Is there any physical basis for what constitutes a 'thing' or 'object'?

Reply to noAxioms Depends on what you mean by thing/object, so you should clarify that first (and before that I would suggest clarifying the need for such a definition in the first place).

If you mean something like "moderate-sized specimens of dry goods," we could probably come up with a (messy, fuzzy and ambiguous) set of criteria from psycho-physical considerations, but before diving into that unwieldy project, I would want to better understand the motivation.

Quoting noAxioms

what constitutes an 'object' is entirely a matter of language/convention. There's no physical basis for it.

We all can’t start or have a conversation without making distinctions and understanding what these distinctions refer to. Saying “pipe” in the first place so that two people who say and hear “pipe” meaningfully requires some basis outside of the two people (where each can point and say “pipe” for instance.

Whether they are both hallucinating or having some sort of deluded experience, or pointing to a physical thing may be another question, but some sort of distinction exists and basis for that distinction exists or else we wouldn’t get past the word “pipe”.

Only assuming we all know what a pipe is can we then imagine cutting it in half longwise and ask about some new thing we might call “half-pipe” (which has a basis in the whole pipe, or call it “gutter” which refers to another context.

So it’s true that words are conventions in themselves, but the fact that they function to communicate things between people is because they make distinctions in a context as a basis for those distinctions. I am fine assuming the basis for the naming convention “pipe” or “gutter” has a basis in a physical reality we might call “the physical world”, but regardless, we can’t speak without standing on some basis that grounds the function of those words.

Quoting noAxioms

To Ludwig's gutters: The gutters are two separate objects if considered by a convention that identifies them as such. Them being physically attached to each other or not is irrelevant. Physics is utterly silent on the topic. There is no device that can be pointed to a 'thing' that will tell you the boundary of that thing, despite all the fictional devices that do exactly that.

I agree with you about this. But I have a pedantic desire to clarify the matter of the gutters. I mentioned them when I suggested that one could decide to cut a pipe into two halves either by cutting across its length, so you get two shorter pipes, or by cutting along its length, so you get two objects of the same length, but not complete circles so not pipes - I decided to call them gutters because they could be used as gutters. When I posited painting the pipe, I did not consider painting the gutters.

Quoting noAxioms

There is no device that can be pointed to a 'thing' that will tell you the boundary of that thing, despite all the fictional devices that do exactly that.

Yes there is. A word is a device that can carve out a boundary. We can call them fictional but you are still reading some of them right now and using them to make points that others are agreeing with. So “fictional” seems dramatic. How about words themselves having no clear boundaries.

Without any boundaries either in physics or carved in words, or both, how can anyone speak?

Thank you all for your replies. My topic was mostly an observation. If you can think of exceptions to my 'it isn't physics' assertion, such counterarguments would be especiallywelcome.
Quoting Ludwig V

one could decide to cut a pipe into two halves either by cutting across its length, so you get two shorter pipes

What if it isn't at the center? A what point does it cease to be two pipes rather than one pipe and a scrap resulting from me getting the length of it just right. Probably the line is somewhere around where the scrap is no longer useful as a short pipe elsewhere. The distinction comes from language and purpose, and is not physical, which is the point of me posting all this.

or by cutting along its length

Or in a double spiral, resulting in a pair of very difficult to disentangle Slinkys.

When I posited painting the pipe, I did not consider painting the gutters.

The painting helps get the mental concept across. It in no way helps the phaser gun which you intended to only disintegrate the blue gutter.


Quoting SophistiCat

Depends on what you mean by thing/object

My point exactly. Nobody has explained to the phaser gun what was meant. It just magically seems to know the intent of the wielder, as is also the case with all the other fictional examples.

If you mean something like "moderate-sized specimens of dry goods,"

What if I mean 'that tornado over there'? It's a physical thing of sorts, or rather a vaguely localaized effect that emerges from non-tornado matter, which is mostly air, something hard to point to. Where are the boundaries of a tornado? The ground is a reasonably decent lower bound, at least the part of the ground that remains stationary. The rest? All a matter of convention, and the convention doesn't care in that case.


Quoting Fire Ologist

We all can’t start or have a conversation without making distinctions and understanding what these distinctions refer to.

Agree, but the point is that I cannot have a conversation with my physical device (such as the examples in the OP), so I can't convey meaning to it. All I can convey to it is 'this' (in the case of the teleport wristband), or 'that' (in the case of anything that can be pointed).

I said Terminator franchise solved the problem, but it didn't. In T2, the liquid terminator can imitate anything it touches, which means there is some kind of physical definition of 'what it touches'. So what if it touches the red gutter? Can it now imitate a gutter, or can it imitate the pipe, or perhaps the entire plumbing system of a city? Somehow meaning is conveyed through mere contact, and it can be driven to contradiction.

we can’t speak without standing on some basis that grounds the function of those words.

I'm asking if something that to which meaning cannot be conveyed still perform as designed. How does the gun know the boundaries of what it is to disintegrate? You say words can do this, but I can't tell it. Sure, I can build an AI device that can parse verbal language so as to convey intent, but that just puts the device into conceptual territory. It ceases to be physical anymore if it's done that way.

Quoting noAxioms

I'm asking if something that to which meaning cannot be conveyed still perform as designed.

Like face recognition. A device that sets boundaries.

The boundary might cut off an ear, but it is a device that makes distinctions to carve out a separate (separated) thing.

Reply to noAxioms

So this got me thinking, and I could only conclude that what constitutes an 'object' is entirely a matter of language/convention

Well, suppose you were helping someone fix their plumbing and they asked you to "please bring over that set of pipes."

But then you only see one pipe there, and report this to them. Then they reply: "what? No, that is the set. I consider each 3 inch interval its own discrete pipe."

Well, obviously this would be pretty weird. Likewise, if you look up the rules for the famous "grue and bleen" it's impossible to imagine them ever coming into wide use.

The reason seems obvious enough to me. Language and convention are not themselves "language and convention all the way down." We don't create our distinctions arbitrarily. They do not spring forth from our minds uncaused. As much as human languages differ in categorization, they are more similar than different. For instance, disparate isolated cultures did not come to recognize totally different animal and plant species, with say, large pigs being a different type than small ones. The Sioux long venerated the rare white bison, but they considered this a "bison" despite the variance in color because they categorize animals in largely the same way all peoples do. There is, of course, some variance in edge cases, but on the whole convention seems to correspond to the observable properties of things across different cultures. For instance, I know of no culture that fails to distinguish between plants and animals, opting instead for some other categorization. The same applies for living/non-living.

Certainly, we can imagine that our distinctions and formulations of species and genus could be entirely different. But this is to prioritize potency in our analysis over act. In actuality, they hew towards commonality, and this is presumably not coincidence.


Anyhow, you might be interested in the Problem of the Many, which is closely related: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/problem-of-many/

It deals with the problem of demarcating discrete objects. Some philosophers have tried to get around this by proclaiming that only "fundemental particles" are true wholes, and everything else is just "particles arranged cat-wise, rock-wise, etc." The problem here is that fundemental particles increasingly don't seem so fundemental, having beginnings and ends, as well as only being definable in terms of completely universal fields (i.e., the whole). Physicists and philosophers of physics increasingly want to label them as "abstractions" to stand in for empirical results. I've even seen them called the "shadows on the wall of Plato's cave," in that they lack independent reality and only emerge from a more fundemental reality, and are an abstraction of interactions with that reality.

But, then, giving up on particles and taking this to an extreme, it would seem that we can't really say true things about anything. Ultimately, if all we have is a field of fields, a single unity, everything interacting with everything else, with no truly discrete boundaries, then it seems like nothing can be said because all distinctions would be arbitrary. This is the problem of the One and the Many.

I think the solution is to recognize that:

A. Plurality is obvious and given in plurality of discrete phenomenological horizons (minds) in the world.

B. Our terms and distinctions aren't arbitrary, even if they could conceivably be different.

I would add that these problems become particularly acute, I would say insoluble, if one starts from the position that what we know/experience are "mental representations" or "ideas" rather than these being that [I]through which we know[/I]. It's a fundemental difference. The latter view sees the sign in the semiotic triad as joining the object known and the interpretant in a single, irreducible gestalt. The former sees the sign as a barrier between the object and the interpretant. In representationalism, there seems to be no way to overcome the epistemic challenge of explaining how "ideas" relate to things, since all we ever deal in are ideas. Thus, showing how our signs are not arbitrary becomes impossible.

Quoting noAxioms

The distinction comes from language and purpose, and is not physical, which is the point of me posting all this.

Yes. I'm not disagreeing with you, for a change.

Quoting noAxioms

Or in a double spiral, resulting in a pair of very difficult to disentangle Slinkys.

:grin:

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

There is, of course, some variance in edge cases, but on the whole convention seems to correspond to the observable properties of things across different cultures.

Yes. Given that we are all human beings and therefore similar in many important ways (as well as different in other important ways, that is not surprising. That's why Wittgenstein grounds everything in human life and practices.

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

I would add that these problems become particularly acute, I would say insoluble, if one starts from the position that what we know/experience are "mental representations" or "ideas" rather than these being that through which we know.

Yes. I think we should think of them as lenses, rather than obstacles.

Reply to noAxioms
Is there any physical basis for what constitutes a 'thing' or 'object'?

Here is Wittgenstein rejecting the notion of a "simple" he had developed in his first work, the Tractatus. A "simple" is perhaps not too far from what you call "a 'thing' or 'object'". Wittgenstein had supposed a form of logical atomism, the notion that there were elementary facts - simples - from which a complete description of the world might be constructed. Here he is questioning whether there is any such absolute basis for claiming something is a simple or a composite object.

Philosophical Investigations:47. But what are the simple constituent parts of which reality is composed?—What are the simple constituent parts of a chair?—The bits of wood of which it is made? Or the molecules, or the atoms?— "Simple" means: not composite. And here the point is: in what sense 'composite'? It makes no sense at all to speak absolutely of the 'simple parts of a chair'.

Again: Does my visual image of this tree, of this chair, consist of parts? And what are its simple component parts? Multi-colouredness is one kind of complexity; another is, for example, that of a broken outline composed of straight bits. And a curve can be said to be composed of an ascending and a descending segment.

If I tell someone without any further explanation: "What I see before me now is composite", he will have the right to ask: "What do you mean by 'composite'? For there are all sorts of things that that can meant"—The question "Is what you see composite?" makes good sense if it is already established what kind of complexity—that is, which particular use of the word—is in question. If it had been laid down that the visual image of a tree was to be called "composite" if one saw not just a single trunk, but also branches, then the question "Is the visual image of this tree simple or composite?", and the question "What are its simple component parts?", would have a clear sense—a clear use. And of course the answer to the second question is not "The branches" (that would be an answer to the grammatical question: "What are here called 'simple component parts'?") but rather a description of the individual branches.

But isn't a chessboard, for instance, obviously, and absolutely, composite?—You are probably thinking of the composition out of thirty-two white and thirty-two black squares. But could we not also say, for instance, that it was composed of the colours black and white and the schema of squares? And if there are quite different ways of looking at it, do you still want to say that the chessboard is absolutely 'composite'?—Asking "Is this object composite?" outside a particular language-game is like what a boy once did, who had to say whether the verbs in certain sentences were in the active or passive voice, and who racked his brains over the question whether the verb "to sleep" meant something active or passive.

We use the word "composite" (and therefore the word "simple") in an enormous number of different and differently related ways. (Is the colour of a square on a chessboard simple, or does it consist of pure white and pure yellow? And is white simple, or does it consist of the colours of the rainbow?—Is this length of 2 cm. simple, or does it consist of two parts, each 1 cm. long? But why not of one bit 3 cm. long, and one bit 1 cm. long measured in the opposite direction?)

To the philosophical question: "Is the visual image of this tree composite, and what are its component parts?" the correct answer is: "That depends on what you understand by 'composite'." This is of course not an answer but a rejection of the question.)

Immediately following, in §48, he describes coloured squares on a grid, as:

We might write a sentence about this arrangement: "RRBGGGRWW". Wittgenstein asks, what is simple here and what is complex?

Philosophical Investigations, §48:Here the sentence is a complex of names, to which corresponds a complex of elements. The primary elements are the coloured squares. "But are these simple?"—I do not know what else you would have me call "the simples", what would be more natural in this language-game. But under other circumstances I should call a monochrome square "composite", consisting perhaps of two rectangles, or of the elements colour and shape. But the concept of complexity might also be so extended that a smaller area was said to be 'composed' of a greater area and another one subtracted from it. Compare the 'composition of forces', the 'division' of a line by a point outside it; these expressions shew that we are sometimes even inclined to conceive the smaller as the result of a composition of greater parts, and the greater as the result of a division of the smaller.

But I do not know whether to say that the figure described by our sentence consists of four or of nine elements! Well, does the sentence consist of four letters or of nine?—And which are its elements, the types of letter, or the letters? Does it matter which we say, so long as we avoid misunderstandings in any particular case?

I hope you can see how this sort of analysis can be applied to object. Wittgenstein himself does so a bit later:

Philosophical Investigations:60. When I say: "My broom is in the corner",—is this really a statement about the broomstick and the brush? Well, it could at any rate be replaced by a statement giving the position of the stick and the position of the brush. And this statement is surely a further analysed form of the first one.—But why do I call it "further analysed"?— Well, if the broom is there, that surely means that the stick and brush must be there, and in a particular relation to one another; and this was as it were hidden in the sense of the first sentence, and is expressed in the analysed sentence. Then does someone who says that the broom is in the corner really mean: the broomstick is there, and so is the brush, and the broomstick is fixed in the brush?—If we were to ask anyone if he meant this he would probably say that he had not thought specially of the broomstick or specially of the brush at all. And that would be the right answer, for he meant to speak neither of the stick nor of the brush in particular. Suppose that, instead of saying "Bring me the broom", you said "Bring me the broomstick and the brush which is fitted on to it."!—Isn't the answer: "Do you want the broom? Why do you put it so oddly?"——Is he going to understand the further analysed sentence better?—This sentence, one might say, achieves the same as the ordinary one, but in a more roundabout way.—imagine a language-game in which someone is ordered to bring certain objects which are composed of several parts, to move them about, or something else of the kind. And two ways of playing it: in one (a) the composite objects (brooms, chairs, tables, etc.) have names, as in (15); in the other (b) only the parts are given names and the wholes are described by means of them.—In what sense is an order in the second game an analysed form of an order in the first? Does the former lie concealed in the latter, and is it now brought out by analysis?— True, the broom is taken to pieces when one separates broomstick and brush; but does it follow that the order to bring the broom also consists of corresponding parts?

What constitutes an object is not to be found in physics or in the physical structures around us, but in what we are doing with our language and what we are doing with the objects involved in those activities. We give consideration to the broom if we are sweeping, but perhaps only to the broomstick if we are using it to move something that is out of our reach, or to the brush if we are looking for hair for a scarecrow...

Quoting noAxioms

could only conclude that what constitutes an 'object' is entirely a matter of language/convention. There's no physical basis for it. I can talk about

Yes, what constitutes an object for us in a world structured by language, is a matter of language. But that doesn't mean there's no physical basis for it; we just can't know the physical basis--there's no physical basis for "us" (who "see" now, only through languge).

Quoting noAxioms

Apparently

Quoting noAxioms

Apparently the convention is that whatever you are carrying is part of you, and vanishes with you. But how does the phaser beam know this convention?

Because the phaser beam is designed by an advanced civilization with, say, quantum computing powers, even the phaser beam has been uploaded with enough that it knows what a reasonable person of reasonable intelligence knows.



Quoting noAxioms

Does it take the railing, a piece of it, or the building, or what? The convention isn't clear in this case since the boundaries of a non-living thing require more detail than just 'take this'.

Again, what would be reasonable in the circumstance? It will do. If one out of a thousand are grey, so be it; same for a reasonable person of reasonable intelligence. Convention is convention, programmed by an evolutionary process over time, constructed and uploaded into all humans, and soon enough, their technology too.

Quoting noAxioms

Non-fictional examples:

All just examples of where convention stands today. Your point is brilliant I think, and was said immediately. Objects[as we see them]are just constructions and projections settled upon and transmitted from mind to mind. If you push enough, maybe in 200 years, when asked, what does a truck weigh? The conventional answer is, depends on what's in it. The fact will remain, we do not Really/Truly define Truck now; and we won't be then. A truck (itself a construction any way, so...) ...a rock is only whatever is being or is-ing, it is not a solid form of sand or minerals.

Same goes for that object "me". And that's the real point. "I" am a convention. What the body really is is accessed only in its is-ing.


Quoting noAxioms

To Ludwig's gutters

They are what your locus in mind has settled at; that's usually triggered by convention, but like any evolutionary process, it's ultimately whatever is the "fittest".

Quoting Ludwig V

I decided to call them gutters because they could be used as gutters.

That is a helpful distinction because it further illustrates Reply to noAxioms point. Do one thing to an object, say, paint it: still one object. Cut it in half, maybe still one object cut in half. Give the two halves a new Signifier; suddenly the ontology has changed! No. We make everything and believe it; a dynamic process, while Reality remains present. We, becoming, accessible to our so called knowledge. Reality, Being, only accessible to "doing the being" to is-ing. But the latter does not mean that there is no physical basis to it; that's just the former--we--talking. It's the contrary. For physical objects, from air to my body, there is only a physical basis. The rest, we make and believe.

Quoting Fire Ologist

A word is a device that can carve out a boundary.

More than that. It's a device that constructs so called boundaries [that aren't really there]

Quoting noAxioms

Thank you all for your replies. My topic was mostly an observation. If you can think of exceptions to my 'it isn't physics' assertion, such counterarguments would be especiallywelcome

Sorry! Just got to this part.

Quoting Banno

What constitutes an object is not to be found in physics or in the physical structures around us, but in what we are doing with our language

Is that as far as W went?

Are you saying that , loosely Kant-like, he didn't want to get into the "reality" of the object and so, took the position, that what we can know of an object is in our language?

Or did W say the only reality of an object is in the language and there is no physical?

Quoting ENOAH

...we just can't know the physical basis

An odd thing to say. There is a physical basis for dividing the pipe in to blue and red, after all, and for dividing the tree into trunk and branches.

Quoting ENOAH

Is that as far as W went?

Certainly not. (insider joke)

There's a poor mans version of "language game" that thinks all there are to language games are words. But from the get go language games involve things around us - slabs and blocks and apples and trees.

Quoting noAxioms

What if the phaser hits a bug on the guy's shirt?

You know what happens if a fly gets into the teleportation chamber!

I would argue that there are no real objects in the world. It is just a matter of how our brains carve things up, some of this determined by our evolutionary history, some by cultural practices. The boundaries we draw around things are not themselves part of the world itself.

I once read about Gilbert Ryle asking whether it makes sense to say that there are three things in the field, two cows and a pair of cows. This illustrates one aspect of the problem of objects.

I used to do a lot of rock climbing. I find it interesting how climbers will come to see certain features on a rock face as distinct objects. Climbers can "read" a wall. Certain kinds of holds sort of stand out as affordances, usually with names attached, such as hueco, crimp, undercling, jug, etc. Non-climbers might just see an expanse of stone. Are non-climbers failing to see real things that are really there, even apart from the practice of climbing? Similarly, we might see a "passage" in a forest. These affordances relate to our bodies and we might act on the world. They are projections of possibilities for future action.

What if you had no body? Would there be a "path" in a forest? Think about how an opening, an empty space, shows up to us as a region in which we can move freely, whereas solid material shows up as an obstacle. But what if you had no body? Would the world be like this at all? Constraint and freedom? Would anything show up as something to stand on, something to grab, something to throw, something to eat?

Notice that we even recognize things in the world such as a smile or a nod. Are these real objects?

What we see as objects are really just meanings for us that we have developed that facilitate our operation in the world. Different kinds of creatures might well carve up the world differently and see different objects in the same space.

