的了解和詮釋是否符合主流學者的觀點(該文第 2.2小節)。

這篇文章在知識或思想層面的含金量不足，可以視為思想史篇章中的一個註腳。

The French liar

René Descartes, the founder of modern philosophy, was furiously condemned by his contemporaries. Why did they fear him?

Sandrine Parageau, Edited by Edited bySam Haselby

, 07/08/25

The French philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650) is generally presented as one of the founders of modern Western philosophy and science, the man who made reason the principle of the search for truth, and who formulated the cogito, ‘I think, therefore I am.’ His assertion of mind-body dualism has given rise to a great number of objections over time, from those of 17th-century theologians to those of 20th-century feminists. In France, even though the decision of the 1792-95 National Convention to transfer Descartes’s remains to the Pantheon in Paris was not followed through, the philosopher is nonetheless regarded as ‘un grand homme’, a national hero, and being labelled ‘Cartesian’ is still today a compliment that emphasises one’s common sense, good judgment and methodical use of reason.

Yet Descartes was not always the undisputed champion of reason that he is today. In 17th-century England and the Netherlands, he was publicly and repeatedly accused of being a fraud and of lying to his readers so as to manipulate them into becoming his disciples. Of course, as one would expect, many intellectual and scientific objections were raised by his contemporaries against Descartes’s philosophy. But those ad hominem allegations were of a different nature altogether: they implied that the French philosopher resorted to well-crafted and dishonest strategies to make his readers ignorant, and therefore gullible, with the aim of making them submit to his control. Thus, according to those critics, the founder of modern science was, in truth, a purveyor of ignorance.

Such an accusation was made for example by the Protestant scholar and theologian Meric Casaubon (1599-1671), a Geneva-born clergyman of the Church of England, in a long manuscript letter on ‘general learning’ written in 1668, in which he deplores what he perceives as the growing ignorance of his contemporaries. In this text, Casaubon accuses Descartes of deliberately encouraging his readers to make themselves ignorant by urging them to renounce their beliefs and forget all the knowledge that they have previously acquired: ‘a man must first strip himself of all that he has ever known, or believed.’

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在中文裏，至少在一般人刻板印象裏，英文 ”philosophy of physics” 直譯成中文的「物理學哲學」難免有「牛頭不對馬嘴」的感覺。這是我以《物理學「基本論」》為中文標題的原因。作者在下文第3、6兩段中對「物理學『基本論』」研究內容和性質的闡釋，也適用於其它學門的「基本論」；例如：生物學基本論、神經科學基本論、社會科學基本論等等。

此文(該欄2025/06/20)和此文(該欄2025/06/11)兩者可視為下文的案例。

我是物理系畢業，對哲學也有些興趣，所以轉載了這篇文章。它畢竟屬於專業領域，我就不強作解人了。

Why philosophy of physics?

Some physicists reject philosophy as a distraction from ‘real’ science but it is in fact both useful and beautiful

James Read, Edited by Edited bySam Dresser, 06/06/25

Divine Comedy, Paradiso II (c1492-95) by Sandro Botticelli. Courtesy Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett/Philipp Allard 請至原網頁觀看插圖

When I’m making small talk at parties and suchlike, revealing to others that I’m a philosopher of physics is a little bit like rolling the dice. What reaction am I going to get? The range is pretty broad, from ‘What does philosophy have to do with physics?’ to ‘Oh, that’s way above my pay grade!’ to (on happier occasions) ‘That sounds amazing, tell me more!’ to (on less happy occasions) ‘What a waste of taxpayer’s money! You should be doing engineering instead!’

Only the last of these responses is downright stupid, but otherwise the range of reactions is perfectly reasonable and understandable: philosophers of physics are, of course, not ten-a-penny, and what we’re up to is hardly obvious from the job description. So what I want to do here is sketch what the philosophy of physics really amounts to, the current state of play in the field, and how this state of play came about.

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轉載這篇文章不是因為我認為它言之成理；而是我認為它是：一個胡說說八道的範例。一個哲學家腦筋也會打結的反面教材。

A way forward for a world where truth has died

A framework for a Post-Truth World

Manuel Delaflor, 12/19/24

Editor’s Notes：As the prophets of certainty wage their wars in our fractured age, a radical new approach from philosopher Manuel Delaflor shows us how to dance with the uncertain.

Consider a curious phenomenon: When passionate fans discuss their favourite shows online, they rarely debate what happened in a scene. For example, in online forums dedicated to Game of Thrones, viewers spent countless hours dissecting a brief moment where Cersei Lannister lingered near a dimly lit archway during a crucial negotiation scene, debating whether the shadows implied secret motives, inner turmoil, or a looming betrayal. Through this collective endeavour, fans weave intricate webs of interpretation that reflect their values, their beliefs, and even their shadows. The very meaning of what they see on screen becomes a mirror, reflecting not just the content itself, but the deeper patterns of how humans create understanding from their personal experiences.

