The Existence of Fundamental Particles and Human Subjectivity

The previous article discussed human subjectivity mainly through the history of philosophy, especially Kant. It argued that subjectivity is not subjective arbitrariness, nor does it mean that human beings invent the world out of nothing. Rather, it means that human beings can only know the world in a human way. What we call the objective world is not a personal fantasy, but neither is it a world that stands completely apart from the conditions of human cognition and simply presents itself to us as it is. It is always a world grasped through human perception, reason, language, mathematics, experiment, and public verification.

If this issue remains only at the level of philosophical concepts, it can sound abstract. But once we place it within modern science, especially within our understanding of electrons, photons, protons, neutrons, and other fundamental particles, it becomes very concrete. In ordinary speech we say that electrons exist and photons exist, as if they were like tables, stones, or trees that could be directly seen, touched, or picked up for inspection. But this is not how science works. Scientists do not see an electron the way they see a small ball, nor do they see a photon the way they see a grain of sand. What we call electrons and photons are scientific objects stabilized through a whole system of experimental devices, methods of measurement, mathematical theory, predictive success, and repeated verification.

This does not mean that electrons and photons do not exist. On the contrary, precisely because the relevant phenomena can be repeatedly captured through different experimental paths, can produce stable results in different instruments, can be accurately described by mathematical models, and can function in technological applications, we say that concepts such as electron and photon have real scientific significance. The question is that their mode of existence is not that of direct objects in everyday experience. They exist as stable objects within a scientific system of knowledge.

Take the photon as an example. We cannot directly see a photon the way we see a bird. What we can see are experimental results: the photoelectric effect, interference phenomena, signals in single-photon detectors, trigger events in quantum communication, or measurable events produced by an instrument. Scientists place these stable phenomena into a theoretical framework and find that the concept of the photon can explain them, predict new phenomena, and support further technological operations. The photon is therefore not a casually invented name. It is a stable concept maintained by real constraints, experimental results, and theoretical structure.

The same is true of the electron. We do not directly see an independent little electron moving over there. What we see are electric currents, tracks, energy-level transitions, traces in cloud chambers or detectors, imaging effects in electron microscopes, and stable relations that appear again and again across many experiments. The concept of the electron becomes valid because it organizes these phenomena, allows different experiments to be explained coherently, and makes possible semiconductors, computers, communication devices, and countless forms of electronic technology. The electron is not a human fantasy. But as a scientific object, it is constructed, tested, and stabilized within the human system of knowledge.

The word “constructed” must be handled carefully here. Construction is not fabrication. Fabrication is imagination without real constraint. Construction is the formation of stable concepts under real constraint. Scientific concepts differ from myth and fantasy because they must submit to the joint constraints of experiment, mathematics, prediction, and technical operation. A scientific object that cannot explain phenomena, cannot be repeatedly tested, cannot form stable relations with other theories, and cannot remain effective in practice cannot be maintained for long. Scientific knowledge is not arbitrary subjective narration. It is a stable response to real constraints within the cognitive structure of the human subject.

This brings us back to subjectivity in the Kantian sense. Kant reminds us that human beings do not know the world from outside the world. The world we know has already passed through human forms of sensibility and categories of understanding. Modern science has of course gone far beyond the range of experience available in Kant’s time, but it has not abolished this basic issue. On the contrary, modern science shows even more clearly that knowing the world is not simply a matter of “seeing facts.” It involves extending the senses through instruments, organizing experience through mathematics, creating controlled conditions through experiment, and stabilizing objects through conceptual systems.

Electrons, photons, and fundamental particles therefore show exactly why subjectivity does not obstruct objectivity. The deeper science goes, the less it is a matter of simple naked-eye observation, and the more it relies on complex mediations established by human reason. We cannot directly enter a so-called thing-in-itself particle world and then carry it unchanged into language. We can only organize repeatable, operable, and predictable stable relations in reality into objects of knowledge through measurement, calculation, models, experiments, and theories.

This also shows that objectivity is not the absence of the human subject. Objectivity does not fall from the sky, nor is it a pure fact entirely untouched by human participation. Objectivity is a stable coherence formed within the activity of the subject by strictly constraining individual subjectivity. Science is objective not because it has no human involvement, but because it does not depend on the arbitrary feeling of any one person. It requires public methods, repeatable experiments, shareable mathematical expression, revisable theoretical structures, and results that different researchers can test against one another.

