Causation: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)

by Stephen Mumford

There are some other difficult conceptual matters that the reductionist position has to face. One is that, for all we know, there might not be a bottom level in nature. As a matter of sheer philosophical principle, there is no reason why there has to be a very bottom level in the world, upon which everything rests. And just as we cannot know there to be a bottom level through our reasoning, nor is it the sort of thing that we could know from the evidence of the senses. The problem is that while we could know something is complex, by seeing that it has parts, we could never know that something is simple. It might after all have hidden parts that we have not yet detected. Some of the work done at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research), for instance, attempts to establish whether some supposedly simple particles in reality have parts.

Interesting! There might not be a bottom level in the world