I think it's fascinating how when you are in a more human-created space, there are many more clear objects. Consider walking into a Walmart. There are many products on shelves, with packaging and contents, with lids, with labels, with brand logos, with lists of ingredients. There are cash registers and screens and icons on the screens. There are people with articles of clothing. There are doors and carts, and so on. But in a natural environment free of human modification, things seem less distinct. Sure, if you prime yourself to see them, you will pick out individual rocks or branches or twigs or leaves or patches of moss or hills or waves. But these boundaries are less insistent. It is easier to relax into seeing it as one continuous whole. (But even then, the way you read it is very much related to how it is to be a human in such an environment. Water is refreshing. Air is clear and nice to breathe. The ground is for standing on.) If you are a geologist or a botanist or something, it might be harder to see it simply as a single landscape. But in a Walmart, it is very hard to see it this way. The objectness of the various products is very insistent. It seems that this is because it is much more related to human uses. But how would the inside of a Walmart appear to a tree?

Even in the forest, those modifications that humans make tend to stand out more starkly as objects, things like fire pits, cleared paths, bridges, and so on.

Clearly, things as they are in themselves, if that makes sense at all, are not as they are to us. If there is no relating the world to a body or a mind or something like that, what is it like? If we want to be "objective", we try to bracket ourselves out. But what would remain? I am not at all sure. It seems to me that maybe things only show up as such if you are something that stands in some relation to them and have purposes and possibilities of action. Otherwise, why carve up the world at all?

Without a need for carbohydrates, sugar isn't sweet. Sugar surely isn't, in itself, sweet, absent any tasting animal.

Quoting Fire Ologist

Like face recognition. A device that sets boundaries.

Meaning definitely needs to be conveyed (via programming, huge database, etc) to perform such a task. I'm looking for an example where one need not communicate with the device for it to work.

The boundaries of such a device are loosely 'face'. Hair possibly inhibits its function. Don't know if a new hairstyle would fool it.


Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

Anyhow, you might be interested in the Problem of the Many, which is closely related:

The top half of your post concerned the foundations of language, which seems not particularly relevant since I am trying to find object in the absence of language. The problem of the many is very relevant, and I have not yet read all of the article, but it seems to hit on many of my points.

The linked article lists 8 'mutually inconsistent' claims about what a cloud is, but I don't find the list necessarily mutually consistent without additional premises, if one starts out by accepting that there is but the one cloud and all subsets of it are not a cloud at all, but a mere portion. Maybe I didn't read it carefully enough. The cloud thing is very much like the tornado, except that from a distance the tornado's boundary is still kind of vague, especially where it's upper bound is.

You post has caused much of the delay in making this reply. Too much reading to do, a good thing.

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

The problem here is that fundemental particles increasingly don't seem so fundemental, having beginnings and ends, as well as only being definable in terms of completely universal fields (i.e., the whole)

Yes, I was going to bring something like that up. Quantization of field excitements has an awful lot of objectness to it, but even it fails to have identity and clear boundaries.


Quoting Banno

Wittgenstein had supposed a form of logical atomism, the notion that there were elementary facts - simples - from which a complete description of the world might be constructed.

Does this help? I'm trying to get a classical device like the fictional phaser to apply its function to a classical object without using language to convey intent. A person getting shot might be a collection of simples, but the physical device needs to select which simples to disintegrate, and which to leave be. What does it do if the shooter's aim is off, or he pans it around?

I shoot at a chessboard. Does it take out a piece, a square and whatever's on it? The whole game? Table too? How to design the gun to do the right thing? Can't be done of course.
Anything indicated is likely composite, and the physical is required to glean which simples are members of the composite without any conveying of intended composite. When put that way, the problem is simple and unsolvable, requiring information that is nonexistent, or at least unavailable.

Quoting Banno

What constitutes an object is not to be found in physics or in the physical structures around us, but in what we are doing with our language and what we are doing with the objects involved in those activities. We give consideration to the broom if we are sweeping, but perhaps only to the broomstick if we are using it to move something that is out of our reach, or to the brush if we are looking for hair for a scarecrow...

Agree to all of this. I am trying to figure out how something that isn't a person (or a device with intent) can do the same thing.

One can see that I am sort of flailing around here. I'm getting likes to all sorts of stuff I've not read before (for which I am grateful), and having that already under my belt would have helped, if only to let me reply more promptly.


Quoting ENOAH

But how does the phaser beam know this convention?
— noAxioms

Because the phaser beam is designed by an advanced civilization with, say, quantum computing powers, even the phaser beam has been uploaded with enough that it knows what a reasonable person of reasonable intelligence knows.

OK, the reasonable premise is that it is a smart device. You set it to kill (disintegrate), so it's going to work on a biological being as previously defined by its makers. So what if I shoot a teapot? What if I want to kill the scary spider on Kirk's chest without killing Kirk? How does the device handle that without needing to explain it at length first, something nobody has time for in combat?

I should post this on a trekkie site. Star Trek cannot be wrong, so they are obligated to pony up an answer, just like the star wars guys needed a plausible explanation for the "Kessel Run in Less Than 12 Parsecs" fiasco.

Quoting ENOAH

Same goes for that object "me". And that's the real point. "I" am a convention. What the body really is is accessed only in its is-ing.

Yes, it seems clear, even to animals that not only have concepts of critter, stick, whatever, but also of ownership of the object in question, such as 'my eggs', as opposed to 'no, my (food) eggs now, sorry'. But in the end, it is only convention, with apparently no physical basis.

Quoting ENOAH

Give the two halves a new Signifier; suddenly the ontology has changed!

Yes again. Suddenly a broken pipe is two unbroken gutters.
It's metaphysical since it's about what it is. Is it ontology?


Quoting fishfry

You know what happens if a fly gets into the teleportation chamber!

Any chamber, like a DeLorean time machine, is a demarked volume, so what is affected is fairly unambiguous.


Quoting petrichor

Are non-climbers failing to see real things that are really there, even apart from the practice of climbing?

They're failing to see what is relevant. Names are given to relevant things. A novice hasn't the sight, so hasn't the names.


Again, thanks to all for your responses.

Quoting noAxioms

So what if I shoot a teapot? What if I want to kill the scary spider on Kirk's chest without killing Kirk? How does the device handle that without needing to explain it at length first, something nobody has time for in combat?

If it has been uploaded at astronomical speed and volume, with all the information that a reasonable person of reasonable intelligence is from infancy to middle age; and since it's smart, you point it, speak (perhaps think, but nah) "spider only" and it takes care of the rest, even if it's your job to aim. For sure. Look where we are now, that you're probably not even laughing. By late 23rd C, phasers are smart.

Quoting noAxioms

Is it ontology?

I, 1, might not know where the latter properly fits, 2, wanted it as hyperbole.

Quoting noAxioms

Any chamber, like a DeLorean time machine, is a demarked volume, so what is affected is fairly unambiguous.

Good point.

Reply to noAxioms, phasers function using a rare element called plotonium. It allows them to eliminate whatever, and only whatever, the writer desires.

Quoting noAxioms

I am trying to find object in the absence of language

The biggest hurdle to this this task is fundamentally you are trying to find object in the absence of language, but you have to use language as an instrument to do it.

Reply to noAxioms I would say there is no physical basis. As someone remarked in a philosophical essay I once read, ‘there’s no such thing as a thing.’ Things or objects are designated as such by a subject for a purpose. But there is no ultimately-existing, discrete, and completely definable thing. No such thing.

Quoting noAxioms

since I am trying to find object in the absence of language.

Dinosaurs.

Reply to fdrake Arche-fossils, you mean?

Reply to Banno

What constitutes an object is not to be found in physics or in the physical structures around us, but in what we are doing with our language and what we are doing with the objects involved in those activities.

It's more the latter though, right? A human being "raised by wolves" without language would still experience objects, no? Even the sheep recognizes the whole "wolf." Animals by in large react to composite wholes. They often ignore simulacra that only have some elements of the form of the whole they are interested in, which would seem to suggest that action isn't just in relation to undifferentiated streams of "sense data."

Reply to Fire Ologist

The biggest hurdle to this this task is fundamentally you are trying to find object in the absence of language, but you have to use language as an instrument to do it.

It's only a hurdle if you insist on a certain sort of precision or definition. I'd say to Reply to noAxioms that finding objects in the absence of language is incredibly easy, just look around. Spend any time with young children and you'll realize that they have no problem recognizing most wholes even if they have no clue what they are or what they are called. Even at the level of just pointing and asking "what this?" they already differentiate between asking about what the name of some object is and the name of some part of the object. E.g., pointing at an animal figurine to as its name versus pointing just to the horns or tail to ask "no, what is just this (part)." Notably, they can often learn colors before age 2, but good luck getting them to understand grue and bleen. There is a sense in which some distinctions are given.

Another way to think of it is that, were the relationship between our demarcation of objects and the properties of objects themselves completely arbitrary, different cultures should recognize different objects, and learning to demarcate objects according to one's own culture should be a fairly abstract and difficult process.

Reply to Banno

Philosophical Investigations, §48

I think this is an area where information theory gives us a very good set of tools for understanding this sort of thing. You can think of a description in terms of maximum lossless compressibility given you want to capture all of the "difference that makes a difference," or the shortest string that can produce that output (Kolmogorov Complexity). When you get to the "real amount of ontological difference out in the physical world," that seems like a question for physics and the philosophy of physics (which is closely related to the question of if the universe is computable). There is an argument to be made that even in the physical science the "differences that make a difference," are context dependent.

The mystery shows up because in abstraction we can posit limitless amounts of difference that makes a difference even in completely uniform media. E.g., you can think of a black square as one black pixel or as 10×100¹?? black pixels (Wittgenstein's point about area), but the latter can, in important ways, be shown to be essentially the same thing.

A number of people seem to have conceded my point that the demarcation of an object is strictly an ideal, a mental convention.

Quoting ENOAH

By late 23rd C, phasers are smart.

Phaser work because they're at least as smart as humans. The object is demarked by knowing the intent of the shot.
Quoting Banno

It allows them to eliminate whatever, and only whatever, the writer desires.

This also reduces the issue to an ideal, that of the writer instead of the smart gun. This applies to all the fictional examples.


Quoting Fire Ologist

The biggest hurdle to this this task is fundamentally you are trying to find object in the absence of language, but you have to use language as an instrument to do it.

Using language to do it is no problem. The physical device is what cannot use language to do it.

Quoting Wayfarer

As someone remarked in a philosophical essay I once read, ‘there’s no such thing as a thing.’ Things or objects are designated as such by a subject for a purpose

I guess I'm reproducing that effort with this post. I totally agree, but I've not seen the paper in question, which is no doubt worded better.
I didn't see the relevance of Arche-fossils. Had to look it up.


Quoting fdrake

Dinosaurs.

Dinosaurs have intent. Predator and prey both need to recognize each other as distinct objects/threats/kin etc. Their convention is sufficiently pragmatic for their needs.

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

A human being "raised by wolves" without language would still experience objects, no?

At least as well as the dinosaurs, yes. The fictional wrist teleporter on the other hand doesn't experience objects since there's no physical definition of it, and we're presuming that it isn't an AI device which attempts to glean the intent of whatever is using the device. The device isn't in any way 'interested in' any specific interpretation of what it's being required to do.

Quoting noAxioms

So this got me thinking, and I could only conclude that what constitutes an 'object' is entirely a matter of language/convention. There's no physical basis for it. I can talk about the blue gutter and that, by convention, identifies an object distinct from the red gutter despite them both being parts of a greater (not separated) pipe.

The physical basis is in application to reality, and seeing whether there is a contradiction. If I call a ball an object, and all the points that define an object are confirmed without contradiction, then it is an object. Language and convention or hypotheses about reality. Application without contradiction is the affirmation of those hypotheses.

If you enjoy epistemology, you may enjoy my paper here. https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/14044/knowledge-and-induction-within-your-self-context/p1

There is a summary after my initial posts that does a great job if you wish to check that before reading it.

Quoting noAxioms

what constitutes an 'object' is entirely a matter of language/convention. There's no physical basis for it. I can talk about the blue gutter and that, by convention, identifies an object distinct from the red gutter despite them both being parts of a greater (not separated) pipe.

Some objects are socially constructed and exist only by conventions, other objects are physical and exist regardless of conventions. Talk of a gutter is conventional, but what it refers to consists of physical parts bound by fields of force into a recognizable whole.

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

It's more the latter though, right?

Sure.

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

I think this is an area where information theory gives us a very good set of tools for understanding this sort of thing.

I agree. "RRBGGGRWW" gives a neat compression of the image.

Provided one has the context in which to unpack it. Provided one knows that the letters represent colours on a grid that is three by three. Without the context, the information may as well be noise.

But that is not given by "RRBGGGRWW".

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

...even in the physical science the "differences that make a difference" are context dependent.

Yep.

Quoting Philosophim

If I call a ball an object

Then you've used language to invoke a convention. I can't do that with any of tools I mentioned. I cannot explain to my device what my intent is when using it.

Quoting jkop

Some objects are socially constructed and exist only by conventions, other objects are physical and exist regardless of conventions.

I contest this.

Talk of a gutter is conventional, but what it refers to consists of physical parts bound by fields of force into a recognizable whole.

All particles anywhere are parts, bound by fields of force and such. Earth's mass pulls on planets in the Andromeda galaxy Does that mean that Earth and some other planet are one object? Where does the influence end?

Sure, it's pretty intuitive for a human to consider a pipe section in isolation to be an 'object', but that's the convention doing its thing. Consider the railing mentioned in the OP. I've already used a convention by calling it a railing. I've strapped a tool to it, and it needs to move 'this'. What does it move? What does it leave behind? The tool has no easier time doing the task for a pipe section or a ball. There's no reason beyond human convention as to where 'that thing' is delimited.

Quoting petrichor

I would argue that there are no real objects in the world. It is just a matter of how our brains carve things up, some of this determined by our evolutionary history, some by cultural practices.

You say no "real" objects, but for most of us, reality is also just how our brains carve things up too. The idea of objective reality is a much a human construct as everything else.

Quoting noAxioms

Dinosaurs have intent. Predator and prey both need to recognize each other as distinct objects/threats/kin etc. Their convention is sufficiently pragmatic for their needs.

How about a microorganism that recognizes it's prey by chemical signals, then moves in that direction and engulfs it. Does it have intent? Does it recognize it's prey?

Quoting jkop

other objects are physical and exist regardless of conventions.

So, perhaps a tree is an object. Is a forest?

Is love real? The United States of America? One of my dreams? Is anything that's real an object?

Quoting noAxioms

I contest this.

A molecule is a compound of atoms bound by physical fields of force. The relations and structures that these words refer to exist regardless of the words or the social habits of natural scientists.

Money, however, is a social construct that exists only as long as we believe in and comply to conventions of an economic system. Without the conventions money doesn't exist.


Reply to T Clark A forest is a recognizable object that consists of trees. Neither is a random swarm of unrecognizable gunk from which we construct recognizable objects.

Reply to noAxioms

Well, we do have machines that do this sort of thing, e.g., autonomous spotter drones that can distinguish tanks and IFVs from other objects. Less excitingly, there are license plate readers with can distinguish discrete characters on a moving vehicle.

They work similarly to eyes on a basic level. From the semiotic view, you have signs generated by the interaction between the object and the ambient enviornment, reflected light waves in the examples above, which are in turn picked up by photoreceptors. The similarity starts to fall apart there, since in the animal example there is an experience of the discreteness of the objects, whereas in the machine example there is just a pattern recognition algorithm (although perhaps a dynamic "learning/evolutionary" one).

Both appear to work not by demarcating any discrete boundary for objects in terms of ensembles of fundamental parts (the way modern philosophy [I]has[/I] generally thought of this problem) but rather by seeking to identify signs consistent with a given [I]form[/I]. For example, license plate readers can handle hand written temporary license plates even though the exact form and material varies from the standard because it is simply looking at an overall level of structure.

The Problem of the Many is, to my mind, a problem that only shows up if we accept the starting presuppositions of a substance metaphysics, where objects properties inhere in their constituent parts—a building block view where "things are what they are made of." On such a view, it's a serious problem that objects can't be identified in terms of discrete ensembles of building blocks.

Process views, which are often inspired by information theory or semiotics, or the marriage of the two (Shannon's model helpfully recreated the Augustine/Piercean semiotic triad) don't have this issue. The demarcation, "if a thing is a cloud" can be defined in terms of some sort of morphism that is substrate independent, which in turn seems to make the issue of "hazy boundaries" less relevant. Boundaries can be hazy because a given morphism might be realizable in very many ways.

Ultimately, I do think Locke's view of "real essences" having to be defined in terms of "mental essences" gets something right here. Without minds, without the plurality of phenomenological horizons, you have a world of complete unity. Cause, energy, and information flow across all "discrete" boundaries as if they didn't truly exist. But mental does not mean arbitrary, and so forms, as they appear in the world, are mutually self-constituting in terms of "mental" and "real" essence (with both only existing apart in abstraction anyhow). Hegel's conception of concepts unfolding in time is perhaps helpful here. When we rethink a concept, e.g. when we learn that "water is H2O," this is a real change in water's physical relations. How a thing is known is not a subordinate, "less real" sort of relationship, but at least as real as anything else (and arguably more real since things most "are what they are," when known.)

The substance view, aside from introducing the problem of superveniance, also has a tendency to make mental relations "less real." Since fundemental building blocks lack intentionality, intentionality must be in a way illusory, or else the sui generis creation of mind. But this separation of mind and nature IMO makes the demarcation problem insoluble.

Quoting jkop

A forest is a recognizable object that consists of trees. Neither is a random swarm of unrecognizable gunk from which we construct recognizable objects.

Humans can name, make an object or thing out of, anything. There is no such thing as a random swarm of unrecognizable gunk if it holds any interest for us. There's a good definition - a thing is a phenomenon that holds interest for people.

Quoting noAxioms

A number of people seem to have conceded my point that the demarcation of an object is strictly an ideal, a mental convention.

We never sense an “object”. We sense a “this object” like for example a “tree” and an “apple” and we abstract the idea “object” as either of those, and so neither of those as “object” So “object” lives on the mental side of the demarcation you made. “Matter” is like that too. No one has ever seen a bucket full of matter. It’s full of something particular.

But then there is the question of the particular. You are saying “tree” is just as conventional as “object”. And the difference between “tree” and “apple” is just as conventional as the difference between “object” and “thing” or “ideal”.

If there was nothing there until we perform the convention of constructing an object, our objects would be in total disarray, incommunicable, unspeakable to another object-maker. There is a medium, an objective, convention independent world of objects. We are all usually wrong about what these objects are and wrong about how we talk about them, and wrong about what we think others are saying, but unless there is a world of objects, communication is both impossible and pointless.

So my answer is, I accept that there are many objects so that we can communicate and maybe somehow triangulate on a definition of one of them someday. And the fact that you were able to read this far in my post here means you accept that there are separate objects too. Whether we want to admit it or not. Once we accept they are there, we can agree to start setting the demarcations.

Another fictional example to add to my list, an older one this time: The Midas touch.
King Midas touches a twig. No convention/intention is conveyed. Does the bark change to gold? The twig/branch/tree/forest? How does the curse know where to demark the effect?


Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

Well, we do have machines that do this sort of thing, e.g., autonomous spotter drones that can distinguish tanks and IFVs from other objects. Less excitingly, there are license plate readers with can distinguish discrete characters on a moving vehicle.

All examples of something for which intent has been conveyed by some sort of language. These things aren't required to 'do your function to' 'that', all without language. The function is clear enough, but the 'that' part isn't if the 'object' in question hasn't in any way been described. A license plate reader cannot function if it doesn't know to only process 'license platey' sorts of portions of images.
I worked on a early version of such software, implementing a bin-picking algorithm to have a robot arm pull objects out of a 3D jumble in a bin, always grasping it at certain places regardless of how it was in there. At some point you've pulled all the easy ones and have to either reach too deep, or reorient the remaining ones around in order to get ones with the correct side up, which takes longer. But at least the device knew the bounds of the object in question, and pretty much how to recognize its orientation from any presented angle. We didn't get it working with all types. We had these water pumps that defied the ability of the machine doing the picking.

Your license plate reader likely needs to recognize 'vehicle' and know where to look for the plates. I live by a toll road and all the toll booths have now been replaced by plate and/or transponder readers. It gets really hard in winter weather when the plates (front and back) can become unreadable. I have a transponder, so it isn't an issue with me.
Three different toll rates: Transponder is cheapest. Pay proactively on the web is next cheapest. If they have to bill you, that is considerably more.