For millennia, truth served as humanity's foundation - a way to end arguments, establish facts, and build knowledge. It stood as a beacon of certainty in an uncertain world, promising that through divine foretelling, or later with proper methods and careful reasoning, we could arrive at unshakeable conclusions about the world, our lives, and our place in the universe. This faith in truth shaped our institutions, our education systems, and our very way of thinking. It provided the bedrock upon which we built our understanding of ourselves and the cosmos.

From time to time, a handful of dissenting thinkers queried truth, from the Pyrrhonian skeptics of Ancient Greece to figures like David Hume, who questioned the reliability of causation and empirical certainty, and Immanuel Kant, who argued that our understanding of the world is mediated by the structures of human cognition. Then we have Nietzsche's rejection of absolute truth in the 19th century that further shook these foundations. Then, in the 20th century, a particular kind of thinker started to dig deeper, geniuses like Derrida, Foucault and Deleuze delivered what might have been the final blow: truth itself, they argued, was nothing more than a construct shaped by power and language. The certainties upon which our institutions rest began to crumble, and as a result, we've been entering a kind of second dark age. Nonetheless, a lay belief in truth by the countess masses prevailed.

What constitutes evidence, what a fact is, or used to be, has lately taken completely unexpected twists. We are witnessing a profound shift: the rejection of established frameworks has become widespread, fuelled not just by past institutional failures, but by a deepening social distrust of expertise itself. What's remarkable isn't just the rejection or dismissal of traditional ways of establishing shared understanding, but the incredible refusal to even accept sets of facts. For instance, debates over whether the Earth's curvature can be observed directly or whether atmospheric distortion explains such observations highlight how even well-established scientific principles can be dismissed to fit alternative narratives in a blink of an eye.

The social media landscape amplifies and accelerates this crisis in ways we're only beginning to comprehend. These platforms don't simply create echo chambers - they actively reward content that triggers emotional responses, which puts humans into animal states of fight or flight, triggering the amygdala, bypassing the frontal lobe. Research confirms what we intuitively feared: social media rewires our very brains, with studies like this in JAMA Pediatrics showing how it fundamentally alters neural pathways, particularly in developing minds. Unlike traditional media, platforms like Facebook and X use algorithms designed to maximize engagement by reinforcing pre-existing beliefs. Research, such as Cass Sunstein's Republic, highlights how these mechanisms entrench divisions, transforming disagreements into unbridgeable chasms.

The machinery of engagement runs on the fuel of outrage and confirmation bias, fragmenting our shared ways of making sense of experiences into increasingly isolated islands of understanding. Each click, each share, each angry reaction further entrenches these divisions. Like a fever spreading through a weakened body, this machinery of fragmentation has created perfect conditions for a more dangerous infection.

In this fragmenting landscape, we're not really seeing the end of truth, but rather its splintering into opposite sets of competing absolutisms. Each group, each echo chamber, each populist movement claims to possess not just an interpretation, but the "real truth" that "the others" have been hiding. The irony is striking - in our supposed "post-truth" era, we're witnessing not an absence of truth claims, but their multiplication, with each claiming absolute validity while rejecting all others. Today, digital platforms take these philosophical insights to their most extreme consequences, bypassing reasoned debate. Conspiracy theories like QAnon thrive in these environments, fuelled by algorithms that amplify sensationalist narratives over nuanced ones, reflecting the splintering of shared understanding into echo chambers.

But the problem is exactly the same, we've discovered that our beloved traditional solutions have failed us. Better education? Facts bounce off hardened beliefs. Improved communication? Our most articulate arguments fall on deaf ears. Enhanced access to information? It only seems to deepen the divide.

I believe that we've been approaching our “post-truth” problem with a fundamental misunderstanding about human nature. Traditional approaches, such as Karl Popper's emphasis on falsifiability, Thomas Kuhn’s exploration of paradigm shifts, and Festinger's cognitive dissonance theory, assume we're primarily seeking accurate descriptions of the world but are led astray by biases, emotions, or faulty reasoning. While these frameworks have profoundly influenced our understanding, they presuppose a rationalist ideal that often fails to address the deeper human craving for meaning and coherence. This assumption shapes how we try to address disagreements - with more facts, better arguments, clearer evidence. And this is precisely what leads opportunists with enough audience to force their own “truths” on others. Despite unprecedented access to information, our divides are just deepening, to the extent that rational discourse has become impossible, culminating in people embracing the weirdest possible beliefs, like flat earthism, because they seem somehow preferable to the perceived “mainstream lies” (as they call them). And who is to tell them that they don't have the "real truth" when facts become whatever they want them to be?

