Immediate experience and existence

Most of us intuitively recognize that the essence of our immediate experience can never be captured by a structural or functional explanation. This disconnect between structure and essence applies to more than conscious experience. It is universal in mathematics and the hard sciences. This divorce did not exist in older metaphysics such as that based on earth, air, fire and water. These fundamental elements had an essence or intrinsic nature and that determined the nature of things constructed from them. Contemporary physics has become completely mathematical and abstract. For example salt is made of the highly reactive metal sodium and the highly reactive gas chlorine. Salt is unlike the elements it is made of. The explanation of salt’s properties involves complex probability densities in quantum mechanics. These have an abstract and convoluted connection to the properties of salt. Newtonian physics retained an essential nature in the billard ball model of atoms. Quantum mechanics does not. Mathematicians want to avoid making implicit assumptions like the parallel postulate in Euclidean Geometry. They accomplish this by removing all intrinsic properties from fundamental entities. The only fundamental entity in set theory is the empty set or nothing at all. All other objects are built up from the empty set. For example the number one is the set containing the empty set. Mathematics and mathematical physics are completely structural. Mass, energy, space and time are abstract mathematical concepts in contemporary physics. They connect with essence and experience only through experimental technique. What is structured in the physical world? The one thing that we know is structured is immediate conscious experience. It is difficult to talk about immediate experience in a general way because we are so intimately con-