Ontological Democracy

Ontological Democracy

Consider the standard reductionist hierarchy:

At each level, one might claim the higher level “reduces to” the lower. But the regression terminates in uncertainty:

• Wave functions are descriptions of probability distributions
• Probability amplitudes describe which interactions are more or less likely
• What “actually happens” when a measurement occurs is deeply contested
• Below quantum fields, we have no clear ontology at all

The supposed “base layer” turns out to be:

1. Probabilistic, not deterministic
2. Descriptive, not fundamental (wave functions are representations)
3. Incomplete (we don’t know what underlies field interactions)
4. Not clearly more “real” than any other scale of description

The alternative is ontological democracy: every scale of structural organization with its own causal closure is equally real at that scale. No layer is privileged as “the” fundamental reality. Each layer (a) has its own causal structure, (b) has its own dynamics and laws, (c) exerts influence on adjacent layers (both “up” and “down”), (d) is incomplete as a description of the whole, and (e) is sufficient for phenomena at its scale.

Once this is granted, the demand that phenomenal properties “reduce to” physical properties is ill-posed. Chemistry doesn’t reduce to physics in a way that eliminates chemical causation—chemical causation is real at the chemical scale. Similarly, phenomenal properties don’t need to reduce to physical properties—they are real at the phenomenal scale.