Some while ago I said I'd post about a Feynman quotation which is illuminatng as to his view on which if any level is fundamental. Here it is:
In his book "The character of physical law" , on pp.124-125,
Richard Feynman summarises the hierarchy of structure, starting with
the fundamental laws of physics and their application to protons,
neutrons, and electrons, going on to atoms and heat, and including
waves, storms, stars, as well as frogs and concepts like `man',
`history, `political expediency', `evil', `beauty', and `hope'. He
then says the following (pp. 125-126):
"Which end is nearer to God, if I may use a religious metaphor.
Beauty and hope, or the fundamental laws? I think that the right
way, of course, is to say that what we have to look at is the whole
structural interconnection of the thing; and that all the sciences,
and not just the sciences but all the efforts of intellectual kinds,
are an endeavour to see the connections of the hierarchies, to
connect beauty to history, to connect history to man's psychology,
man's psychology to the working of the brain, the brain to the
neural impulse, the neural impulse to chemistry, and so forth, up
and down, both ways. And today we cannot, and it is no use making
believe we can, draw carefully a line all the way from one end of
this thing to the other, because we have only just begun to see that
there is this relative hierarchy."
"And I do not think either end is nearer to God. To stand at either
end, and to walk off that end of the pier only, hoping that out in
that direction is the complete understanding, is a mistake. And to
stand with evil and beauty and hope, or with fundamental laws,
hoping that way to get a deep understanding of the whole world, with
that aspect alone, is a mistake. It is not sensible for the ones who
specialize at one end, and the ones who specialize at the other, to
have such disregard for each other ... The great mass of workers in
between, connecting one step to another, are improving all the time
our understanding of the world, both from working at the ends and
from working in the middle, and in that way we are gradually
understanding this tremendous world of interconnecting hierarchies."