Ed Feser has a great post up about what it means to be human, and what it means to have a soul or be a soul. It’s precisely what I’ve been driving at with my discussions of natures and so forth, only Feser does it much better than I do.

I was especially interested by the last paragraph, which is to some extent tangential to the rest of the post:

I noted in a recent post that those beholden to scientism tend to reify abstractions — to abstract the mathematical structure of a concrete physical system and treat it as if it were the entirety of the system, or to abstract the neurobiological processes underlying human action and treat them as if they were the whole source of human action.

And this is true. Physics is the study of the physical world as measured. But when you’ve measured every aspect of, say, a steel girder, you don’t have a steel girder. You have enough information for a detailed CAD model of the girder (along with other physical variables), but not the girder itself. The subject of physics is the real world, but physics itself is an abstraction of reality, not reality itself.