And this is how old explanatory frameworks persist despite contrary evidence, how scientific findings, no matter how robust, fail to convince those who've found reassurance in alternative interpretations. Take religious frameworks - they persist not because they better explain natural phenomena, but because they provide profound meaning about life's purpose, death's mystery, and human suffering. Their power lies not in their empirical accuracy but in their meaning-making capacity. These aren't just failures of education or reasoning. They point to a deeper pattern in human cognition, a profound need we've been blind to all along.

We have now reached the point where we are standing at a crossroads: either continue this sacrificial dance of competing “absolute truths”, each more strident than the last, or recognize that we have failed and that we've been asking the wrong question all along.

As Nietzsche once suggested, humanity’s obsession with absolute truth often blinds us to deeper existential needs, meaning and coherence. This insight resonates with my personal conclusion: what we crave is meaning. Not truth. What we seek are frameworks that illuminate our experiences, a way to make sense of our struggles, narratives which give purpose to our pain. We hunger for stories that help us navigate the vast complexity of existence, which make our world coherent, comprehensible, meaningful. If I am correct, this revelation changes everything.

It was in part this realization that led me to develop Model Dependent Ontology (MDO), an epistemic framework that addresses how humans engage with their experiences rather than how we think they should. At its core, MDO recognizes that meaning-making isn't just one aspect of human cognition - it's fundamental to how we live. It touches our most inner core. Our understandings, explanations and beliefs aren't attempts to capture some “external reality” or “eternal truths”; they're tools we use to make sense of what we live, of how we engage with others to create coherent narratives that guide our actions and decisions in a hyper-complex world.

Consider how even our most successful scientific theories - quantum mechanics and relativity - demonstrate that what we observe fundamentally depends on our framework of observation, not on some eternal “truth” of any kind, one that is valid for anyone at every point. Different frameworks yield different but equally valid descriptions of the same phenomena. MDO takes this insight further: it suggests that even our most basic concepts about what exists or what counts as evidence emerge from specific models with their own assumptions and limitations. This isn't about denying the importance of evidence or observation - quite the opposite. It's about recognizing that any statement, any fact, any concept we employ is necessarily interpreted within some model or framework. This is a point that Rudolf Carnap made in a seminal paper entitled Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology (1950).

Understanding this opens up more sophisticated ways of evaluating and working with multiple models while maintaining their pragmatic utility. Rather than attempting to determine which model is "true," rather than enforcing new "truths" like some figures do, it examines how different ways of understanding serve different purposes, create different meanings, and lead to different outcomes.

Consider how differently this approach works in practice. Instead of treating economic frameworks as competing claims, where one and only one can be "the right one," MDO examines their use as tools for making sense of different scales and contexts of human endeavours. MDO then acknowledges that the breathtaking complexity of global markets cannot be reduced to a single model any more than human political beliefs can be reduced to imagined "lefts" or "rights." MDO actually encourages generating a potentially unlimited quantity of different models in different dimensional axes, as a way to overcome the stubbornly persistent human insistence on using bipolar, monodimensional axes.

This represents a radical shift in how we approach understanding itself, and the irony is exquisite: by abandoning our obsession with finding the truth, we might finally develop better ways of understanding our world than we ever could through the lens of absolute certainty. Instead of imposing single "correct" ways of seeing the world, we might be better by cultivating multiple model competency, teaching people to work with different frameworks while understanding their contexts and limitations. Imagine an education system that taught not what to think, but how to move fluently between different ways of making sense of the world, recognizing that different contexts require different tools for understanding. More crucially, imagine having practical tools to evaluate these models based not on their claim to any truth, but on their ability to illuminate our experiences while remaining consistent with observed evidence.

The challenge ahead isn't choosing between truth and relativism - that's the old game, the one that led us into our current crisis. The real challenge is learning to dance more skilfully with the multiple frameworks through which humans create meaning. To find the greater meaning, not the greater truth. This isn't just an academic exercise - it's about survival in an age where competing absolutisms threaten to tear societies apart. MDO offers not just an epistemic framework for understanding this dance, but the practical tools for performing it with greater awareness, flexibility, and effectiveness. Perhaps then we can move beyond the endless war of "truths" toward something more sophisticated: a world where meaning-making becomes not a source of division, but a shared human adventure in understanding.


Manuel Delaflor is Director of the Metacognition Institute and the author of the forthcoming book, Model Dependent Ontology.

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