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

The Problem of the Many is, to my mind, a problem that only shows up if we accept the starting presuppositions of a substance metaphysics, where objects properties inhere in their constituent parts—a building block view where "things are what they are made of."

This is more in line with the topic. A part is indicated. The question is, is it a part, or is it the 'object' in question? It might be part of something larger, and that larger thing may itself be designated to be part of something even larger, with no obvious end to the game. Hence, the convention is needed. There is no physical way to resolve this without the convention, and the convention isn't physical.

The article you linked used a cloud as its example. Two statements said that there was one and only one cloud. That convention, having been stated, left all the other premises (eight in all) consistent with each other despite the article saying that they were mutually exclusive. I didn't understand that.

On such a view, it's a serious problem that objects can't be identified in terms of discrete ensembles of building blocks.

Yes, which is why the discussion of the problem is relevant.

Process views, which are often inspired by information theory or semiotics, or the marriage of the two (Shannon's model helpfully recreated the Augustine/Piercean semiotic triad) don't have this issue.[/quote]How would it solve some of the problems I've used in examples? I have a device that yields the mass of whatever I indicate. I indicate the ground. Does it give the mass of a molecule, pebble, hill, tectonic plate? Does it include the moon since the moon is matter "bound to Earth by physical fields of force" as @jkop puts it.

Ultimately, I do think Locke's view of "real essences" having to be defined in terms of "mental essences" gets something right here. Without minds, without the plurality of phenomenological horizons, you have a world of complete unity.

Agree, so long as 'minds' is not anthropocentrically defined.


Quoting T Clark

There's a good definition - a thing is a phenomenon that holds interest for people.

So since there's no people holding interest in my examples, you seem to agree with my views? There is no 'thing' outside of intent/convention.

Quoting Fire Ologist

If there was nothing there until we perform the convention of constructing an object, our objects would be in total disarray, incommunicable, unspeakable to another object-maker

Same comment. In the absence of the convention, there is only disarray, no objects. My topic is about the absence of convention, not how the convention might come to be by that which finds use for it.

Quoting noAxioms

So since there's no people holding interest in my examples, you seem to agree with my views? There is no 'thing' outside of intent/convention.

Yes, we do agree. I have a strong interest in Taoist philosophy as expressed in the Tao Te Ching and Chuang Tzu. This is from Stephen Mitchell's translation of Verse 1 of the Tao Te Ching.

Quoting Lao Tzu

The tao that can be told
is not the eternal Tao
The name that can be named
is not the eternal Name.

The unnamable is the eternally real.
Naming is the origin
of all particular things.

And this from Verse 40.

Quoting Lao Tzu

Return is the movement of the Tao.
Yielding is the way of the Tao.

All things are born of being.
Being is born of non-being.

In Taoism, being is associated with the everyday world we live in. Non-being, or the Tao, is the unformed, unconceptualized state before things are brought into being by naming them.

Quoting noAxioms

Dinosaurs have intent. Predator and prey both need to recognize each other as distinct objects/threats/kin etc. Their convention is sufficiently pragmatic for their needs.

I meant in the sense that for humans, there existed objects - stuff, placeholders, particulars, whatevs you wanna call it - prior to our purposes and conceptualisations. Thus it can't all be us. I could make the same remark about plants, for dinosaurs.

Hope that helps.

Regardless I think you're making a distinction between purposive/normative and physical, whereas there's other graduations - like you might think of chemical, biological, systemic, ecological, intentional etc strata as other strata of existence in which nonarbitrarily individuated objects may exist. IE there could very well be an organic, but non-normative or mental, basis for the existence of objects. Or a social one. There's a tendency to go from physics to language without thinking about it.

Though you might want to say that such things still have a physical basis, because they relate to distinctions in physical processes. Bodies stuff is still star stuff. But then the ascription of a physical basis to a distinction means nothing other than a distinction. If you think everything's physical anyway. In other words, if there is a distinction drawable between two terms, in that analysis, it must be done in terms of physical properties since all properties would be stipulated to be physical.

If instead there are other flavours of properties - which are distinct from but not necessarily opposed to what you might call physical - then asking whether a flavour of distinction has a physical basis makes sense. But if other flavours of properties which could serve as a basis for distinctions are in play you're in @Banno's and @SophistiCat's comments' territory. In which the distinctions you make are informed by the use context, and you may need to clarify what you would pre-theoretically count as an object. Since in the OP it's an unexamined term and its relationship to generic physical properties isn't spelled out.

My pet theory is that what counts as an object depends upon the context. And a process can count as a context. Like sucrose counts as an object for amylase, and populations of amylase enzymes count as an object for the evolution of digestive systems. You might want to call those physical, I'd suspect they aren't best described as physical 'cos the standard model doesn't care if I've got candy in my mouth.

And yes @Wayfarer it's an arche-fossil argument. With some assemblage nonsense to taste. The usual fdrake breakfast.

Quoting noAxioms

My topic is about the absence of convention

Then you need to use a chalk baord that doesn’t need chalk. Or a board. Or somrthing we can talk about together.

Quoting fdrake

since I am trying to find object in the absence of language.
— noAxioms

Dinosaurs.

Reply to noAxioms

Quinton Meillassoux introduced the concept of the "arche-fossil" in his book *After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency*. The term refers to objects or evidence, such as fossils, that indicate the existence of objects prior to human consciousness. Meillassoux uses this concept to challenge the correlationist position, which holds that we can only know the correlation between thought and being, rather than being itself independently of thought. The arche-fossil serves as the linch-pin for Meillassoux to assert that there is a reality independent of human perception and cognition. He argues that such objects, which existed long before humans and consciousness, demonstrate that the universe has a history that is not contingent on human observation. This challenges the idea that being is always tied to our experience.

A counter-argument to that, is that any meaningful conception of existence just is a human conception. That while it is empirically the case that dinosaurs and many other things pre-dated the evolution of h. Sapiens, the statement that ‘dinosaurs existed’ is only meaningful within the conceptual framework provided by an observing mind - with 'prior to' being part of that framework. Transcendental idealism, a target of Mellaissoux’ critique, holds that while we can have reliable empirical knowledge of phenomena (the world as we experience it), the world as it might be in the absence of any observation is unknowable as a matter of definition. Meaning that our understanding of existence, including the existence of dinosaurs, is implicitly dependent on the human conceptual framework. This doesn't mean that dinosaurs didn't exist or that an unbeheld object ceases to exist, which is another mental construction (namely, its imagined non-existence). It doesn't over-rule or invalidate empirical observation, but it serves to remind that empirical observations are made by humans. Whereas the speculative realism of Mellaissoux seems to want to 'reach beyond' human cognition.

Quoting fdrake

sucrose counts as an object for amylase, and populations of amylase enzymes count as an object for the evolution of digestive systems. You might want to call those physical...

I think this is where biosemiosis becomes relevant, isn't it? Biosemiotics provides a framework to understand such interactions not just as physical processes but involving the interpretation of signs and the generation of meaning within biological contexts. In this example, sucrose can be seen as a 'sign' that the amylase enzyme 'interprets' and acts upon. The amylase enzyme breaks down sucrose, 'recognizing it' as a specific substrate. This interaction involves a signaling process where the presence of sucrose triggers a specific biochemical response in the enzyme.

I think we are meandering away from the question in the OP.

The question is:
Quoting noAxioms

Is there any physical basis for what constitutes a 'thing' or 'object'?

Object, of course, here, is the "thing" that philosophical theories have been trying to explain. And if the OP's definition of "object" is a philosophical one, the answer is yes.

Yes, there is a physical basis for what constitute a thing: it has to be finite, it is complete in our conception of it, and we have a coherent idea of what this thing is.
That is why we will never call the universe a thing.
We don't call consciousness or the mind a thing, but we call the brain a thing.
We call the planets, things.
We call the trees things.
We call a triangle a mathematical object.

So, in response to :
Quoting Wayfarer

He argues that such objects, which existed long before humans and consciousness, demonstrate that the universe has a history that is not contingent on human observation.

While this is tenable and I believe in this, this is not what's being asked.

Quoting L'éléphant

We call a triangle a mathematical object.

But it's not a physical thing. It's an idea.

Quoting Wayfarer

But it's not a physical thing. It's an idea.

Something that has a shape and measurement is a physical thing.

Reply to Wayfarer It is finite and complete.

Quoting noAxioms

What if the phaser hits a bug on the guy's shirt? Does just the bug disappear or does the guy (the intended target) go as well?

This would be a violation of the prime directive, so the phaser has to have AI directed activation. The AI doesn't know anything about physicality. That's a philosophical category that's completely useless to a robot.

Quoting L'éléphant

Something that has a shape and measurement is a physical thing.

?Wayfarer It (triangle) is finite and complete.

Reply to L'éléphant But is it a physical thing? Certainly the picture of a triangle is physical, but the definition is a concept.

Reply to noAxioms

This is more in line with the topic. A part is indicated. The question is, is it a part, or is it the 'object' in question? It might be part of something larger, and that larger thing may itself be designated to be part of something even larger, with no obvious end to the game. Hence, the convention is needed. There is no physical way to resolve this without the convention, and the convention isn't physical.

Well, my take here would be that people are physical entities, and cultures are just groups of people, their (physical) artefacts, etc. So their delineations of objects do have physical existence. Granted it is an "incorporeal" (without body) physical existence (i.e., distributed across many brains, books, machines, art work, etc.). This sort of existence, which crosses so many substrates and seems essentially substrate independent, is why I think information theoretic approaches work so well here. "Economic recessions," would be another example of physical phenomena that are "incorporeal" in just this sort of way. The signs used to signify these things are also natural in a way, and their relationship is a natural one.

But there is an important sense in which an information based definition of objects or forms is non-physical, in that it can seemingly be encoded in all sorts of media and also has an abstract, purely mathematical sort of existence in the same way the natural numbers or shapes might.

The sci-fi examples or the Midas Touch I think are unanswerable. There is no one canonical dividing line for entities to refer to when dividing objects. Real world examples here might be instructive. If we want to delineate the boundaries of something for a machine using ultrasound, radar, etc., we might have it calibrated "just-so" as to have returns only come on the sort of thing we want to delineate. So it's an interaction that defines the thing. Another good example might be using a specific sort of solvent so that only the thing you wish to dissolve ends up being washed away. Draino, for instance, is going to interact with hair, soap scum, etc. in a way different from how it interacts with a metal pipe, and this difference essentially delineates between "pipe" and "clog." But if you pick something magical then is seemingly would have no real reason to every stop at one type of thing or another. That said, you could probably still define suspended solid objects in terms of continuous density of matter.

Reply to Wayfarer

But it's not a physical thing. It's an idea.

Well, supposing that the world can be adequately described with mathematics, there would be a big difference between the mathematical entities consistent with "triangle" and those consistent with "any being having a first person subjective experience of a triangle or triangularity," right? But the second seems like it would be fantastically more complex, even if it could perhaps be realized in an infinite number of ways.

One of the interesting things about supposing that what underpins conciousness can be described mathematically is that it seems to suppose an entire set of second order entities, "mathematical entities [I]as cognized by some thinker[/I]."

And whereas one can locate simple entities seemingly everywhere, overlapping each other in different ensembles, it would seem that the latter sort of entity only shows up in terms of humanity's fathoming of mathematics (at least in our neck of the cosmos). I'm not sure if this is a useful way to think of it, but it perhaps answers the concern about "infinite varieties of forms." For, when it comes to forms that entail cognizing minds, it seems like the actual should have particular precedence over the potential.

The form of "the exact shape of that lump of mud over there," is not even clearly cognized by the person who uses it as an example of the overabundance of forms and ideas, whereas the idea of "triangle" or "dog" is known by almost every toddler.

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

Well, supposing that the world can be adequately described with mathematics, there would be a big difference between the mathematical entities consistent with "triangle" and those consistent with "any being having a first person subjective experience of a triangle or triangularity," right?

I think you’re conflating, or confusing, several separate points. My question about the triangle was simply ‘is it a physical object?’ - to which I say the answer is ‘plainly not’. ‘Physical things’ include - well, pretty well anything you can lay your hands, or eyes on. But geometric forms, numbers, rules, principles, and the like, are not physically existent in the same sense that physical objects are. They are what were called in classical philosophy ‘intelligible objects’. It is germane to the discussion ‘what is an object’, insofar as it requires consideration of whether such entities are or are not objects.

Whether the world can be adequately described with mathematics is a different question.

But neither of those points are directly entailed by my post about the sense in which knowledge implies or requires an observing intelligence. They can be connected to that, but at this point I haven’t tried to connect them.

Reply to noAxioms I have to admit my perplexity towards the question you are asking. Am I understanding you to be saying that you are unsure of whether trees are "things" or "objects?" Or that rocks may not be "things" or "objects." Is that your view noAxioms? Because I think the physical basis for the object "this tree" would just be the tree itself. Or is your view that trees are only trees by convention?

Quoting Wayfarer

Meaning that our understanding of existence, including the existence of dinosaurs, is implicitly dependent on the human conceptual framework.

Quoting Wayfarer

Sapiens, the statement that ‘dinosaurs existed’ is only meaningful within the conceptual framework provided by an observing mind - with 'prior to' being part of that framework.

I generally skip the details of the arche fossil because it's technical. But its fundamental target is what you've said. You'd get something out of reading it I think.

Quoting T Clark

Is love real? The United States of America? One of my dreams?

A feeling, a country, and a state of mind. Clarky, I assume those exist by common convention, but I'm not sure how 'real' they are. Yes, the United States has a specified territory, but isn't this acknowledged as convention rather than reality?

Quoting T Clark

Humans can name, make an object or thing out of, anything.

Only Chuck Norris can do that. :cool: For example, make a fire out of ice, or make wood by rubbing two fires against each other.


Quoting T Clark

There's a good definition - a thing is a phenomenon that holds interest for people.

What then is an uninteresting phenomena?

Quoting fdrake

You'd get something out of reading it I think.

Although the book is written with clarity and consistency, it presupposes a familiarity not only with dogmatic metaphysics, post-Kantian critical philosophy, phenomenology and post-Heideggerian philosophy, but also and above all with Alain Badiou's materialist ontology, and more specifically, with his ontological re-formulation of post-Cantorean set theory, as well as his conception of the event as what exceeds the grasp of an ontology of being qua being

I think the price of entry is a little steep :yikes: .

Serves me right for bringing it up.

Quoting Wayfarer

I think the price of entry is a little steep :yikes: .

The Badiou stuff appears past the arche fossil argument. That's in the first bit. It's Locke, Descartes and the post Kantians. His vocabulary kinda of lets you treat dependence upon discourse, dependence upon a conditioning subject, dependence upon a dialectical mediation, dependence upon an intellect etc as the same phenomenon. The sights are on reciprocal co-constitution in all its forms.

Reply to fdrake An entry on Mellassioux says:

Correlationism is thus not the thesis that we must relate to something in order to know it, but rather that what we know of anything is true only for us. In this regard, correlationism is a form of scepticism for it asserts that whether or not things-in-themselves are this way is something we can never know because we can only ever know things as they appear to us, not as they are in themselves. For example, for the correlationist there is no answer to the question of whether carbon atoms exist apart from us and whether they decay at such and such a rate because we only ever know appearances. This is Meillassoux’s support for scientific realism. For the correlationist we are never able to get out of the correlation between thought and being to determine whether or not carbon itself has these properties or whether it is thought that bestows these properties, which is sometimes the view of scientific functionalism. Meillassoux calls this unsurpassable relation the correlationist circle.

I think I can spot a weakness in that argument. My view that we know things as they appear, not to us as individuals, but to us as a species, a language-group, a culture, and so on. To say that we know things only as they appear ‘to us’ is indeed to fall into scepticism and relativism. But I don’t deny the domain of empirically-verifiable facts that will be verifiable by any other observer given the appropriate conditions and controls. In that sense, I’m a scientific realist. However, scientific realism always pertains to the objective domain, that which can be made an object of analysis, measurement and observation. And the subject who performs that measurement is [s]not part of that[/s] outside that scope. I don’t know if Meillassoux addresses that idea (which is discussed in many papers by another Frenchman, Michel Bitbol. Incidentally, all of these names are people I’ve only learned about through participation in this forum, so that says something.)

I think I might be able to tackle After Finitude, but I’m put off by not knowing anything about Badou and being a bit scared by Cantor. But, you know, live and learn.

Quoting Wayfarer

To say that we know things only as they appear ‘to us’ is indeed to fall into scepticism and relativism.

"to us" is a placeholder for "as conditioned by the categories of understanding" or "as encountered as as an object in the world with an understanding always already there" or "within an episteme" or "as articulated in collective discourse" or "in this culture"...

Quoting Wayfarer

I don’t know if Meillassoux addresses that idea

He does. You're rehearsing one of the arguments he anticipates and responds to in the text. Which isn't to say he's right (I have some reservations), but it's to say you'd benefit from reading it!

Reply to fdrake Thank you, I shall follow your advice.

Quoting jkop

What then is an uninteresting phenomena?

Good question. I believe uninteresting phenomena are those that lack primary qualities such as bulk, figure, texture, motion, and so on. As a result, our senses have little ability to recognize them. I'm aware that this argument sounds rather Lockian...

Quoting Wayfarer

However, scientific realism always pertains to the objective domain, that which can be made an object of analysis, measurement and observation. And the subject who performs that measurement is outside that scope.

There's scientific knowledge about the subjective domain as well. For example, pains, itches, stress, feelings and thoughts are real phenomena whose mode of existing is subjective, and are therefore studied indirectly via language, analysis of reports, behavior, statistics, shared experiences etc. They are not outside the scope of objective knowledge in medicine, psychology, social sciences, linguistics, philosophy etc. From being ontologically subjective it does not follow that it is also epistemically subjective and outside the scope of objective knowledge.

Reply to jkop Yes fair point. That pertains to objective understanding of reported sensations, experience, and so on. But without the ability of subjects to report on those phenomena, there would be no data, so it's something like 'objective knowledge of subjective reports'. But the subject of experience as such is not objectively perceptible. What I had in mind was more like what Michel Bitbol says in this talk:

[quote=Michel Bitbol;https://www.academia.edu/24657293/IT_IS_NEVER_KNOWN_BUT_IS_THE_KNOWER_CONSCIOUSNESS_AND_THE_BLIND_SPOT_OF_SCIENCE_]What is unseen in objective science? The first item that is unseen is my, your, own bodies – not the body as an object for anatomy, of course, but my body while it stands in front of any object whatsoever. If I am a scientist, I have a body. I go back and forth in the laboratory doing gestures, shaping chunks of matter, making instruments, in workshops essentially like this studio. But scientists dream of bypassing their bodies. When they build their theories, scientists act as if they were pure, point-like gazes from which they can enjoy the show put on by the world. This assumption extends to the scientists’ instruments as well, which are usually subtracted or forgotten in the ultimate outcome of their work. Science wants to understand ‘the world out there’; scientists no longer care about the instruments once they have used them to obtain whatever knowledge they’re after. [/quote]

That also extends to the axioms, theories, bodies of knowledge which comprise the basis on which objective analysis is conducted. That too is dependent on decisions and choices - on what to study, what to include or exclude and so on. And of course many of those elements might also be subject to modification as a consequence of experiment and experience. But the point remains that the subject who is conducting all of this work, the scientist who's theory it is, is generally not considered as a part of the object of analysis. (Isn't something like that exactly the conundrum that was thrown up by the observer problem in quantum physics?)

Quoting Michel Bitbol

But scientists dream of bypassing their bodies. When they build their theories, scientists act as if they were pure, point-like gazes from which they can enjoy the show put on by the world.

I don't think Bitbol has it right here. If you talk to physicists or biochemists, say, about their experimental work, scientists are trying to eliminate the effects of their bodies on the matter in hand because they regard that as the right thing to do in that context. If one is trying to identify how variables interact, one has to 'assume' ceteris paribus, that the rest of the world holds still, even though it doesn't. A lot of scientific effort goes into eliminating the possibility that something about the bodies, or environment, or unwanted product of equipment, of experimenters is influencing outcomes.

