The crux of this seems to be defining the actual. You define it as the “here and now” - so, prior to GR, Newton’s laws were the “actual” but post GR are these laws seen as a simplification/model or are they still an "actual"? Is GR an “actual” waiting to be a simplification/model? I suppose that if one thought science was able to reach an “actual reality”, then one would be justified in saying that each step along that road could be the “actual”, but that surely is a huge speculation to make. It seems to me that as long as we cannot be confident with regard to the ultimate completeness of scientific explanations, then they can only ever be a model. The degree to which the model can be thought of as representing the “actual” is I think a very difficult question, which is why I think essentially it is a case of models all the way down to the fundamental levels of nature. And what do we find at that fundamental level?, well, a notion of reality that is mind independent and inaccessible.

I can see how one may consider the predictive element of (say) Newton's laws will always be valid within its domain (unlike the rather transitory nature of descriptive elements) and from this perspective it could be thought of as always being an "actual", but after all said and done it is still an incomplete representation.


Well we can’t compare the model to a deeper underlying reality simply because we would have no recourse to identifying in a scientific manner that reality. We may have philosophical notions, but those are hardly suitable for such scientific comparisons. But the very fact that we employ differing models logically points to a distinction between the models and a deeper reality.

In the case of my example (the electric field) engineers can observe the RF energy through instruments, they can observe that the adding, moving or changing the antenna elements can affect the energy levels received, and those measurements could be shown to relate directly to a concept of an electric field as a real propagating electric wave (ignoring the magnetic component). But what does this observation really relate to in a scientific (not engineering) sense? The changing electric field is not a familiar observable notion like ripples on a pond, it is a concept based entirely on notions that are not part of our every day life (our macroscopic reality). Those notions have been created by science as a means of representing measurements that we perform at a detector. I have no idea if those notions have a close resemblance or not to the underlying reality that allows us to observe a correlation between a source and detector separated in vacuum. Ken G pointed out that there are three different models that scientists use to explain this correlation, which one of them is correct? They are all correct of course in that they are all usable models of an underlying reality that underpins our macroscopic notion of EM radiation propagating between a source and sink.

We are never in touch with absolute reality other than through human representation, this is my point - and that human representation can only be a model since we can never access the absolute directly.

That I wouldn’t appreciate the role of science in our lives seems unlikely, what I did lack from science was a sense of what it was supposed to be telling us - notions of a reality consisting of “material” objects as particles or “photons in flight” seemed a bit fanciful to me. Yet I was aware that the science worked, so what was this scientific reality? Well what physics has told me is that there is a distinction to be made between scientific reality and the absolute. The latter exists in the absence of sentient beings, but at the most fundamental level is of a form that is inaccessible through science. The former gives rise to human representations that we label as atoms, photons etc, or in other words they are models.