I want to understand it but everything I read about it oscillates impossibly between vulgar metals -> gold and some kind of spiritual transformation metaphysical stuff
What is it and what can be legit gleaned from it in an empirical or useful sense?
Does it have utility outside of use as a metaphor or allegory or whatever?
Something still happens to some of it, the reason we often speak of doing it in excess. Heck, when a baby is conceived, the atoms in the embryo (and by extension the maturing human once born) don’t arise out of nowhere, their atoms have to be converted from something, as matter cannot be created or destroyed, only modified. Or if I understand what you’re saying another way, it’s like saying everything is just protons, neutrons, and electrons/positrons.
They ‘arise’ from the food the mother eats, inhales, etc… Her body processes and converts molecules, not atoms. She doesn’t create iron and calcium from other elements.
We don’t often speak of anything that matches your misunderstanding of how physics and chemistry work.
Everyone is taking “it’s not how it works” to mean “it never happens”, and that is where it stops adding up.
To use another example, the whole climate crisis (and I’m not a denier) is based on the idea something is being produced that wasn’t there before. Without going into semantic nooks and crannies, that’s the gist of it. Heck, they say if you kill a plant, it doesn’t release oxygen, but if you kill an animal, it does release carbon (which is like oxygen and then some). But then how are things explained with “something is there that wasn’t there before” squared with “the only things that are there are things that were always there”? Surely, if everyone here is correct, humans thinking the climate crisis is caused even in part by biological life is the equivalent of humans thinking that everyone going to one side of the world to jump in place will push the Earth away from the sun and cool us down.
This is gonna be my last reply in this. You just don’t understand how matter conversion, mass conservation, combustion, energy conservation, animal and plant reproduction, and many other things work. I can’t teach you middle and high school science in comments on the internet, there are better resources out there. Best of luck and holy shit please do look into it and don’t make any assumptions or judgment calls because they are all wrong.
Hence why I’m asking.