Then a 'scientific' approach would be, separately and perhaps within a different scientific discipline, to identify the effect of bodies or equipment holding everything else still.

I appreciate the result may still be the same, but I do think us arty-farts sometimes castigate scientists, if only implicitly, for things they understand perfectly well.

Reply to mcdoodle
Aren't all scientific theories underdetermined? Does that mean science, in general, reflects our biases, our worldviews, our pet perspectives?

Rocks also might be the wrong sort of thing to look at for a paradigmatic example of discrete objects. Rocks don't have much of a definite form. A rock broken in half becomes two rocks, generally speaking, and many rocks fused together become one rock, whereas "half a dog" is clearly a half. Rocks are largely bundles of causes external to them. They don't do much to determine themselves.

I would say rather that the paradigmatic example of multiplicity and discrete separation would be the plurality of minds in the world. Further down the chain would be the bodies of animals, which not only have a determinate form but also are relatively self-determining, being what they are because of what they are (and thus having their boundaries contained within them). The dandelion seed clinging to a bears fur is distinguishable from the bear in a way sand laying stop sandstone is not.

This in turn would lead to a view where beings are, as discrete beings, to the extent they have self-determing unity (which is essentially the Thomist view).

Edit: In the classical view, this would often be framed in terms of objects having greater or lesser levels of reality. Ideas have greater reality because they are self-determining in a way, being that they are what makes things what they are. But if ideas and the things instantiating them are mutually self-constituting and subject to evolution, this would seem to challenge the classical view in some ways.

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

Rocks also might be the wrong sort of thing to look at for a paradigmatic example of discrete objects. Rocks don't have much of a definite form. A rock broken in half becomes two rocks, generally speaking, and many rocks fused together become one rock, whereas "half a dog" is clearly a half. Rocks are largely bundles of causes external to them. They don't do much to determine themselves.

Any discrete object is discrete by virtue of standing out against a background. Think of this thesis:

The realm of the senses is all rabbit-duck and it's divided up into discrete-object-background complexes according to the organizing ability of your mind.

Is it possible to disprove this thesis?

edit: I think the main problem with it is that I'll need a higher power to separate me out from the the rest of the world. Plus, I might run afoul of the private language argument.

Quoting javi2541997

I believe uninteresting phenomena are those that lack primary qualities such as bulk, figure, texture, motion, and so on.

Ideas and abstract objects lack "primary" qualities a la Locke, but can nevertheless be interesting. Many "secondary" qualities are interesting too, e.g. the qualities in music, coloured shapes, food etc.

Quoting Wayfarer

(Isn't something like that exactly the conundrum that was thrown up by the observer problem in quantum physics?)

The physics is way over my head, but if there is backwards causation in a block universe and such, then our current understanding of causation might require some additions.

Quoting frank

Aren't all scientific theories underdetermined? Does that mean science, in general, reflects our biases, our worldviews, our pet perspectives?

To generalise so broadly does seem to me to obscure the underdetermination involved. I'm personally pretty confident, for instance, that the measurement of the gravitational constant doesn't reflect our biases etc.; that much modern neuroscience, as a different example, is infected with biases and pet perspectives given the small evidence base, and often obscures this to make generalisations about humans; and that 'social science' of necessity is understood to be inflected by the worldview of the scientists and their culture.

Quoting javi2541997

A feeling, a country, and a state of mind. Clarky, I assume those exist by common convention, but I'm not sure how 'real' they are. Yes, the United States has a specified territory, but isn't this acknowledged as convention rather than reality?

I guess it comes down to that - if we name it, which is a matter of convention, it is real and it is a thing.

Quoting jkop

What then is an uninteresting phenomena?

Good point. I guess "phenomenon" is just another word for "thing," which makes the argument circular. Let's try this - a thing is an aspect of the world that draws the attention of and holds interest for people. Now you ask "What then is an aspect of the world that doesn't draw the attention of or hold interest for people?"

Reply to frank

Any discrete object is discrete by virtue of standing out against a background. Think of this thesis:

The realm of the senses is all rabbit-duck and it's divided up into discrete-object-background complexes according to the organizing ability of your mind.

Is it possible to disprove this thesis?

No, I think this holds up even from a purely information theoretic view. Floridi addresses this sort of thing in his Philosophy of Information in a chapter on the application of information theory to physics and metaphysics. While we can, in a certain context, speak of the "information carry capacity/'in'" particles of baryonic matter, it is very easy to get mislead here and to start thinking of bits and qbits as building blocks who "contain information in themselves."

Information is always relational though. A proton in a universe where every measurement everywhere has the same value as a proton essentially doesn't exist. You need variance of some sort to have anything meaningfully existing, even in the simplistic toy universe (David Bohm has some good stuff on the priority of difference over similarity, and I think Hegel's ideas on the collapse of "sheer being" into nothing hold up here).

If things are defined by their relations, including their status as constituting even basic ontological difference, then the principle idea underlying substance metaphysics, i.e., "that things properties inhere in their constituents," is simply false. I find this to be a good point in favor of such a view, because I think Jaegwon Kim, and others, have successfully ruled out "strong emergence," under the substance view, and yet we seem to need something like "strong emergence" to explain ourselves.

More controversially, it might be possible to extend this inherit relationality into an argument for an inherit "perspectiveness" to all physical interactions— relevant perspective (or something like it) without experience.

Quoting mcdoodle

. I'm personally pretty confident, for instance, that the measurement of the gravitational constant doesn't reflect our biases

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

More controversially, it might be possible to extend this inherit relationality into an argument for an inherit "perspectiveness" to all physical interactions— relevant perspective (or something like it) without experience.

This is an SEP article on underdetermination of knowledge. It's like a relative of the problem of induction. With regard to gravity, it means this: any attempts to explain gravity will run into issues with underdetermination, which are:

1. Any hypothesis makes sense as part of a web of already held beliefs. If a hypothesis fails, we have a choice between saying that the hypothesis is wrong, or saying that one of the background beliefs (part of the web of beliefs) is wrong. There's no way to make this choice beyond pragmatism.

2. For any theory that gains approval in the scientific community, there are alternatives that will also explain the available data. Again, it's a matter of pragmatism.

So tying this back to the OP @noAxioms, it means that if we question the makeup of a human (does it include the clothes or bugs on the sleeve), we'll find that however we approach the question, the conclusion will be an exercise in pragmatism. Any revision to our web of beliefs comes down to psychology (see in the above article where Quine says epistemology is basically psychology.)

Quoting fdrake

I meant in the sense that for humans, there existed objects - stuff, placeholders, particulars, whatevs you wanna call it - prior to our purposes and conceptualisations.

I don't understand this comment. If these things are prior to our purposes and conceptualisations, then how is this relationship 'for humans'?

Regardless I think you're making a distinction between purposive/normative and physical, whereas there's other graduations - like you might think of chemical, biological, systemic, ecological, intentional etc strata as other strata of existence in which nonarbitrarily individuated objects may exist.

I am kind of looking for specific examples. Chemical seems more concerned with 'bulk goods' rather than objects. Biology can work. It is a living thing, so it kind of has 'bounds', but I attacked those bounds in my OP. A tree can distinguish between the life form itself and the parts it sheds (leaves) every autumn, which thus arguably construe objects even while still on the tree.
A bacteria cell (brought up by somebody above) chasing down another is closer to chemical: It has evolved to react to chemical signals and absorb nutrients: follow its nose so to speak. This is definitely biosemiotics, brought up by Wayfarer. Not much 'object' about that until it has to absorb all of some other 'thing' and not just take 'bites' as it can.

Though you might want to say that such things still have a physical basis, because they relate to distinctions in physical processes. Bodies stuff is still star stuff. But then the ascription of a physical basis to a distinction means nothing other than a distinction. If you think everything's physical anyway. In other words, if there is a distinction drawable between two terms, in that analysis, it must be done in terms of physical properties since all properties would be stipulated to be physical.

and you may need to clarify what you would pre-theoretically count as an object.

For purposes of this discussion, "All of whatever is indicated (e.g. 'this', 'that over there'), and not more than what is indicated". How said thing is indicated is not entirely defined, but pointing, touch, and semi-enveloping are good places to start. Yes, it depends on context, but the context is usually absent in the cases I care about. A phaser set to 'kill' (and not just disintegrate) implies a single biological context, and probably not meant as a way to dispose of a container of toxic waste, despite the wonderful utility of using it that way.



Quoting Wayfarer

The arche-fossil serves as the linch-pin for Meillassoux to assert that there is a reality independent of human perception and cognition.

This seems to presume a non-epistemological definition of 'real'. I'm all for that, but not all are (notably those holding that being is fundamentally tied to our experience), and I don't use a 'realist' definition of 'real' myself, but I state the definition it if I need to use it.

A counter-argument to that, is that any meaningful conception of existence just is a human conception.

Sort of. What if something nonhuman has a meaningful concept of existence? How is that different from a human that isn't you having a meaningful concept of existence? Secondly, a meaningful concept of existence may be dependent on conceptions, but existence itself need not be.


Quoting L'éléphant

I think we are meandering away from the question in the OP.

Thank you for your contribution to the thread. I am enjoying the wider discussion this has inspired. No need to throw water on it yet.

The question is:
Is there any physical basis for what constitutes a 'thing' or 'object'?
— noAxioms
Object, of course, here, is the "thing" that philosophical theories have been trying to explain.

Best defined through the numerous examples in the OP, plus also the 'Midas' one that I thought of later. I'm sure there are more, but most examples are fictional since fiction can use a convention that the consumer of the fiction can presume, but that physics cannot.

Yes, there is a physical basis for what constitute a thing: it has to be finite, it is complete in our conception of it, and we have a coherent idea of what this thing is.
That is why we will never call the universe a thing.

Off topic, but agree, that would be a category error. A 'thing' is created in time, essentially assembled from pre-existing stuff into its thingness for a duration.
My OP is more concerned about the boundary of a given thing. What all is included? What isn't? What is the physical basis for whatever answer is given for those questions.

We don't call consciousness or the mind a thing

Some do.

We call the trees things.

I mentioned a tree in the Midas example a ways up, which illustrates the ambiguity of what exactly was indicated.



Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

The sci-fi examples or the Midas Touch I think are unanswerable. There is no one canonical dividing line for entities to refer to when dividing objects.

But that's an answer isn't it? There's no one line, and yet a line is shown to be in the fiction, as more or less expected by the consumer of the fiction. The answer is, the fiction cannot ever be real unless we either missed something, or there's a way to convey the convention to the 'device'.

Real world examples here might be instructive. If we want to delineate the boundaries of something for a machine using ultrasound, radar, etc., we might have it calibrated "just-so" as to have returns only come on the sort of thing we want to delineate.

That's a pretty good example. We want it to ignore uninteresting stuff, but cannot always. We want it to convey discreet interesting 'objects' but it doesn't always. A fetal ultrasound is going to see some of Mom's guts, but the range and aim is designed to minimize this. The navy sonar picks up whales when it wants subs, and it maybe misses some of the subs. Heck, do they have sonar-resistant subs like they do for ships with minimal radar profies? Don't see how that is easily done without making them a lot less quiet moving through the water, which would defeat the purpose.

Another good example might be using a specific sort of solvent so that only the thing you wish to dissolve ends up being washed away. Draino, for instance, is going to interact with hair, soap scum, etc. in a way different from how it interacts with a metal pipe, and this difference essentially delineates between "pipe" and "clog."

Both bulk substances, not 'objects', but still another very relevant example.


Quoting NotAristotle

Am I understanding you to be saying that you are unsure of whether trees are "things" or "objects?"

Well, once the word 'tree' is used, the convention has been stated. We know what a tree is, and it may or may not cover the underground parts, but it is definitely separate from some other tree.
But the question abou the tree was illustrated in my Midas example when I first brough that up. Midas touches a twig. What turns to gold? The twig, branch, tree, forest? The word 'tree' was never conveyed. The intent might not even be there. The touch may have been unintended.
Answer of course is that it's fiction, so there's no requirement for there to be a correct answer. There never seems to be an answer, which seems to support my suggestion of the lack of physical basis for what constitutes all of the 'thing' indicated.


Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

whereas "half a dog" is clearly a half.

That's why the phaser set to 'kill' is somewhat clearly defined. Life forms usually have reasonably clear boundaries, but we still have trouble shooting the spider off Kirk's chest. A phaser set to 'disintegrate' (same function) has far more trouble delimiting its job.


Quoting Wayfarer

To say that we know things only as they appear ‘to us’ is indeed to fall into scepticism and relativism.

Not, relativism, no!!! Don't fall down into that wretched pit of scum and villainy (with me).

Quoting frank

So tying this back to the OP noAxioms, it means that if we question the makeup of a human (does it include the clothes or bugs on the sleeve)

I was partly asking what all is part of a human, but I'm also asking what all is included in 'that ->' when pointing at a human, but I'm actually pointing to the bug.

we'll find that however we approach the question, the conclusion will be an exercise in pragmatism.

This presumes that the physical device (which artificially made to serve a pragmatic purpose) will be able to glean the pragmatic intent when being used. Bottom line, don't use a big gun to shoot a bug off your buddy's chest.

Quoting noAxioms

This presumes that the physical device (which artificially made to serve a pragmatic purpose) will be able to glean the pragmatic intent when being used

It could do that with AI directed actuation. Just tell the AI what you want to shoot.

Quoting noAxioms

So this got me thinking, and I could only conclude that what constitutes an 'object' is entirely a matter of language/convention. There's no physical basis for it.

Quoting noAxioms

I'm trying to get a classical device like the fictional phaser to apply its function to a classical object without using language to convey intent.

Quoting Fire Ologist

The biggest hurdle to this this task is fundamentally you are trying to find object in the absence of language, but you have to use language as an instrument to do it.

You've just designed a gun that emits a destructive heat ray. Your IC board supports three settings for the temperature of the emitted heat ray. In order to test your settings, you turn a dial to the middle setting. This setting maxes out at the combustion threshold for common notebook paper. Pointing your gun, you fire at a notebook paper poster framed within the boundary of an iron rectangle. Will your gun make a discrimination, thus destroying only the paper? Success! The poster bursts into flame, burns up to gossamer black carbon and stops at the edge of the iron frame.

Quoting noAxioms

How to design the gun to do the right thing?

By setting the gun to the middle heat-range setting, you constrained the gun to discriminate a paper burn from an iron burn. Did your setting dial dialog with your IC board?

Quoting mcdoodle

A lot of scientific effort goes into eliminating the possibility that something about the bodies, or environment, or unwanted product of equipment, of experimenters is influencing outcomes.

That’s not really the point of the lecture, though. It’s about the fact that science is conducted by humans, who are subjects of experience, who are attempting to arrive at the purported ‘view from nowhere’ which is believed to be something approaching complete objectivity. But that doesn’t mean science is ‘getting it wrong’, either. It’s a philosophical observation about interpreting the meaning of scientific observations. It doesn’t invalidate those observations. (It’s related to an Aeon essay I posted ages ago, The Blind Spot of Science, which likewise was interpreted as an attack on science, which it wasn’t.)

Quoting noAxioms

I don't understand this comment. If these things are prior to our purposes and conceptualisations, then how is this relationship 'for humans'?

Two senses of priority - you might think of them as temporal and transcendental. The one you're talking about is transcendental. Norms condition perceptions/interactions/actions and make particulars count as objects within them.

Dinosaurs are temporally prior to human existence - they happened before. Thus however they behaved is prior to human faculties of reason - we developed later. Thus there existed a time in which dinosaurs were not judged by human intellects. Thus there was a time dinosaurs weren't conditioned by the human understanding. But they still had properties and stuff. Like they had teeth and bowel movements. They had feet.

That's relevant because stuff individuates without us being there. So if you want to talk about individuation, it should be in a manner that doesn't depend on "us" being there. For a very broad sense of "us". Like a conditioning perception or set of norms, that's an "us".

Or alternatively, you want a sense in which one process can treat something as an object, and thus that thing counts as an object for that process. Like your dinosaurs example. In which case you can make the same move as I did above with the human intellect and dinosaurs as you can for a process which makes something else count as an object for it. Find some greater embedding context for the process and start asking about the process' interactive capacities with the particular it makes count as an object for some purpose. You then locate the object and the conditioning process in the same embedding context and ask how the object properties could only come to be in terms of the conditioning process interactions when conditioning process properties and object properties emerge from the same context.

So with the amylase/starch example. The process that makes a starch molecule - and other molecules - count as an object for the amylase enzyme is the binding site. A great embedding context there is the evolutionary development of metabolism and digestion. It'd be very difficult to think of the starch as only an object for the enzyme because the starch has highly exploitable bonds which the amylase enzyme developed to break down as fuel.

In my book you end up needing to think about how a process distinguishes itself from a background. Like a subprocess. Like a tree growing a distinct leaf. With that leaf's relatively autonomous being.

Or I suppose you bite the bullet and make all of natures' processes effectively arbitrarily demarcated from each other. Even when they have different laws and levels.

So with your trucks - a collision of a car with the truck+load will behave as if its the truck+load has the mass of the truck+load. The process there is a collision, and in terms of momentum transfer the truck+load is the relevant object. The same would be true for how the truck+load balances.

But for the process of unloading the truck, the truck+load behaves as a truck with a load in it. Since that process distinguishes the truck from the load and doesn't care that adding the load to the truck would make it behave like a heavier point mass.

In terms of my point above, you end up conditioning the individuating properties of those two scenarios in terms of the load's mass's relevance to individuation. So asking about the conditioning mechanism which allows you to distinguish them leads you to mass. Which gives you a bizarre dependence of the allegedly arbitrary distinction on a subsuming context, upon which the distinction makes sense.

And that distinction isn't necessarily just normative - like the momentum transfer isn't word stuff.

Quoting noAxioms

I was partly asking what all is part of a human, but I'm also asking what all is included in 'that ->' when pointing at a human, but I'm actually pointing to the bug.

One of the books I was singing the praises of a couple of years back was Mind and the Cosmic Order, Charles Pinter. He’s a maths emeritus (now deceased although he lived until a ripe old age. I wrote to him about his book in 2022 and got a nice reply.) It’s not a fringe or new-age book, it’s firmly grounded in cognitive science and empiricism. A glance at the chapter abstracts in the link will convey something of its gist.

The fact that cognitive scientists are talking about ‘how mind creates world’ is directly relevant this conversation. See also this video Is Reality Real? with a couple of cognitive scientists and a rather alarmed Richard Dawkins (“Of course it is! What are you saying”?!?)

Quoting noAxioms

Midas touches a twig. What turns to gold? The twig, branch, tree, forest?

That's an easy one; it would be the tree in its entirety that turns to gold. Not the branch nor the forest, for neither of these are standalone things like the tree is, unless the branch is broken off the tree.

Quoting noAxioms

Midas touches a twig. What turns to gold? The twig, branch, tree, forest? The word 'tree' was never conveyed. The intent might not even be there. The touch may have been unintended.

The twig is a portion of the tree, and the set of the latter is the density that makes up a forest. If Midas touches a twig, everything turns gold unintentionally because each element is interdependent. It would be different if Midas cut a twig with another object (like an axe) and then touched it. Once an element has been lost, the chain of turning into gold is no longer present.

Reply to NotAristotle Reply to javi2541997

These explanations are sufficient. To touch a branch of a tree is to touch a tree. No confusion there.


Quoting noAxioms

But the question abou the tree was illustrated in my Midas example when I first brough that up. Midas touches a twig. What turns to gold? The twig, branch, tree, forest? The word 'tree' was never conveyed. The intent might not even be there. The touch may have been unintended.
Answer of course is that it's fiction, so there's no requirement for there to be a correct answer. There never seems to be an answer, which seems to support my suggestion of the lack of physical basis for what constitutes all of the 'thing' indicated.

I am beginning to believe that you are contriving, intentionally or unintentionally, a difficulty that is not there. True, Philosophy has been criticized to be full of (1) archaic definitions (2) esoteric selectiveness (3) and even stubbornness. But it is never accused of unnecessary overthink.

