Elison: Just because you have a scientist discussing metaphysics doesn’t suddenly turn it into science.
I’m glad that Hawking’s metaphysics jives with your sensibilities. It’s good to find something that makes sense to you. But it doesn’t necessarily invalidate things that others have said. Expertise has no bearing on truth, though there can be correlation.
There are actually people who say that an atom is not a particle - it’s a collection of sub-particles, which themselves are rarified energy or move into and out of existence…
Science is not fact. Science is system for organizing and interpreting a collection of observations. Those interpretations are refined until theories are developed. Theories are models for what we think of as reality. Those models are adjusted based on what we’re going for - they are not fact, they are not truth.
Newtonian physics describes things at the scale from microorganisms to planets. Relativity physics describes things that are larger/faster/denser. Quantum physics describes things at the scale of atoms and smaller. Chemistry describes things at the level of chemical interaction. None of these fields are unified, and none of them claim to be fact.
There is no universal understanding of science, there are valid disagreements within most disciplines in and of themselves. We tend to elevate science to the position of “Truth” because it has been such a powerful methodology. But it is still a model, or a set of models, for us to make sense of reality. Or at least make sense of what we believe is reality.
And that is the nature of metaphysics - trying to figure out what reality actually IS.
When you say “we both see a woman, you can’t then deny it”, what is this supposed to prove? Suppose you and I are both standing in a room, and I see a woman and you don’t? Am I hallucinating? Are you? Suppose you continue adding people to the room, and they all see her, but you still don’t? Suppose someone else enters the room, and states the woman is a ghost - all of those who could see her were seers but didn’t realize it, you still see nothing, and the last person understands the difference between you, them, and the woman.
Then a final person enters and says that you are all the same, there is no identity/individuality. You are just a part of the godhead perceiving itself from various levels of consciousness. That you are all perceiving individuality is an illusion generated by your energetic vibration, and if you could merely raise that vibration, you would see it too.
So what then? Are all those other people in the room liars? Are they normal and you’re hallucinating? How could you possibly verify the perception of these others?
To be clear - these are rhetorical questions, they are there to illustrate the trains of thought one can follow. They are intended to have multiple answers.
This is metaphysics. It doesn’t have answers, it has questions and reasoned arguments in response to those questions. The most satisfactory way of understanding these problems is through experience, not through explanation.