Do you mean to say that fundamental particles are so close to be non-existent (i.e. non-matter) in terms of their size that they are like an infinitesimal quantity compared to absolute zero?
Translation: energy always contains the potential to become, or to make the things they act upon to become, absolutely anything. This may be, but still, if we are speaking in a physicalist context, how is this so? How are we to conceptualize energy such that it has the potential to become anything, even new qualities that didn’t before exist?
Hmm, but it still seems limited–too limited to account for the kinds of qualities I’m interested in. Let’s take the taste of pineapple for example. A quick study of physiology will tell us that the taste of pineapple is the result of sugar molecules in the pineapple binding to neural receptors in the taste buds, which triggers an electric signal to travel down the nerves and enter the brain, whereupon we (presumably) taste pineapple. So sure, I suppose the energy released when sugar molecules bind to taste receptors relinquishes a bit of the “infinite,” and in this case in particular, the taste of pineapple, but how, in a physicalist context, does the infinite contain the taste of pineapple. I know that the concept of the infinite should contain the taste of pineapple, along with pretty much everything–infinite implies no limits, no limits that is of what might come out of it, which there is no reason to assume excludes the taste of pineapple, but that’s not the same as answering the question of how: how does the potential inherent in an energy source achieve the infinite if the infinite includes that which doesn’t seem can come out of energy, at least energy as we are conceptualizing it?
Translation: maybe I’m asking the wrong question. Maybe the question isn’t: how does a quality like red come out of something completely lacking in that quality? Maybe the question ought to be: how did the lack of red ever exist in the first place. Maybe it’s just as valid to think of the presence of red as the default–thereby not requiring an answer to the question: how did it come to be–but then the question is simply moved to that which is no longer the default: how did the lack-of-red or absence-of-red come to be. We can longer say, in this context, that that’s the way things begin because, if the presence of red is the default, then that more or less entails that the lack-of-red must have come out of the presence-of-red. It is to say that the full diversities of qualities we see today is how things always were, and how they had to be on a fundamental level, and the question now is: why do we find that the universe can be reduced to such qualitative monotony?
That’s true of physical/spatial diversity (in the sense of concentrated centers of matter/energy dispersing itself in space to take on more diverse locations in space), but in terms of qualities, I would think the opposite is true. Highly complicated structures that manifest an organized order tend to bear more qualitative diversity than simple structures with little order.
Cumulus clouds for example, which bear very interesting and unique formations, tend to undergo entropy and become bland and dull stratus clouds.
Am I misunderstanding your point?
I often ask the same question: how are particules (or at least atoms and molecules) typically found with other particles of the same kind? Why is dirt often found with more dirt? Why air with more air? Why water with more water? What is it about atoms and molecules that cause them to be lumped together with other atoms and molecules that are exactly the same?