Quoting NotAristotle

Midas touches a twig. What turns to gold? The twig, branch, tree, forest?
— noAxioms

That's an easy one; it would be the tree in its entirety that turns to gold. Not the branch nor the forest, for neither of these are standalone things like the tree is, unless the branch is broken off the tree.

Right. Just because everything is touching, like the tree touches the forrest floor, touching the whole Forrest, etc, etc, doesn’t mean you lose sight of the separate things that are touching. You need separate things to have a question about where to draw lines where separate things touch and overlap. You can’t lose site of the trees because of the forest either.

*

Quoting fdrake

Dinosaurs are temporally prior to human existence - they happened before. Thus however they behaved is prior to human faculties of reason - we developed later. Thus there existed a time in which dinosaurs were not judged by human intellects. Thus there was a time dinosaurs weren't conditioned by the human understanding. But they still had properties and stuff. Like they had teeth and bowel movements. They had feet.

Do you think that discovery, had it been made at the time, would have discredited Kant’s ‘Critique of Pure Reason’? Granted, dinosaurs weren’t known to him, but he did help author a theory of nebular formation and presumably would not have given any credence to Biblical creation mythology. The general question being, does the fact of discoveries that pre-date the human species undermine transcendental idealism? Mellaissoux seems to argue that they do.

Quoting Wayfarer

Do you think that discovery, had it been made at the time, would have discredited Kant’s ‘Critique of Pure Reason’?

I doubt it. I'm sure the argument is sufficiently arcane that no one cares about it. Also the move to make something which is seen as transcendental an event, or locate it within a body, probably wouldn't parse for him. The arche fossil is very much targeted against combining embodiment and materiality with reciprocal co-constitution. You can even read it as a constructive dilemma - reciprocal co constitution implies idealism about what is interacted with, or what is interacted with has independent properties, choose. I imagine you'd go with the former.

Reply to fdrake If the question was whether our common worldview assures us that distinctions don't need conscious input, then dinosaurs would be on point. But dinosaurs are part of a worldview that is itself underdetermined by physical evidence (see here). As Quine would say, we believe there was a time when there were no humans because of psychological reasons, not physical ones.

So the question is whether our worldview should limit our questioning or not. I think we all agree it shouldn't, but in this case, that just leaves us where we started.

Quoting fdrake

Thus there was a time dinosaurs weren't conditioned by the human understanding. But they still had properties and stuff. Like they had teeth and bowel movements. They had feet.

Did they have feet? Did anything (back then) treat dinosaur feet as a particular? To the dinosaur, probably not. If it steps on something sharp, it might perceive that it hurts down there and to back off the further bearing of weight, but that's it. There's no no reason to draw a line where 'foot' is no longer applicable and 'rest of leg' comes into play. That's a complex model of a body with distinct parts all hooked together, and the dinos probably didn't work with such needlessly complex models. Maybe I'm wrong about this.
They likely did have concepts of some parts. There's this stegosaurus over there and one wants to maintain awareness of the Thaginator, the most dangerous end of it. That's a particular that both of them might model as a particular thing.

The chemistry examples are good. Chemistry, at a basic level, treats molecules as objects. At least small molecules. For big ones, the objects become more like receptor sites and such, and we start getting into semiotics when working at that level.

Or I suppose you bite the bullet and make all of natures' processes effectively arbitrarily demarcated from each other. Even when they have different laws and levels.

Another good point. Demarcation where the rules change. That's better than just 'if I pull here, the object is what all comes along with it', which is a difficult definition to apply. I cannot define a tree that way, because who knows where it will break when I pull hard enough. I might get an entire stand of trees if I pull in the right place, or I might get only a twig.

The process there is a collision, and in terms of momentum transfer the truck+load is the relevant object.

Sort of. The momentum transfer there is almost the same whether the truck is empty, or loaded with double its unladen mass. It can almost be modelled as a car hitting a somewhat malleable brick wall.

But for the process of unloading the truck, the truck+load behaves as a truck with a load in it.

Yes. There's purpose to that activity, making it normative.


Quoting Wayfarer

One of the books I was singing the praises of a couple of years back was Mind and the Cosmic Order, Charles Pinter. He’s a maths emeritus (now deceased although he lived until a ripe old age. I wrote to him about his book in 2022 and got a nice reply.) It’s not a fringe or new-age book, it’s firmly grounded in cognitive science and empiricism. A glance at the chapter abstracts in the link will convey something of its gist.

I will try to find this one. Yes, it seems relevant. I looked at the table of contents, if not chapter abstracts. First try: trip to the library.

Quoting Wayfarer

It’s about the fact that science is conducted by humans, who are subjects of experience, who are attempting to arrive at the purported ‘view from nowhere’ which is believed to be something approaching complete objectivity

I don't think 'a view from nowhere' is particularly coherent in our physics. An objective description may well be coherent, but it isn't a view. A picture cannot be drawn from it. Such seems to be the nature of our physics. I think this objective description is what is being sought, but anybody who calls it a view is going down the wrong path.



Quoting NotAristotle

That's an easy one; it would be the tree in its entirety that turns to gold.

Quoting L'éléphant

These explanations are sufficient. To touch a branch of a tree is to touch a tree. No confusion there.

Why is that the answer? Why is it easy that the other answers are wrong? What if the twig was the intent? How did Midas not touch the forest?

Quoting javi2541997

The twig is a portion of the tree, and the set of the latter is the density that makes up a forest. If Midas touches a twig, everything turns gold unintentionally because each element is interdependent. It would be different if Midas cut a twig with another object (like an axe) and then touched it. Once an element has been lost, the chain of turning into gold is no longer present.

OK, so it's an attachment thing, but the tree is attached to the ground, and thus to the other trees, no? It wouldn't break if I lifted it by the trunk if it wasn't attached so.

Quoting L'éléphant

I am beginning to believe that you are contriving, intentionally or unintentionally, a difficulty that is not there.

Well, the difficulty isn't there for us because we have language and conventions. It isn't difficulty for physics because physics doesn't care. It has not need for it. It seems only a difficulty for fictions, and it's no problem of mine that not all fictions correspond to a meaningful reality. It's a problem for me only as an illustration of how people accept such impossibilities as sufficiently plausible that they're not even questioned.


Quoting Fire Ologist

Right. Just because everything is touching, like the tree touches the Forrest floor, etc, doesn’t mean you lose sight of the separate things that are touching, you can’t lose site of the trees because of the forest either.

We lost sight of the twig because of the tree. How is that different?


Quoting frank

It could do that with AI directed actuation. Just tell the AI what you want to shoot

Again, that evades the question by using language to convey the demarcation to the device.

Quoting ucarr

You've just designed a gun that emits a destructive heat ray. Your IC board supports three settings for the temperature of the emitted heat ray. In order to test your settings, you turn a dial to the middle setting. This setting maxes out at the combustion threshold for common notebook paper. Pointing your gun, you fire at a notebook paper poster framed within the boundary of an iron rectangle. Will your gun make a discrimination, thus destroying only the paper? Success! The poster bursts into flame, burns up to gossamer black carbon and stops at the edge of the iron frame.

The poster doesn't burst into flames. It ignites only where the gun is pointed, and spreads from there. So the gun hasn't defined any definition of demarcation, the metal frame has.

Glad you're reaching for real examples though. They're hard to find outside of fiction.

Quoting noAxioms

It could do that with AI directed actuation. Just tell the AI what you want to shoot
— frank
Again, that evades the question by using language to convey the demarcation to the device.

Still, an inanimate object can make distinctions you program it to recognize. You don't have to be a magic human to do that. I think the rest is just a matter of purpose. The phaser doesn't have any motives that aren't given to it.

Strange. We seem to in principle put labels around things any way we want, nevertheless there seems to be directly apparent underlying distinctions that we experience regardless of those labels (Arguably - at least that is my strong inclination - but I think there can be intractable debate about this that I am not sure about: e.g. overflow of consciousness and phenomenal/access distinction which I think is probably somewhat illusory).

Those underlying distinctions also obviously depend on the way our brains happen to interact with the world - e.g. animals with different sense capabilities, the resolution we interact with world where solid objects are obviously constructed from something more fundamental - what seems like a "natural" object depends on the perspective. Even so, underneath we assume there are kinds of regularities in the world which, though we perceive and perhaps abstract through our limited perspectives, seem to capture objective distinctions out in the world beyond labels... distinctions we could never access mind-independently... what does a distinction even mean? How do you cash out the term "objective"? There is almost a paradox that clearly in principle there is some objective world, events, "things" not the same as other "things", changes in one place different from another place. But any labelling brings the arbitrarineas back.

Is object just not a coherent concept? One must just accept the limit that the mind constructs things in an arbitrary way about something which is "objective". Inherent contextual paradox. We can refer to an objective world but not without subjective machinery... but then how is that objective. Cannot be reconciled ever. No matter how you construe it, a reference, a label is an arbitrary label. This like an inherent glitch of epistemic perspectives. Maybe you can justify a label if it could not have been otherwise though. But we don't know enough. And even then you cannot say that other labels are invalid. The difference then is parsimony.

Fundamental object? But are there any in the universe? Is the universe a constant arrangement of little fundamental objects? Virtual particles emerge from the "aether". Elementary particles decay. Matter can be turned to energy and vice versa. Particles can change properties but I don't know how that works... once there was three weak bosons and hypercharge.. symmetry breaking, now there are two W, one Z boson and a photon. I also find it interesting that the discretization of fields into individual particle quanta seems in these models almost a side effect. It comes from boundary conditions which are the same reason anything else is quantized in quamtum mechanics. Only, a lot of things happen not to be quantized because they happen to not have those conditions. But do we really know what a field is? Seems quite abstract. Particles are then just due to energy levels of the field. What is energy even? Not even really a thing is it. Very abstract way of describing constraints on behavior. Literally everything in physics is about behavior, spatio-temporal transformations. Forces are about behavior involving symmetries. Particles representations of poincare symmetry groups. When you get down to it energy is the indicative of symmetry too... just perhaps the most fundamental one. There are no objects in physics in some sense... abstract functional behaviors... what even is mass but a resistence to force in some sense?

Do we need intrinsic fundamental objects in physics. What role would intrinsicness play? Would be almost epiphenomenal, homogenously indistinct... either that or inaccessible. Then when you try to imagine what the inaccessible would be like, you must still use labels, which ofcourse I have been using all along. Paradox I say. Because how can the world have no intrinsic nature... but again, "intrinsic nature" is an abstract concept we invent. Maybe just no possoble coherent access and so the paradox remains.

Maybe then you can identify distinct particles but they ephemeral and perhaps not fully well-defined scientifically (e.g. spatially). But again, label issue still there and deeper inaccessibility being beyond scientific model of observable behavior. Paradox. Can you define object in some other way? In terms of causal interactions and modal counterfactuals? Then again, causality is a construct and modality suffers same anti-realist arguments as any other scientific concept imo.

Quoting noAxioms

We lost sight of the twig because of the tree. How is that different?

No you didn’t. You said “twig” and then said “tree” and then noticed how they were “touching” which still sets out two separate objects in order for “touch” to make any sense either. THEN one can look closer at the two things touching and learn they are so connected they might be one thing, in which case you are just back to the same starting point where you said “twig” or carved out and identified one thing.

The process didn’t eliminate difference and identity, it just shows how it can be harder or easier to observe and delineate.

Quoting noAxioms

Why is that the answer? Why is it easy that the other answers are wrong? What if the twig was the intent?

It doesn't matter what the intent is, it matters what object has objectively been contacted by Midas' hand.

Quoting noAxioms

How did Midas not touch the forest?

I thought you said Midas touched a twig, not a forest. Why do you think the entire forest becomes golden? By this logic, wouldn't literally everything on Earth become golden when a twig is touched. I don't understand your reasoning here.

Quoting noAxioms

Did they have feet?

Yes. Dinosaurs had feet. They're in the fossils. You can see the bones. You can see footprints.

Quoting noAxioms

Sort of. The momentum transfer there is almost the same whether the truck is empty, or loaded with double its unladen mass.

Yes. Almost the same. But not quite. Sum of masses blah blah.

Quoting noAxioms

Yes. There's purpose to that activity, making it normative.

Aye. One of those truck objects is normatively demarcated, one isn't. There's still underlying properties that need to be in place and individuated for both to make sense - like mass and spatial extent of the relevant particulars/placeholder terms. Like it really does behave like an object which is heavier for the collision, and it really does behave like a truck with another object inside of it for the unloading.

What I mean with the latter is that normative doesn't directly imply relative, 'cos it can be true that the truck was unloaded. You see what I mean?

Quoting noAxioms

The poster doesn't burst into flames. It ignites only where the gun is pointed, and spreads from there. So the gun hasn't defined any definition of demarcation, the metal frame has.

If we work backwards one causal step: "where the gun is pointed," how do we know the gun doesn't know the combustion differential between the paper and its iron border amounts to a stop? I ask this assuming we can reverse-engineer from outcomes to intentions. We see a gun pointed at a target made of multiple parts. How do we know the gun doesn't know what we know about combustion differentials? We see a gun pointed at a target. We don't know the scope of its intended destruction of the target until we see it.

Quoting NotAristotle

I thought you said Midas touched a twig, not a forest. Why do you think the entire forest becomes golden? By this logic, wouldn't literally everything on Earth become golden when a twig is touched. I don't understand your reasoning here.

At first, I thought the same thing. According to his (@noAxioms) theory, everything would turn to gold with Midas' single touch. But I believe the essential point is that it only impacts things that are connected to one another. The twig, the tree, and finally the forest turn golden because they are all interdependent. However, Midas' touch will eventually lose its effectiveness. For example, consider the Sahara Desert and Antarctica. There are no woodlands there. The twig was the intended object, and the forest got golden on purpose because they are interdependent. Midas cannot turn Antarctica into gold with a single twig.

For this reason, I personally believe there is the possibility to stop the forest from becoming golden. If I chop the twig with the axe or rip out the roots, the process ends. Well, if I remove one element of the set, the magic of Midas is over.

Quoting noAxioms

There's no no reason to draw a line where 'foot' is no longer applicable and 'rest of leg' comes into play. That's a complex model of a body with distinct parts all hooked together, and the dinos probably didn't work with such needlessly complex models. Maybe I'm wrong about this.

One of the main points of Pinter's book is the way cognition works is by carving out gestalts. A gestalt is a meaningful whole - basically, an object, but an object as perceived by a cognising subject, which distinguishes the object from its sorroundings and sees it as a unit. (The 'cognising subject' is not necessarily a human - this is something found in the cognition of even very simple animals, including insects - he gives the example of a fairy-fly, so small as to be impercetible to the naked eye.) These gestalts are the currency of structured cognition - along with every other sentient organism, we see the world in gestalts, in conjunction with the accompanying sensory and somatic inputs that enable us to navigate the world. In this context the mind has an active role in 'constructing' gestalts. That's what I think you're driving at. For us, there is clearly a reason to draw the line between 'foot' and 'leg' as we instinctively understand anatomy (which probably goes a long way back before knowledge of medical anatomy, to the carving up of prey animals with stone tools not to mention knowledge of your own and others’ bodies). So - I think you're on the right track.

Quoting fdrake

The arche fossil is very much targeted against combining embodiment and materiality with reciprocal co-constitution. You can even read it as a constructive dilemma - reciprocal co constitution implies idealism about what is interacted with, or what is interacted with has independent properties, choose.

Reciprocal co-constitution is the idea that human cognition and the material world mutually shape and define each other - that our understanding of the material world is inseparable from the cognitive frameworks we use to interpret it. But if in positing that, cognition is treated as an object or factor, alongside it's object, then that implies adopting a perspective outside of it, from which both cognition and its object can be contemplated. But how can that be done? This is why citing dinosaurs as an example of phenomena that pre-existed h.sapiens, and necessarily existing independently of the mind, misrepresents what it's seeking to criticize. Anything that pre-exists h.sapiens could be cited, as it is an empirical fact that h. sapiens evolved a finite period of time in the past (and relatively recently in geological time-scales). This criticism is not too far removed from Johnson's argument against Berkeley, the 'argumentum ad lapidem'. The idealist (or perhaps I should say the cognitivist) view is that the entire constellation of ideas and facts that are drawn upon to cite the fossil evidence, exist in a cognitive framework, which we bring to the picture. Whatever is 'outside' that cannot, as a matter of definiton, be cited or even referred to.

Dan Zahavi, a phenomenologist with whom I've become acquainted through philosophyforum, put it like this:

Ultimately, what we call “reality” is so deeply suffused with mind- and language-dependent structures that it is altogether impossible to make a neat distinction between those parts of our beliefs that reflect the world “in itself” and those parts of our beliefs that simply express “our conceptual contribution.” The very idea that our cognition should be nothing but a re-presentation of something mind-independent consequently has to be abandoned.

(From Husserl’s Legacy: Phenomenology, Metaphysics, and Transcendental Philosophy.)

Quoting Wayfarer

A gestalt is a meaningful whole - basically, an object, but an object as perceived by a cognising subject, which distinguishes the object from its sorroundings and sees it as a unit.

But I suspect that nothing 100 million years ago envisioned a foot as a distinct object. That was the point of my comment. Maybe I don't give the being of that age enough credit. It's all just either 'me', 'not me', or perhaps bulk goods.


Quoting Apustimelogist

Is object just not a coherent concept?

Question is, it is anything more than a concept? Nobody is suggesting that as a concept, it is incoherent. Well, mostly nobody.

Quoting frank

Still, an inanimate object can make distinctions you program it to recognize

Then you've communicated the convention to it. The question is if 'object' is defined in the absence of that communication.

Quoting frank

The phaser doesn't have any motives that aren't given to it.

Are the motives given to the beam itself? Because the phaser doesn't pick what disappears, the beam does. It also doesn't shoot past the thing it just disintegrated, a strange side effect for something that emits a beam for a full half second or so.

Quoting Fire Ologist

THEN one can look closer at the two things touching and learn they are so connected they might be one thing

Quoting javi2541997

But I believe the essential point is that it only impacts things that are connected to one another.

But everything is connected, or nothing is. I mean, everything interacts via fields of force (as jkop put it). What is a connection if not that?

Quoting NotAristotle

I thought you said Midas touched a twig, not a forest. Why do you think the entire forest becomes golden? By this logic, wouldn't literally everything on Earth become golden when a twig is touched.

Not just Earth. So the logic (from 'twig' to 'tree') doesn't work.

Quoting ucarr

how do we know the gun doesn't know ...

Because the gun 'knowing' anything violates the OP.

Quoting noAxioms

I suspect that nothing 100 million years ago envisioned a foot as a distinct object. That was the point of my comment.

And didn't my comment elaborate on that very idea?

Quoting noAxioms

But everything is connected, or nothing is. I mean, everything interacts via fields of force (as jkop put it). What is a connection if not that?

I agree. What I'm trying to say is that the interaction is dependent on a collection of 'things' or 'objects'. Your example began with a twig and continues as follows: a twig + the tree + the forest. These three elements combine to form a common set. If Midas touches one of the elements, the set turns gold. However, because 'everything' is connected, we may believe that the ground and then the earth will become golden as well. I disagree with the latter. I don't get how if Midas transforms a forest into gold, the Sahara Desert becomes linked to the same chain. There are no trees in the desert, thus I don't understand how it is dependant on the first set of twig + tree + forest.

Everything is not necessarily connected.

Quoting noAxioms

But everything is connected, or nothing is.

In order for everything to be connected, you have to have separate things that connect. So saying everything is connected, is saying everything is separate as well. Otherwise you are saying all is one thing and nothing else.

My liver is connected to my brain but my liver is separated from my brain. Maybe we have to keep moving the lines as we define the point where these separate things connect, but we don’t need to see that my liver is my brain.

Quoting noAxioms

Then you've communicated the convention to it. The question is if 'object' is defined in the absence of that communication.

I don't think so. There's no physical evidence behind the way we divide the world up.

Reply to noAxioms

But that's an answer isn't it?

