The question “What is fundamental?” elicits widely divergent responses, even among physicists. The majority view is that the mantle of the most fundamental scientific theory is currently held by the Standard Model of particle physics, and will eventually be passed on to its successor, a “Super Model” that will incorporate quantized gravity and explain current mysteries like dark matter and dark energy. But many disagree with this straightforward, reductionist viewpoint. Some invoke the concept of emergence (weak or strong) to argue that science is anchored by many equally fundamental concepts and theories, at every level of description. Some turn the tables around and assign greater fundamentality to higher levels, in many cases, to consciousness itself. Some maintain that the most fundamental level must be an abstract/mathematical structure, and that the physicality of the world we perceive is an emergent phenomenon. In this essay, I will try to make sense of these diverging views while attempting to distinguish between epistemological fundamentality (the fundamentality of our scientific theories) and ontological fundamentality (the fundamentality of the world itself, irrespective of our description of it). There will also be towers of turtles and chains of monkeys.
Marc Séguin