From the perspective of Sustenesis, this issue can be clarified further. Sustenesis is not primarily concerned with whether a concept was “thought up” by a subject. It asks how a structure forms through difference, constraint, and sustained coherence. Scientific objects such as electrons and photons are sustained coherences formed among many different phenomena through experimental constraints, mathematical constraints, instrumental constraints, and theoretical constraints. They do not exist merely inside a word. They exist within the stable operation of the scientific system as a whole.

The concept of the photon holds because it can maintain a certain consistency across different experiments and form stable relations with energy, frequency, quantum states, detection events, probability distributions, and other concepts. The concept of the electron holds because it can maintain identity across electric charge, mass, spin, orbitals, energy levels, scattering, material properties, and technological applications. The “same electron concept” does not exist because we have grasped a perfectly transparent thing-in-itself. It exists because the concept can continue to operate, explain, predict, be revised, and remain stably connected with other concepts inside the scientific system.

The mode of existence of fundamental particles is therefore not everyday object-like existence, but existence within scientific sustenesis. They are not linguistic signs with no real basis, nor are they tiny objects directly graspable by the naked eye. They are stable objects formed among real constraints, experimental operations, mathematical expression, and theoretical systems. Their reality does not come from simple direct visibility. It comes from their sustained coherence within the whole system of knowledge.

This way of understanding scientific objects helps us avoid two extremes. The first is naive realism, as if scientific concepts were direct photographs of the world itself. The second is crude constructivism, as if scientific objects were merely shadows manufactured by human language and social habit. A more reasonable view is that scientific objects are neither purely given nor arbitrarily made. They are stable objects formed under strict constraint between real differences and human cognitive structures.

This is also the real meaning of human subjectivity in science. Subjectivity does not mean that human beings can casually prescribe what the world is. It means that the world can become a human world of knowledge only through human modes of cognition, technique, and conceptualization. Electrons and photons do not exist because human beings say that they exist. But the fact that they are known, discussed, calculated, and applied as electrons and photons is formed within the activity of the human scientific subject. What we confront is not the naked world itself, but a scientific world already measured, expressed, modeled, and maintained.

Sustenesis further explains that knowledge is not a representation inside an isolated subject’s mind. Knowledge is stable coherence preserved, invoked, tested, corrected, and effectively operated within a system. Concepts such as electrons, photons, and fundamental particles are knowledge not because some individual believes in them, but because they can be preserved, invoked, tested, revised, and effectively operated within the scientific system. They can enter laboratories, equations, instruments, engineering technologies, and repeatable public verification. In this process, they become real objects recognized by modern science.

The existence of fundamental particles therefore does not cancel human subjectivity. It makes subjectivity clearer. The deeper we go into the microscopic world, the more we find that “seeing the world” is not direct viewing, but the establishment of stable relations through complex structures. Science is not an arbitrary interpretation of the world. It is the human effort, under finite conditions of cognition, to capture maintainable patterns in the world through increasingly rigorous constraint.

From this angle, photons, electrons, and fundamental particles are not simply “small things.” They are highly stable sustenetic objects within the human system of knowledge. They connect patterns in reality, signals in experiments, relations in mathematics, and operations in technology. They are neither human hallucinations nor direct objects wholly independent of the forms of cognition. They are scientific existences stably maintained between reality and the subject.

This may be the real lesson modern science offers to the question of subjectivity. Human subjectivity is not an obstacle to science. It is a condition under which science becomes possible. Human beings cannot step outside their cognitive structures to obtain the absolute world. But through mathematics, experiment, instruments, and public verification, they can continually compress personal subjectivity and allow certain stable relations to be maintained within a system of knowledge. Scientific truth is not truth detached from the subject. It is truth that remains stably coherent after being strictly constrained within the activity of the subject.

The question of whether electrons and photons exist is therefore not simply a question of “whether they are there.” It is a question of the way in which they exist. They are not everyday objects given to direct intuition. They are sustenetic existences within the scientific system. Their existence is supported by real constraints, confirmed through experimental paths, expressed through mathematical structures, verified by technological applications, and organized by the human mode of cognition. Understood in this way, we can respect scientific objectivity while preserving the depth of the problem of subjectivity.