Certainly. Like I said, multiplicity is given in experience, and this doesn't seem to be arbitrary. Yet you're not going to get canonical dividing lines between objects in physics. This jives well with classical arguments for the necessary "unity of being," (Unum as one of the Transcedentals). If you had a "second sort of being" that didn't interact with our sort (even mediately), it would be epistemologically inaccessible and, by definition, its existence or non-existence could never make any difference for us. All being then, or at least all being that isn't a completely inaccessible bare posit, shares in a sort of unity where everything interacts with everything else (even if this interaction is mediated in some cases).


But we could consider that an AI or machine could distinguish things based on form. A machine charged with eliminating White Snake's "Lonely Road," could identify it in disparate media: on magnetic tapes, in sound waves, encoded on hard drives or compact discs, or even encoded in in neurons. That is, we can define things in terms of substrate independent relationships (information). Yet a machine could obviously also distinguish between a magnetic tape and a sound wave by other means.

Form, at least form as information, seems to be definable in complete mathematical abstraction, but there are still problems with it. If we change one note in White Snake's song is it the same. What about covers? What happens if we keep losing fidelity until it becomes indistinguishable from many other possible recordings?

So on the formal side there is an inherit instability and ambiguity too, precisely because form can be so precisely defined that minute changes constitute new mathematical entities. Thus, we might want to allow for such ambiguities and variance in form by looking at key morphisms that would allow for a mapping across similar entities. But which morphisms matter? Again, the mind and its relation to the object seems essential for defining this.

This back and forth instability reminds me of the sort of things both Hegel and Pryzwara like to deal in. I do think Hegel's doctrines of essence and concept represent a good answer here, but they are a bit much to get into. Ultimately, concepts are determined by what a thing is, but what a thing is includes its relation to Geist/mind. Concept and delineation evolution aren't arbitrary but evolve as part of what things are (which includes how they are known) .


Reply to frank

I don't think so. There's no physical evidence behind the way we divide the world up.

None at all? It seems there is plenty of physical evidence behind the distinction between plant and animal, living and non-living, physical squares and physical triangles, etc. The problem is, to my mind, not lack of physical evidence for our distinctions but rather the desire to want to define the objects of knowledge without reference to the knower or that knowledge's own coming into being. It's the problem of presupposing a certain sort of atomism.

Reply to Fire Ologist

Well, this is the old problem of The One and the Many, no? Being has to be a unity of sorts, but there has to be some way to affirm multiplicity or else we end up like Parmenides, unable to affirm anything, only able to speak the all encompassing Eastern "ohm." But everything can't be completely discrete or arbitrary either, or else we also can't say anything about anything.

I do think the univocity of being makes this problem particularly acute, which is why Plato's original solution has a sort of vertical dimension to reality.

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

None at all? It seems there is plenty of physical evidence behind the distinction between plant and animal, living and non-living, physical squares and physical triangles, etc.

You're talking about universals, there, so you're starting with a time-honored way of dividing things up. I was talking about particulars. For particulars, it's like this:

Quoting Wayfarer

And didn't my comment elaborate on that very idea?

Indirectly. The comment talked about even bugs having gestalts, but a bug has no pragmatic use for a concept of a foot.
All kind of off topic, since I am looking for an 'object' that is independent of a gestalt, even if discussion of it necessarily isn't.

Quoting javi2541997

If Midas touches one of the elements, the set turns gold. However, because 'everything' is connected, we may believe that the ground and then the earth will become golden as well. I disagree with the latter.

Doesn't stop with Earth either.
So what changes along the way? In the absence of semiotics, why demarks the border between what turns to gold and what doesn't? It isn't being 'connected' because there's no border to that. If that was the definition, the universe would contain exactly one object, rendering the term essentially meaningless.

There are no trees in the desert, thus I don't understand how it is dependant on the first set of twig + tree + forest.

I don't understand how it got from twig to tree. The word 'connected' was floated around, but no finite physical definition of that was supplied. If it means particles that interact by fields of force, then the twig is connected to the desert because there's force between the two subsets. There's no finite limit to that.

Several people made similar comments. The concept of 'twig is part of a tree, but not part of a continent' is pretty intuitive for a human, but when you take away the human convention, it's not so easy to pin down.

Quoting javi2541997

Everything is not necessarily connected.

Then come up with a definition of 'connected' that doesn't make everything into one connected thing.


Quoting Fire Ologist

In order for everything to be connected, you have to have separate things that connect.

Or there is but one thing. By the only definition of 'connected' I've seen, it implies one universal object, one that Midas cannot avoid touching.

Otherwise you are saying all is one thing and nothing else.

So come up with a better definition of 'thing' that still doesn't involve human convention. How is a device, to which the convention has not been communicated, able to perform its function on the object indicated, and not on just a part of it, or on more than what was indicated.

My liver is connected to my brain but my liver is separated from my brain.

By what definition is this true? Sure, by language, 'liver' and 'brain' demark a region of certain biological life forms. But in the absence of that language, is 'this' the same thing as 'that'? Perhaps this and that are the same life form. Perhaps this and that each refer to only a cell wall and not an organ or organism at all. Only with language/semiotics does it become demarked, which is what this topic asserts.

I say 'semiotics' because it isn't just language. A seagull might pick out the eyes of some fresh dead thing it finds. It doesn't have words for that, but it knows that eyes are the best part.


Quoting frank

I don't think so.

You don't think so what? My comment that you quoted was a reply to your suggestion of communicating the convention to the device, and then you say "I don't think so", which makes it sound like either programming the device isn't a form of communication, or maybe denying your earlier suggestion of making the device 'smart'.

There's no physical evidence behind the way we divide the world up.

I pretty much said that in my OP, yes.

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

The sci-fi examples or the Midas Touch I think are unanswerable.

Quoting noAxioms

But that's an answer isn't it?

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

Certainly.
...
But we could consider that an AI or machine could distinguish things based on form.

Of course. A machine has access to the same conventions and language as biological things. An AI would often be able to utilize the appropriate convention if there is language involved, but there still isn't language involved in shooting a gun, so it must rely on typical conventions and guesswork. Worse, it isn't the gun that needs to decide, but rather the energy beam that it shoots that needs to figure this stuff out.

A machine charged with eliminating White Snake's "Lonely Road,"

Sounds like somebody communicated with it, demarking the boundaries, however arduous the task might be.

Note too that you're treating data like an object, not a particular, but all patterns that meets a certain criteria. Your question then becomes, where it that line drawn between something that matches sufficiently and something that isn't. The boundaries are demarked, but not clearly, so judgment must be employed.

Same logic can be used with a gun: "Kill Bob", which can be interpreted as "eliminate the existence of the current state of Bob" which is effortless since Bob is continuously changing. So it becomes 'make a sufficiently significant change to Bob, which may leave a life form behind that no longer qualifies as Bob.

Quoting noAxioms

There's no physical evidence behind the way we divide the world up.
I pretty much said that in my OP, yes.

You're correct.

Quoting noAxioms

Question is, it is anything more than a concept? Nobody is suggesting that as a concept, it is incoherent. Well, mostly nobody.

But then surely the concept of an object as an objective thing would be incoherent?

Quoting noAxioms

Then come up with a definition of 'connected' that doesn't make everything into one connected thing.

To be honest, I believe we are mixing up distinct notions here. 'Connected' means to be joined to something else. For example, when I connect the red wire to the red port or connect the electricity and water supply to my home. It appears (to me) that some elements are linked to one or two things at most, but not to everything.
While 'interdependent' (as I used in my argument) refers to groups that are dependent on one another. We may say that if every element is interdependent, then everything will turn gold with the touch of Midas. Nonetheless, I still disagree. There are some elements dependent upon one another (twig + branch + tree = forest. All these are a common and interdependent set) while others don't. I can't see how the air or the clouds could be golden too, according to your argument.

Reply to noAxioms

Quoting ucarr

how do we know the gun doesn't know ...

Quoting noAxioms

Because the gun 'knowing' anything violates the OP.

Quoting noAxioms

I could only conclude that what constitutes an 'object' is entirely a matter of language/convention. There's no physical basis for it. I can talk about the blue gutter and that, by convention, identifies an object distinct from the red gutter despite them both being parts of a greater (not separated) pipe.

Is this the premise you're examining?

Reply to frank

Ha, that's a funny clip.

You're talking about universals, there, so you're starting with a time-honored way of dividing things up.

Aren't they two sides of the same coin? We have evidence to tell us that a plant is different from an animal (universal ). We also have plenty of empirical evidence to support the idea that [I]this pumpkin right here[/I] is different from the one "over there on the shelf," namely their different, observable histories, variance in accidental properties, and obviously their appearing to be in two different spaces (concrete).

Likewise, there is plenty of physical evidence to support contentions like "this pumpkin here is the same pumpkin that was here last night." Yes, the pumpkin has changed overnight, so we might consider if it is [I]really[/I] the same pumpkin, but nonetheless, we still have physical evidence that to help us distinguish what we mean by "this pumpkin that has been on the shelf all night." For instance, a video of the pumpkin sitting on the shelf all night is such physical evidence.

If there was absolutely [I]no[/I] physical evidence to demarcate particulars then decisions about them would be completely arbitrarily, and it should random whether I consider my car today to be the same car I drove last month. But our consideration of particulars isn't arbitrary, nor do they vary wildly across cultures, even if they can't be neatly defined.


I think the problem here is the same problem I referenced before, wanting to try to define objects, delineation, continuity, etc. completely without reference to things' relationships with Mind ("Mind" in the global sense since this is where concept evolve).

I mostly agree. I would merely add that if we keep in mind that what we are constantly dealing with are mental constructions, this should not be surprising that a lot of what we interact with is a matter of convention.

I would only quibble with the topic of a "physical basis". Does that mean a basis in physics? Well physics will tell you little about ordinary objects. Novelists and ordinary people may say more about these things.

If physical basis means something else, then I would like to know. Until someone can present a convincing argument as to what "physical" must contrast with (and why is this so) we may do away with "physical" and speak about "objective basis" of objects.

Quoting Manuel

If physical basis means something else, then I would like to know. Until someone can present a convincing argument as to what "physical" must contrast with (and why is this so) we may do away with "physical" and speak about "objective basis" of objects.

The cultural background of this discussion is the image of God as a clockmaker, who sets the world in motion, then leaves it to itself. Subtract out the God, and you have a mechanistic universe, which is part of our present worldview. Things like universals, ideas, abstract objects, etc. become ill-fitting phantoms . They aren't addressed by physics because they don't count as real in the sense an atom is supposed to be. So this worldview says the real is physical. It's contrasted to unreal ideas.

This is why it can be startling to realize that when I look around, I'm seeing ideas. It's just Plato back again, right?

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

Aren't they two sides of the same coin? We have evidence to tell us that a plant is different from an animal (universal )

There isn't a scientific definition of life according to Robert Rosen. If pressed to come up with one, we'd have to say it has something to do with a final cause, but this isn't something we find in the physical realm. Plants have chlorophyl, but so do euglenas, which aren't plants or animals. We can't say plants don't eat, because Venus flytraps do. It's fuzzy boundaries.

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

We also have plenty of empirical evidence to support the idea that this pumpkin right here is different from the one "over there on the shelf," namely their different, observable histories, variance in accidental properties, and obviously their appearing to be in two different spaces (concrete).

It's true that pumpkin distinctions seem to be the sort of thing we discover. I don't recall deciding to divide the pumpkin off from the rest of the world, for instance. The distinction is there whether I'm looking at it or not. But look again. Look at the visual field that includes the pumpkin. Feel of the pumpkin with your hand. Smell the pumpkin. Where in any of this data is pumpkin?


Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

f there was absolutely no physical evidence to demarcate particulars then decisions about them would be completely arbitrarily, and it should random whether I consider my car today to be the same car I drove last month. But our consideration of particulars isn't arbitrary, nor do they vary wildly across cultures, even if they can't be neatly defined.

The object is a fusion of idea and matter. We can hardly reject physicality. It's definitely there. It's just that the way we divide up the universe is conventional. It could be divided up differently.

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

I think the problem here is the same problem I referenced before, wanting to try to define objects, delineation, continuity, etc. completely without reference to things' relationships with Mind ("Mind" in the global sense since this is where concept evolve).

I agree. If an object is a fusion of idea and matter, then subtracting out idea, gives us something we can't imagine.

Quoting frank

you have a mechanistic universe, which is part of our present worldview

Yes. That is correct as a matter of intuition, or folk-psychology. It's built-in the way we interpret things.

Quoting frank

Things like universals, ideas, abstract objects, etc. become ill-fitting phantoms . They aren't addressed by physics because they don't count as real in the sense an atom is supposed to be. So this worldview says the real is physical. It's contrasted to unreal ideas.

Something like this seems to be the drive between such thinking. It's kind of curious then, when you consider what our most accurate physics says what an atom is, has nothing to do with the intuition that leads us to believe that atoms are these visible concrete things, that make the world up.

And atom is far from that, and perhaps should be considered more of a kind of "cloud" of activity, which is so far removed from anything we can visualize it starts to look like an idea of sort, which is NOT to say that the atom itself is an idea.

Quoting frank

It's just Plato back again, right?

Plato... I suppose it depends on how he is interpreted now. If the interpretation is that we have a single perfect idea of a horse or a tree, then that's too strict, imo. If he is interpreted more softly as ideas are the mediation through which we experience the world, that is better.

But yes, on the whole.

Reply to frank

There isn't a scientific definition of life according to Robert Rosen. If pressed to come up with one, we'd have to say it has something to do with a final cause, but this isn't something we find in the physical realm. Plants have chlorophyl, but so do euglenas, which aren't plants or animals. We can't say plants don't eat, because Venus flytraps do. It's fuzzy boundaries.

Right, there is not a perfect physical definition, but there is certainly physical evidence for such definitions. Conventions could be different. They sometimes are from place to place or time to time. But they only tend to differ so much, and they don't develop arbitrarily, but rather develop in line with sense evidence (physical evidence). Historically, things obviously help to develop the notions that they can be said to instantiate.

Things are defined by their relations, including their relationships to mind.

But look again. Look at the visual field that includes the pumpkin. Feel of the pumpkin with your hand. Smell the pumpkin. Where in any of this data is pumpkin?

It's in there. Otherwise, when kids point at things and ask "what is this?" we should have little idea what they are referring to, since it could be any arbitrary ensemble of sense data. But when a toddler points towards a pumpkin and asks what it is, you [I]know[/I] they mean the pumpkin, not "half the pumpkin plus some random parts of the particular background it is set against."

Yet if there were no objects (pumpkins, etc.) [I]given[/I] in sensation, kids should pretty much be asking about ensembles in their visual field at random, and language acquisition would be hopelessly complex. The woes of people with agnosia have been enough to convince me that a cognitive grasp of the intelligibility of objects is fundamental to perception. If we had to conciously abstract from and learn the visual ques that represent depth, for example, we'd have quite a time learning to walk.

Even animals recognize discrete wholes; the sheep knows "wolf" and knows it from the time it is a lamb.

I also think this gets at why AI images full of unrecognizable images are generally taken as "creepy" or "disgusting."





Whereas abstract art can be quite lovely:

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

It's in there. Otherwise, when kids point at things and ask "what is this?"

But is this a child detecting objects or a child that is detecting statistics (which maybe has been honed over development too)? You then ask that doesn't detecting statistics depend on what kind of statistics you are sensitive too and where you find yourself in the world? A pumpkin looks very obviously like a single object to us but these statistical regularities that make up a pumpkin are decomposable because we know a pumpkin is made up of lots of different things inside which generally we are not aware of - many scales above and below. The child certainly isn't aware of atoms, forces etc. Is the child detecting an object? Or statistics.

You can train people to detect all sorts of statistics and things in the right context which they normally wouldn't consider significant in any other. I think another point is that I think our perception and language is sophisticated and flexible that it can detect any kind of objects it wants given the need. No one normally uses the concepts bleen or grue... but if we wanted to we obviously can. The indeterminacy is there all the time and we can use it but choose to restrict ourselves.

Here is one thing I am inclined to recently. Concepts aren't really a thing. Knowledge is not in words. We can have knowledge without words and use it very well. And once you take away the words its pretty vague the idea of drawing boundaries and labels around things because when we manipulate the world and predict things it transcends any fixed, coarse labels. My ability to use objects with my hands and maybe invent new ones, new uses has nothing to do with fixed boundaries I must respect. There is an extreme fluidity in how I enact my knowledge.

Words are just about communication. It is just something we use to help convey information. Words don't define the things in themselves and words don't even have rigid meanings beyond our ability to manipulate them.

There are no concepts just our interactions with the world through a neural space with incredible ability to distinguish through its many degrees of freedom. We can detect regularities. But that in itself is utilizing the same kind of space of degrees of freedom. There are an enormous numberways we can act, react, distinguish in ways which differ and overlap in regard to the things that show up in the cortical space.

Quoting frank

This is why it can be startling to realize that when I look around, I'm seeing ideas. It's just Plato back again, right?

I've been puzzling over, and reading up on, the basic dictum of Plato's metaphysics, which is 'to be, is to be intelligible'. From what I've gleaned, it means that to grasp an object's intelligibility is to see what it really is. Perhaps that's why @Count Timothy von Icarus's non-objects are intuitively felt to be 'creepy and disgusting'.

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

Even animals recognize discrete wholes; the sheep knows "wolf" and knows it from the time it is a lamb.

Hence the 'gestalts' in this post.

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

It's in there. Otherwise, when kids point at things and ask "what is this?" we should have little idea what they are referring to, since it could be any arbitrary ensemble of sense data. But when a toddler points towards a pumpkin and asks what it is, you know they mean the pumpkin, not "half the pumpkin plus some random parts of the particular background it is set against."

I understand what you're saying. But if you tell me what things in the toddler's visual field she's pointing to, each one of those elements is a universal. Each one is an idea: orange, round, bumpy, etc. She's pointing to ideas. Yes, there's a visceral aspect to experience with the world, but the whatness of it isn't physical. It's ideas.

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

Yet if there were no objects (pumpkins, etc.) given in sensation, kids should pretty much be asking about ensembles in their visual field at random, and language acquisition would be hopelessly complex.

Unless the kid comes equipped with a smorgasbord of ideas ready to deploy? Are you familiar with Meno's paradox? I'm not saying the ideas are deployed at random. What I'm pointing to is that the world is a duck-rabbit picture. Whether it's duck or rabbit is not present in the picture.

Quoting Manuel

It's kind of curious then, when you consider what our most accurate physics says what an atom is, has nothing to do with the intuition that leads us to believe that atoms are these visible concrete things, that make the world up.

And atom is far from that, and perhaps should be considered more of a kind of "cloud" of activity, which is so far removed from anything we can visualize it starts to look like an idea of sort, which is NOT to say that the atom itself is an idea.

I think physics is prompting a shift in worldview. Whether it catches on, I don't know.

Reply to frank

Maybe. But since we are by and large visual creatures and we cannot well visualize how physics at the most fundamental level would look like, it's hard to see such a view spreading.

Who knows?

Reply to frank

Whether it's duck or rabbit is not present in the picture.

Yes, exactly. That's s the way it is for things. You could know the exact make-up and location of every particle in a sheep and this, taken by itself, would not tell you that it is a sheep or what a sheep is. It's the same way that you can't tell what the bishop does in chess just by staring at the piece really hard. Likewise, such "complete physical information" about a cup of coffee also wouldn't even tell you if it is hotter than the ambient enviornment (and thus was made recently), and it certainly wouldn't tell you what a cup is or what coffee is. And if you don't know what a cup or coffee is, how can you possibly tell where one stops and the other begins?

You can't get to what things are without reference to context. That's issue of determining universals. However, in the same way, you can't delineate the boundaries of [I]anything[/I] without the idea/universal. The idea is what tells you "include this, not that," or "stop here."

That's why looking for such delineations "in physics" without reference to things' external relations makes no sense. To be sure, all these relations are presumably physical, but the relations don't exist "in" the things. E.g., Salts' ability to dissolve in water isn't properly "in" salt, for salt only dissolves when it is placed in water, not when it is off by itself. Things' external relations, particularly their relations to minds, determine "what they are." Then the idea of what they are delineates their boundaries. But it's silly to talk about whether individual atoms are "part of a cat," because a cat isn't defined in terms of ensembles of atoms but by relations to move, to litter boxes, to people, etc.

However, the idea that things must ultimately be definable in terms of what they are "built up from" remains strong in modern philosophy, and so people keep looking for "catness" in groups of atoms and for the boundaries of individuals cats in "clouds of atoms."

Reply to Apustimelogist

To borrow a line from J.S. Mill, I think one would have had to make some significant advances in philosophy to believe that children experience statistics and not things (or have had some very strange childhood experience.) The things of experience are given. Questions about what underpins them is another matter.

Reply to Count Timothy von Icarus
I totally agree, and also with what you said about the universe becoming monolithic by virtue of the imperative of relationship. That shows up in Schopenhauer as well.

Quoting Apustimelogist

But then surely the concept of an object as an objective thing would be incoherent?

Kind of looks that way, doesn't it?

Quoting javi2541997

'Connected' means to be joined to something else.

But [ object, connected, joined, touching ] all seem to be restricted to mere concepts, having similar lack of physical basis. OK, touching sort of has some physical basis since electricity passes through circuits that are everywhere 'touching', except this isn't true in say a transistor, so it still gets fuzzy.
Still, there is no actual touching of a pair of particles. There is only 'sufficient proximity'.

I can't see how the air or the clouds could be golden too, according to your argument.

My argument just follows somebody's definition of 'connected'. I don't think it was yours. You've not really provided a rigorous one that would allow the existence of multiple objects, a distninction where say the twig would turn to gold, but not the moon.



Quoting ucarr

"what constitutes an 'object' is entirely a matter of language/convention. There's no physical basis for it."
— noAxioms

Is this the premise you're examining?

Yes.


Quoting Manuel

I would only quibble with the topic of a "physical basis". Does that mean a basis in physics?

It means a basis in something other than semiotics/language/convention. That doesn't leave much except for physics.
I mean, there is quantum physics, where there are these fundamental particles/field-disturbances. Those are pretty dang objective 'things'. It's when you start collecting them together into sets of multiple particles, where physics has little if anything to say about where the set of particles is bounded. Mathematically, any subset is as good as another, so there's no correct answer to 'what one subset of particles is this particle a member?'. Absent a correct answer to that, there doesn't seem to be an objective 'object'.

Note that I switched to 'objective' there instead of 'physical', which is dangerous because the word has connotations of 'not subjective' and has little implication of 'not subject to convention'.


Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

Look at the visual field that includes the pumpkin. Feel of the pumpkin with your hand. Smell the pumpkin. Where in any of this data is pumpkin?

Don't care. The question is, why should anything from physics prefer this particular subset of particles which humans collectively describe as 'pumpkin'?
When a kid points to it, the convention is implied. It's obvious to most humans that the object of attention is this fruit that the kid wants to know the name of.
I have an autistic son, and such conventions are not so obvious. You point to something, and he's not considering the thing being pointed to. He's looking at the end of your finger, wondering what's there that you're talking about. Not all conventions we find so natural come naturally to someone not neural-normal.

But when a toddler points towards a pumpkin and asks what it is, you know they mean the pumpkin, not "half the pumpkin plus some random parts of the particular background it is set against."

But the phaser beam (the beam itself) does not know this.


Quoting Wayfarer

I've been puzzling over, and reading up on, the basic dictum of Plato's metaphysics, which is 'to be, is to be intelligible'.

Quite the epistemological definition, but there is no 'intelligible' in physics.
I took a very nonstandard view when crafting my definition of 'to be', which is more along the lines of 'being part of the cause of a given event/state'. I avoided epistemology with that one at least since I wanted 'being' to be prior to awareness.

Quoting noAxioms

Quite the epistemological definition, but there is no 'intelligible' in physics.

But even though fundamental particles and their properties can’t be envisaged, the equations that describe their interactions are accurate to one part in a trillionth (or something.) The fact that those equations can be taught and learned and put to use means there’s at least something intelligible about them, doesn’t it? There’s a difference between understanding them correctly, and not understanding them. So there must be something that the mind can get hold of through those equations, isn’t there?

But then on the other hand you’ve got Feynmann’s ‘nobody understands quantum physics’, so maybe it’s not intelligible. That has puzzled many more highly-trained minds than my own.

Quoting noAxioms

I took a very nonstandard view when crafting my definition of 'to be', which is more along the lines of 'being part of the cause of a given event/state'.

Your ‘non-standard view’ is very much like the definition of being that is offered in this post from one of the protagonists in a Platonic dialogue:

Quoting ibid. 247d

I am saying that anything actually is, once it has acquired some sort of power, either to affect anything else at all, or to be affected, even slightly, by something totally trivial, even if only once. Indeed, I propose to give a definition, defining things that are, as nothing else except power.

Reply to noAxioms

Quoting noAxioms

"what constitutes an 'object' is entirely a matter of language/convention. There's no physical basis for it."

Quoting ucarr

Is this the premise you're examining?

Quoting noAxioms

Yes.

Are we outside the language game within the realm of Kant’s noumena?

Quoting noAxioms

So this got me thinking, and I could only conclude that what constitutes an 'object' is entirely a matter of language/convention. There's no physical basis for it. I can talk about the blue gutter and that, by convention, identifies an object distinct from the red gutter despite them both being parts of a greater (not separated) pipe.

I believe that the principal way which we distinguish objects is with the sense of sight. We see boundaries which mark the edges of things, and when a boundary encompasses an area this is seen as an individual object. The sense of touch confirms what sight shows us. I consider this to be the "empirical basis" of what constitutes "an object".

Notice though, that "physical" (meaning of the body) is derived from the assumption of objects, as a body is an object. So it is actually impossible to separate "physical" from "object" in the way you seem to suggest, as this is an essential relation, physical is necessarily, by definition, of the object. What is actually the case then, is that there is an objective (of the object) basis of "the physical", and the inverse cannot be the case. "Physical" is based in the object, and "object" is not based in the physical.

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

To borrow a line from J.S. Mill, I think one would have had to make some significant advances in philosophy to believe that children experience statistics and not things (or have had some very strange childhood experience.) The things of experience are given. Questions about what underpins them is another matter.

Or perhaps simply these "things" are statistics, to completely deflate the idea of an object. This would simply be a matter of what brains do - infer and de-correlate latent regularities in statistical and learn transition statistics for the sake of control. An "idea" is just what is latent in ineffably complex transition and control statistics.

Ah, thinglihood. The Achilles heel of all great thinkers.Hearkens back to the conflict arisen from the first true philosophers, who of course remain absent from "observable" or rather "reputable" history.

You must first acknowledge your question "answers" itself by "defining" a truth it attempts to discover. Or as some say, constitute a statement and remains a non-question. If this is confusing, this is further proof of this acknowledgement, otherwise, your use of the word "physical" retains a basis of that which is commonly perceived as "physical" as in: easily evidenced. My point being the fact you mention the "physical" means you acknowledge there is a "non-physical" that stands guard just over the boundary of what you (or presumably, the majority) consider physicality. Otherwise, there is no distinction only but another thing. What I mean is, your question remains a non-question because it dictates a debated concept "physicality", which deprives the purported environment in which you wish to have such a debate of a sole propriety.

This is often confusing so if I may circle back.The ignorant observer, which I likely wager you to see me as. Philosophy is the Colosseum of non-violent gladiatorial custodianship of that which not only is and is to be, but rather should be for reasons not needed to be physically asserted in perpetuity. Basically, my statement is though you in intent ask one question, three questions are in fact begged of the viewer.

What is physicality? What is a basis? Determined by who? Is said basis justified? By or denounced by what? What is constitution? The sub-questions are truly endless.

But to assume the "most reasonable" assumptions as fact:

Well, even operating on such strict standards offers a world of flexibility, I suppose the most base being:

Is there any observable (repeatable event or testimony) that is "consistent" that which is also repeatable or consonant,

It becomes a non-question almost. More details or information requested.

Sometimes objects seem simpler than they really are because you can just implement a particular kind of control where you can ostensively point at things and say a word, completely ignoring the rest of the total complexity in which one makes distinctions at various scales, precluding well-defined boundaries. We choose to point at things based on the pragmatics and perspective of the kind of scale we exist on and evolved in the universe, based on the sensitivities to things we can pick out due to neural hardware, due to the affordances in which we can act in the environment. But could we point at other less obvious "objects"? Yes. If they become important to survival could they become bonafide "objects"? Yes. Ultimately, pointing and naming something is just the idealized, superficial surface of your ability to distinguish and manipulate things.

The thing is that sight and touch are coarse-grained depending on one's perspective and in any case, touch is about fundamental physical interactions or forces, not the actual touch of a thing. They tell you about affordances of an object in some context, not "contact" with an object.

What distinguishes "object" from "non-object"? Statistical salience.

Reply to noAxioms

Don't care. The question is, why should anything from physics prefer this particular subset of particles which humans collectively describe as 'pumpkin'?

Depends on what you mean by "from physics?" Obviously, people do recognize things like pumpkins and even cultures that developed largely in isolation from one another make distinctions that are far more similar than dissimilar. Presumably, the causes behind the emergence and development such distinctions are physical, and the reasons for their being similar are also physical.

Actually, we have a pretty good history of the development of many of these notions. We know how people have probed questions like "what is water?" and "are whales fish?" for millennia. Any explanation of the development of these concepts is going to involve the myriad physical observations people have made of said objects and their careful examination of their physical properties and physical relations vis-á-vis other entities (e.g. through experiments).

Hence, I'd argue that object clearly plays a role in the development of the concepts associated with it, and this role seems to flow from its physical properties and relations. So in that sense, the distinction does come "from physics," and indeed in an ontology like physicalism it seems to be a requirement that all such distinctions can be explained in terms of physics (although perhaps they are not reducible to physics—whether "non-reductive physicalism" is a coherent concept depends on how physicalism is defined).

But if you want an explanation in terms of the subject matter of physics, or in terms of some superveniance vis-á-vis "a set of particles" (which is not necessarily how "physics" would like to define things anyhow) then yes, the object can never be defined "from physics." This doesn't mean that do not objects exist, it means that trying to define them in terms of ensembles of particles won't work. In general, I think the focus on particles as "building blocks," and the desire to define things in terms of them, while quite ancient and still popular, is based on fundamentally flawed assumptions.

So:

Mathematically, any subset is as good as another, so there's no correct answer to 'what one subset of particles is this particle a member?'. Absent a correct answer to that, there doesn't seem to be an objective 'object'.

See: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/912501

Asking for objects to be defined in terms of sets of particles is like trying to figure out what the letter "a" is, what it does, and how it should be distinguished from other letters/the background, by only looking at the shape of the letter, the pixels that make it up, etc.

I'd argue that the question: "why should anything from physics prefer this particular subset of particles which humans collectively describe as 'pumpkin'?" is simply the wrong sort of question and itself presumes things that I don't think are true— namely that "what things are" is completely a function of "what they are made of." But consider what would happen if you moved a volume of water to a parallel universe with slightly different physical constants. Perhaps "water" as defined as "H2O" can still exist there (if we define H and O based on their atomic numbers), but it might have completely different interactions with everything around it and between parts of itself. For example, a few tweaks get you water where the solid form is denser than the liquid form, which in turn would seem to make life much more difficult to form (an example often given for "fine tuning). But if something has totally different properties, how is it "the same substance?" I would say it isn't; change the fields and you get different things.

All the properties of objects are relational (e.g. lemon peels don't reflect yellow light in a dark room, salt only dissolves in water when placed in salt). Non-relational properties, the properties things have when they interact with nothing else and with no parts of themselves, are, at the very least, epistemicaly inaccessible. Such "in-itself" properties can never make any difference to any possible observer. Hence, Locke made a grave mistake on making "in-itselfness" the gold standard of knowledge, and this culminates in the incoherence of the "view from nowhere." Looking for "what things are" without reference to their relations then is never going to work.

Objects are defined in terms of their relational properties. Things' relationships with minds are often denigrated as somehow "less real" than relations between mindless things. However, I don't think there is much to support such a view. It's based on presuppositions that I think it is difficult to support, and a sort of (often unacknowledged) dualism.

Note that I switched to 'objective' there instead of 'physical', which is dangerous because the word has connotations of 'not subjective' and has little implication of 'not subject to convention'.

:up: Right. That the bishop always moves diagonal is a convention but it's an objective fact. But presumably it's also a fact with physical causes and underpinnings.

I have an autistic son, and such conventions are not so obvious. You point to something, and he's not considering the thing being pointed to. He's looking at the end of your finger, wondering what's there that you're talking about. Not all conventions we find so natural come naturally to someone not neural-normal.

The atypical can only be defined in terms of the typical. That something is "convention" does not make it arbitrary. Barring some sort of libertarianism where man's actions are unconditioned by the way the world is, there is presumably a causal chain behind conventions. And that conventions synch up so well, even when developed in isolation, and that their historical evolution is demonstrably driven by physical examinations of things, I believe demonstrates that the conventions surrounding objects are determined by their properties. I mean, what is the alternative, that conventions re objects don't have anything to do with objects themselves? Do they spring from the aether then? Presumably something about "tiger" makes it an important distinction for all peoples who encounter tigers to make, in a way that grue or bleen are not.

Reply to Apustimelogist

Perhaps, but your prior post seems to be elevating potency far above act in the analysis. No one uses grue and bleen and I don't imagine you could ever get them to, not least because:

A. It isn't obvious when objects were created by looking at them, smelling them, etc.
B. When an object is "created" is itself a dicey philosophical question.

But you might imagine something like splitting the visible spectrum in half and having words for size AND color for some colors and then shape AND color for others, such that "square + purple" and "yellow + small" are their own discrete words. And yet absolutely no society does this. They use colors and sizes.

It is of course logically possible for conventions to be very many ways. But in actuality they aren't. Presumably, this is not "for no reason at all" and I also see no reason to think it comes from some sort of sui generis and spontaneous uncaused freedom unique to man. Hence, convention cannot be arbitrary but emerges from the interaction between man and the world, something that is presumably "physical" in an important sense and involves the properties of objects in conjunction with human nature and culture.

BTW, a similar delineation problem occurs when trying to define computation in physical systems. You can map all sorts of computations onto all sorts of physical systems. There is no one canonical mapping. This is why folks like Terrance Deacon arrive at the conclusion that life is required to make sense of information (although I disagree with this view).

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/computation-physicalsystems/#SimMapAcc

The simple mapping account turns out to be very liberal: it attributes many computations to many systems. In the absence of restrictions on which mappings are acceptable, such mappings are relatively easy to come by. As a consequence, some have argued that every physical system implements every computation (Putnam 1988, Searle 1992). This thesis, which trivializes the claim that something is a computing system, will be discussed in Section 3.1. Meanwhile, the desire to avoid this trivialization result is one motivation behind other accounts of concrete computation.

Likewise, you can encode an MP3 song into all sorts of media: DNA, discs, tapes, even rocks or water pipe valves. But what makes that encoding [I]that[/I] song can never be found in the encoding or the objects in which it is encoded themselves. It's a relational property.

The corpuscular view has many difficulties here. For one, in an a deterministic universe of little balls of stuff bouncing around, where the little balls define everything, information theory becomes difficult to conceptualize. There is no real "range of possible variables" for any interaction. The outcome of any "measurement" (interaction) is always just the one you get, there is no "potential." The distribution relevant for any system is just that very distribution measured for all the relevant interactions. You need some conception of relationality, potency, and perspective to make sense of it (Jaynes arguments for why entropy is, in some way, always subjective I think are relevant here). Arguably, you need perspective to explain even mindless physical interactions, but the legacy of the "view from nowhere/anywhere" is strong.

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

The corpuscular view has many difficulties here. For one, in an a deterministic universe of little balls of stuff bouncing around, where the little balls define everything, information theory becomes difficult to conceptualize. There is no real "range of possible variables" for any interaction. The outcome of any "measurement" (interaction) is always just the one you get, there is no "potential." The distribution relevant for any system is just that very distribution measured for all the relevant interactions. You need some conception of relationality, potency, and perspective to make sense of it (Jaynes arguments for why entropy is, in some way, always subjective I think are relevant here). Arguably, you need perspective to explain even mindless physical interactions, but the legacy of the "view from nowhere/anywhere" is strong.

Could you dumb this down a little for dummies like me? :grin:

Quoting noAxioms

It means a basis in something other than semiotics/language/convention. That doesn't leave much except for physics.
I mean, there is quantum physics, where there are these fundamental particles/field-disturbances. Those are pretty dang objective 'things'. It's when you start collecting them together into sets of multiple particles, where physics has little if anything to say about where the set of particles is bounded. Mathematically, any subset is as good as another, so there's no correct answer to 'what one subset of particles is this particle a member?'. Absent a correct answer to that, there doesn't seem to be an objective 'object'.

Note that I switched to 'objective' there instead of 'physical', which is dangerous because the word has connotations of 'not subjective' and has little implication of 'not subject to convention'.

Yes, there is always going to be a potential issue with any word we choose, but from my perspective the whole "physical" argument is so often repeated as if a substantive distinction is being made, I don't think that's the case.

There could also be issues with "objective" as you mention, but I think we should take it for granted that we are always speaking from a human centric viewpoint, we don't have an alternative, so in that respect it is less controversial.

I agree that plenty of our distinction are made by convention, you can use a knife as something to cut fruit and vegetables or you can use it as a weapon, or a pencil sharpener.

However, these conventions follow certain restraints: we could group together two books and call those two books taken together to be one single book (as an object), but there are quite practical reasons for treating books the way we do.

So yeah, conventions are always at play, what's curios is that they don't seem entirely arbitrary either.

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

No one uses grue and bleen and I don't imagine you could ever get them to, not least because:

I think you could if you gave them a reason where they needed to use those concepts, where those concepts suddenly became useful and had statistical significance. People don't because there is no pragmatism in those concepts but they are completely intelligible otherwise we wouldn't be talking about them. And it follows that if we had to use the concepts in everyday conversation or had to look out for grue and bleen things... then we would.

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

A. It isn't obvious when objects were created by looking at them, smelling them, etc.
B. When an object is "created" is itself a dicey philosophical question.

No average person realistically knows any of these things for objects.

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

But you might imagine something like splitting the visible spectrum in half and having words for size AND color for some colors and then shape AND color for others, such that "square + purple" and "yellow + small" are their own discrete words. And yet absolutely no society does this. They use colors and sizes.

Yes, because we have no reason to use these yet these concepts still exist or you wouldn't be able to talk about them. At the same time they depend on how your biology happens to be. If you had a different type of color vision then what decomposition of colors seems "natural" may not be the same as a regular person. At the same time, if you had a sense that was inherently able to detect "size + color" then you would have a completely different conception of what seemed "natural".

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

But in actuality they aren't.

But they do exist. The fact that it is not useful to use a certain kind of concept doesn't preclude it.

And again, I think you confuse concepts and words with out ability to engage with the world. A cat doesn't need words to distinguish and interact with the world. You can train a cat to react to and behave in accordance to arbitrary "colour + size" combinations and neuroscientific experiments have precisely done this. We are fully capable of engaging with the world in a multitude of ways that far strips words and concepts we use. Words are just for communication, not things in themselves. Worda don't do any work. Complicated brains with huge numbers of degrees of freedom do the work with regard to incredibly complicated statistics that show up in our sensory organs with patterns at various scales. Obviously these statistics have root in some kind of physical connection via physical apparatus. Obviously how we interact with the world is arbitrary. But no visual scene is a fixed decomposition into discrete objects. We have access to a huge amount of information in the visual field that allows us to flexibly engage with it in ways much greater than a fixed decomposition of objects. We are engaging with statistical regularities at different scales and have some ability to attend to some over others.

This topic was called the problem of 'natural kinds' when I was at university. Someone might have mentioned this already, I haven't read the whole thread.

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

Obviously, people do recognize things like pumpkins and even cultures that developed largely in isolation from one another make distinctions that are far more similar than dissimilar. Presumably, the causes behind the emergence and development distinctions are physical.

You're still reaching for human meaning, when I'm trying to avoid it. I am in no way suggesting that the concept of objects is meaningless to us.

Admittedly one can argue for a fruit being an object. Apples, like leaves and other termporary structures, will detach at predictable boundaries when 'ready'. Not so sure about the pumpkin, which for all I know rots with the rest of the plant if left to its own. and hence is harder to describe as physically distinct from the vine from which it grows.
Such examples are still from biology, not an intellect, but much of biology has some kind of notion of independently existing units, which make nice objects. By 'physics', I was hoping for something more fundamental than biology. Even chemistry has crude 'objects' which are distinct, with collections of similar objects constituting a 'substance', but not a bounded larger object.

None of my OP examples seem to work at the chemical level.

Take for example a typical free body diagram. Such a diagram is a human construct depicting hypothetical physical objects connected in various ways and applying forces to each other. Take away the human semiotics, and all that is left is a classical physical system of particles, the motion of each being determined by the net forces acting upon them. No part of that description demarks object boundaries, except at the 'particle' level.

See: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/912501

From that post then
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, exactly. That's s the way it is for things. You could know the exact make-up and location of every particle in a sheep and this, taken by itself, would not tell you that it is a sheep or what a sheep is.

Your description has already demarked the sheep by selecting "the exact make-up and location of every particle in a sheep". The object at that point has already been defined, despite not stating that the object constitutes a sheep.

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

Asking for objects to be defined in terms of sets of particles is like trying to figure out what the letter "a" is, what it does, and how it should be distinguished from other letters/the background, by only looking at the shape of the letter, the pixels that make it up, etc.

Yes, that. It's just perhaps ink particles on parhaps paper particles. There's two 'kinds' of substances there that can more or less be sorted, but at best you can say of this system is that here's where the particles of the one substance are, and here's where the particles of the other substance are, and perhaps each of those subsets constitutes an 'object', since there's at least one way to determine their approximate bounds. Other information is missing, such as that it is the darker substance that is more of interest, and that it can contain meaning, but it's more meaningful when considered from a limited set of view points.

I'd argue that the question: "why should anything from physics prefer this particular subset of particles which humans collectively describe as 'pumpkin'?" is simply the wrong sort of question and itself presumes things that I don't think are true, namely that "what things are" is completely a function of "what they are made of."

Remember that I'm more interested in where the pumpkin stops than what it is. My wording (that you quoted there) attempts to convey that. "What things are" does not, and such wording already presumes the preferred grouping of this particular subset of particles.

But something has totally different properties, how is it "the same substance?"

There's no convention for comparing materials from different universes, where 'is the same substance' can meaningfully be assessed. It is on the list of things requiring a convention, and in this case, not having one.

Non-relational properties, the properties things have when they interact with nothing else and with no parts of themselves, are, at the very least, epistemicaly inaccessible.

Such as the property of 'existence', just to name one.
The only property I'm interested in is "is a member of this one preferred subset of particles/substances": Particles not in that set are members of different (disjoint?) preferred subsets of substances. I think a contradiction is reached if the sets are not disjoint.

I believe demonstrates that the conventions surrounding objects are determined by their properties.

I believe the conventions are determined from consideration by the intellect that finds the utility in the convention.

I mean, what is the alternative, that conventions re objects don't have anything to do with objects themselves?

Without the convention, there are no 'objects themselves'.

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

Likewise, you can encode an MP3 song into all sorts of media:

It's encoded in the digital expansion of Pi. Can't get rid of that one, but does that mean that any song, recorded or not, is 'out there'? Why does its existence in Pi not matter? Because it doesn't.



Quoting Wayfarer

The fact that those equations can be taught and learned and put to use means there’s at least something intelligible about them, doesn’t it?

Sure, I'm not saying that physics isn't intelligible. I'm saying that it doesn't seem to supervene on comprehension by some intellect. Some say it does. I'm just not one of them.

Maybe the mathematics that the universe seems to follow/obey is descriptive. Maybe it is proscriptive. Those are different views, but neither view seems to have object bounds as something independent of the intellect.

Your ‘non-standard view’ is very much like the definition of being that is offered in this post from one of the protagonists in a Platonic dialogue:

I could not follow the gist of the dialog, sorry.


Quoting ucarr

Are we outside the language game within the realm of Kant’s noumena?

Quoting Metaphysician Undercover

I believe that the principal way which we distinguish objects is with the sense of sight.

If you read the OP, I'm not asking how we distinguish objects. I'm asking how such distinctions are physical, not just ideals.
I give many examples illustrating what I'm after.



Quoting Outlander

My point being the fact you mention the "physical" means you acknowledge there is a "non-physical" that stands guard just over the boundary of what you (or presumably, the majority) consider physicality.

I'm using 'physics' here to mean 'more fundamental than the comprehension of an intellect'.

Basically, my statement is though you in intent ask one question, three questions are in fact begged of the viewer.

What is physicality? What is a basis? Determined by who? Is said basis justified? By or denounced by what? What is constitution? The sub-questions are truly endless.

Kindly apply some of these questions to some of my examples, that I can glean what you mean by them. I always try to be open to having begging logic and biases identified.


Quoting Apustimelogist

you can just implement a particular kind of control where you can ostensively point at things and say a word

Trick is to do it without saying the word. Any word immediately invokes a convention.
There's no 'importance to survival' since the question is being asked in absence of anything which can meaningfully assign 'importance', salience, or which can meaningfully 'survive'.


Quoting bert1

This topic was called the problem of 'natural kinds' when I was at university.

I looked that up, and it seems to be a different problem, about kinds, not the objective limits of a thing's extension.

Reply to noAxioms

Quoting noAxioms

Are we outside the language game within the realm of Kant’s noumena?
— ucarr


I believe that the principal way which we distinguish objects is with the sense of sight.
— Metaphysician Undercover

If you read the OP, I'm not asking how we distinguish objects. I'm asking how such distinctions are physical, not just ideals.
I give many examples illustrating what I'm after.

Can a sentient being cognize a thing-in-itself without the mediation of language?

Quoting noAxioms

not the objective limits of a thing's extension.

I think you’ve given yourself an impossible task maybe.

Let’s equate an “object” with a whole pizza, and “extension” with the dough, and “language” with the sauce, and “concepts/minds” with the cheese.

You are trying to define an object separately from the other components of the same object, like trying to define a pizza without any dough, or without any sauce or cheese.

These “components” as I’ve called them are inseparable, so not really components. (Unlike a pizza so it’s tough to make a metaphor for something that would apply to a single pepperoni as it would the whole pizza). We make concepts out of things and can think of them as components, but like “mind” and “concepts” might be distinguishable as two concepts, when is there ever a concept without a mind? Are they inseparable, are they interdependent in order for either to be?

So separating a physical “object” may require a mind like an idea requires a mind. That doesn’t mean there is no dough, no extension. That doesn’t mean there cannot be natural kinds that would be distinguished and separate individuals without minds, but it means that because I happen to have a mind, when I point to a distinct object, I am always adding my own mind to the state of affairs, and that addition is now a “part” of the “object” distinguished.

I think its about plurality. Endless plurality. We can point at any aspect of a scene we want. Maybe there's no fact of the matter. But surely the words we come out with, there is inherent plurality in the schemes we use. Huge degeneracy or even redundancy in the ways we can use words to engage with things in perception. And we can do it on the fly.

Quoting noAxioms

Trick is to do it without saying the word. Any word immediately invokes a convention.
There's no 'importance to survival' since the question is being asked in absence of anything which can meaningfully assign 'importance', salience, or which can meaningfully 'survive'.

Yes but the way your brain works at any moment isn't independent of your personal or evolutionary history.

Reply to noAxioms

Take for example a typical free body diagram. Such a diagram is a human construct depicting hypothetical physical objects connected in various ways and applying forces to each other. Take away the human semiotics, and all that is left is a classical physical system of particles, the motion of each being determined by the net forces acting upon them. No part of that description demarks object boundaries, except at the 'particle' level.

Well, to make things worse, I've seen many physicists and philosophers of physics call into question the idea of even particles as discrete objects, i.e., "they are human abstractions created to explain measurements" etc. I do not think you're going to find what you're looking for. In physics there are no truly isolated systems and when you get down to the scale of atoms entanglement adds another wrinkle to looking for discrete entities.

Your description has already demarked the sheep by selecting "the exact make-up and location of every particle in a sheep". The object at that point has already been defined, despite not stating that the object constitutes a sheep.

Yeah, that's the point. Even if you somehow were magically given what you knew to be the canonical "mapping" of some entity, that, taken in isolation, couldn't tell you what it does in the world and how it relates to it (i.e. what it is). Which ties into this point:

Remember that I'm more interested in where the pumpkin stops than what it is. My wording (that you quoted there) attempts to convey that. "What things are" does not, and such wording already presumes the preferred grouping of this particular subset of particles.

IMHO, the two questions cannot be pulled apart.

How can you tell where a given pumpkin ends if you don't know what a pumpkin is? You can't distinguish between the pumpkin, which is full of water, and rain running off its surface, unless you know something about what pumpkins are. Likewise, if you had a human body and knew nothing about it or what a hand was, how could you possibly demarcate the hand? You couldn't. Clearly there is a physical basis for hands being distinct parts of bodies, but it can't be found in the hand itself.

Anyhow, you keep framing things in terms of particles. People have been trying to give this question an even somewhat satisfying answer in terms of particles ensembles for over a century now. I think it's just a fundamentally broken way to conceive of the problem. You don't get any discrete boundaries if you exclude any reference to minds. All other multiplicity in the world is dependent upon the multiplicity of minds, a mindless world is just one continuous process, a "blobiverse" as I've seen one physics article put it.



Reply to Apustimelogist

At the same time they depend on how your biology happens to be. If you had a different type of color vision then what decomposition of colors seems "natural" may not be the same as a regular person. At the same time, if you had a sense that was inherently able to detect "size + color" then you would have a completely different conception of what seemed "natural".

Yes, exactly, but humans aren't many potential species, we are just one. What is "pragmatic," "useful," or "good" is always conditioned by the way the world is. This is what I mean by prioritizing potential over actuality.

Of course, if the world was so different as to rewrite all our conceptions of objects, there would be different objects. But the world would seem to have to be very different indeed.

Reply to Fire Ologist

:up:

I'm also not sure why it would be important to define individuals "without any reference to their relations to minds," in the first place. For one, this seems to make the task impossible, because you've now cut any possible relationship through which we could know anything about individuals. The second thing would be: why do this in the first place? The "view from nowhere" has been beaten about as badly as any philosophical position out there. Reductionism hasn't planned out despite over a century of efforts, and I honestly think you can make a good case for it being decently well falsified. Minds are obviously "real" and so their relationships to things, including demarcating them, seem like they should be plenty "real enough" to define individuals.

Reply to ucarr

Shouldn't "things-in-themselves" be impossible to cognize by definition? If it's being cognized then it's always cognized "as it relates to that mind" not "as it relates to nothing but itself." Most uses of the term I'm familiar with set it up this way at least—Locke, Kant, etc. make them unreachable by definition (and then have them do a huge share of the explanatory lifting in their explanations of the world anyhow, lol)

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

You could know the exact make-up and location of every particle in a sheep and this, taken by itself, would not tell you that it is a sheep or what a sheep is.

[quote= Mind and the Cosmic Order, Charles Pinter]The atoms of a teacup do not collude together to form a teacup: The object is a teacup because it is constituted that way from a perspective outside of itself.[/quote]

Quoting noAxioms

If you read the OP, I'm not asking how we distinguish objects. I'm asking how such distinctions are physical, not just ideals.
I give many examples illustrating what I'm after.

All distinctions are ideal, and not physical, aren't they?

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, exactly, but humans aren't many potential species, we are just one. What is "pragmatic," "useful," or "good" is always conditioned by the way the world is. This is what I mean by prioritizing potential over actuality.

Of course, if the world was so different as to rewrite all our conceptions of objects, there would be different objects. But the world would seem to have to be very different indeed.

What is pragmatic depends on how a particular animal lives its life. We are perfectly capable of inventing a multitude of completely coherent concepts or words that refer to different things, different boundaries. We just choose to use vocabulary in a certain way as depends on how we live our lives and what we want to communicate. If i just made up a concept and fit it to the world... then what is the criteria for it not to be a proper concept or object if it fits? Or if lots and lots of people start using the concept coherently? I don't think the idea that we can "rewrite our conception of objects" is falsifiable in a similar sense to how some criticize the idea of different conceptual schemes. We engage with the world and we can draw boundaries anyway we want and apply labels in anyway we want with complete flexibility, maybe partly why all "objects" are fuzzy, also perhaps reflecting the fact that nothing we encounter in our daily lives is not in some sense decomposable in very complicated ways.

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

Well, to make things worse, I've seen many physicists and philosophers of physics call into question the idea of even particles as discrete objects, i.e., "they are human abstractions created to explain measurements" etc.

All true, but I did say 'classical'. Your comment goes beyond a classical description.

[quote]How can you tell where a given pumpkin ends if you don't know what a pumpkin is?

It very much seems you cannot since there's nothing that says to continue while it's a pumpkin, but not beyond, where it ceases to be pumpkin, and certainly nothing to say that 'pumpkin' is what matters in the first place.

Clearly there is a physical basis for hands being distinct parts of bodies, but it can't be found in the hand itself.

Agree. I said as much in my comments with Wayfarer about the 100 million year old foot.

Anyhow, you keep framing things in terms of particles. People have been trying to give this question an even somewhat satisfying answer in terms of particles ensembles for over a century now. I think it's just a fundamentally broken way to conceive of the problem. You don't get any discrete boundaries if you exclude any reference to minds.

We seem to be in agreement then.


Quoting Fire Ologist

Let’s equate an “object” with a whole pizza, and “extension” with the dough, and “language” with the sauce, and “concepts/minds” with the cheese.

You are trying to define an object separately from the other components of the same object, like trying to define a pizza without any dough, or without any sauce or cheese.

Per your weird assignment of terms, it would be an attempt at a pizza with dough but without the cheese and sauce, except that the dough seems undefined without sauce on it.

when is there ever a concept without a mind?

I didn't suggest such a thing.

From what I read, I agree with the Pinter view.


Quoting ucarr

Can a sentient being cognize a thing-in-itself without the mediation of language?

Any cognition is at some level a language, but I suppose it depends on how 'language' is defined.

Quoting Metaphysician Undercover

All distinctions are ideal, and not physical, aren't they?

Only to an idealist.

Quoting noAxioms

Only to an idealist.

But you seem to be leaning towards an idealist view yourself. Can you say why you're not?

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

Minds are obviously "real" and so their relationships to things, including demarcating them, seem like they should be plenty "real enough" to define individuals.

:up:

Quoting Metaphysician Undercover

All distinctions are ideal, and not physical, aren't they?

I don’t know about “all distinctions”. There is no reason there can’t be physical distinctions. They would work well to explain the difference experience of getting up from chair and realizing my back and knees hurt from sitting. It is just an experience, a phenomenon, something epistemology hasn’t settled yet. But no physical distinction? Seems to me if there exists anything physical at all, whether it be one physical thing (say a giant ball of clay), you have distinctions and really many physical objects to distinguish.

So we minds may only work through the medium of our idealized distinctions, but it does not follow that all distinctions are ideal. The world may itself have physical distinction in it (and I don’t mind simply assuming it does, like any physical scientist has to assume.)

This is all a battle between motion and stillness. Or between fixed identity (objects) and change (not finding any objects). Motion seems to overtake everything that was once still and is now gone, including any non-ideal sense of stillness. So stillness, like the “object” noAxiom is trying to find in matter, seems the weaker component, and possibly only ideal (so not real, like motion is real).

Reply to noAxioms

Objects are still. The moon treated as object is the moon never changing. Visible mostly at night, white and grey, appears to reflect light and not generate any light to my eye - the moon. Fixed. We all know about it. The same moon.

But the moon moves and is slowly minutely always undergoing massive changes; so because of change, the still object referenced in the “moon” is really an ideal moon, because the actual moon isn’t a still object. Like every physical thing, nothing is a thing for long.

Unlike an object, which has a clear definition, clear border delimiting it and distinguishing it as a particular “it”, motion changes things, undoes their definitions, and reveals the ideal moon which appears fixed, is not quite accurate.

But we are smart. We can reference the moon anyway, holding it still with our minds, knowing it is changing and might not remain the moon for long. And while we hold the spinning, decaying moon still, we can show it is distinct from the sun (another moving target, but always moving distinctly from the moon).

So distinctions can be in the world, but right before our eyes they just don’t last as long, unlike the idealized distinctions we can make right before our minds that say “moon”.

Physical objects, holding themselves together for a time, is what the world looks like. Whether the distinctions last long is another question. Whether the distinctions we see and idealize create useful references, that are translatable to language like “natural satellite” instead of “moon” is another question. But whether physical objects exist is another question. And once you admit the physical, you’ve simultaneously admitted physical distinction.

Quoting noAxioms

It very much seems you cannot since there's nothing that says to continue while it's a pumpkin, but not beyond, where it ceases to be pumpkin. And certainly nothing to say that 'pumpkin' is what matters in the first place.

You couldn’t give the example of how a pumpkin is not a distinct object if there were no distinct objects. You certainly couldn’t covey such a thought to me from your mind if you didn’t place an object, like a pumpkin, translated as “pumpkin” into language, but otherwise able to be thrown in the direction of my head, in between us. You could have said “gourd” or “cheese sandwich” but you made reference to a distinct thing instead.


Quoting noAxioms

You don't get any discrete boundaries if you exclude any reference to minds.
We seem to be in agreement then.

That contradicts this:
Quoting noAxioms

All distinctions are ideal, and not physical, aren't they?
— Metaphysician Undercover
Only to an idealist.

Unless you, like me think, some distinctions are ideal, and others are physical.

You just want an example of a physical distinction, but one separate from words. And you want me to use words here on this forum to demonstrate it.

How about this word as a physical example of a physical object that has no words attached to it: hgtiigumsolee. There an object of light and dark distinct from everything else you read. Here are two distinct examples of an object defining itself before your very eyes, out in the world that has no words to it, something you cannot even conceotualize but here it comes again twice: hgtiigumsolee. hgtiigumsolee

Idealize that. It’s only particular. Like a pumpkin might be.

Quoting noAxioms

You are trying to define an object separately from the other components of the same object, like trying to define a pizza without any dough, or without any sauce or cheese.
— Fire Ologist
Per your weird assignment of terms, it would be an attempt at a pizza with dough but without the cheese and sauce, except that the dough seems undefined without sauce on it.

But dough, then, like the whole pizza, becomes the whole object, with its own extension, idealization, and language. Just as you just used language to distinguish your weird assignment from my weird assignment (and mine was more weird.)

You can’t say that extension (which is a concept) without putting it in something extended (like dough). The ideal and the extended are of the same distinction.

Reply to Apustimelogist

What is pragmatic depends on how a particular animal lives its life.

Yes, which is determined by the way the world is and the nature of the animal. No tiger becomes a vegetarian. Any tiger stuck in the desert likely dies without reproducing. No ant foments revolutions. The sheep distinguishes "wolf" for a reason. Humans are more self-determining than beasts, but they are not, by nature, completely self-determining.

So what determines the pragmatic is, to some extent, already given, and this explains why different peoples make largely the same sorts of distinctions despite having developed their languages and cultures largely in isolation.

I'm not sure what the counter point here is supposed to be since you have once again posed your objections entirely in terms of potency and not given any examples of actual occurrences. Everything is "could, "can," "is possible," or "if." But can you think of one culture that doesn't distinguish types of animal or doesn't use terms for colors but rather blends color and shape, color and size, etc.?

I don't know of one. If they ever existed, they have either gone extinct or at the very least occupy a marginal position in terms of world languages.

But my point is exactly this, which languages, norms, and distinctions become dominant is not something determined by "no reason at all," or simply because "people choose them." There is a causal chain driving language evolution, history, human distinctions, etc. Of human choice was completely free of "how to world is," then distinctions should look essentially random, since they are conditioned by nothing. If they are conditioned by "pragmatic" concerns, then it would seem that such concerns are themselves determined by "how the world is" and "how people are."


Now if you have a libertarian view where human choices are not determined by the world—are essentially free from causality—then obviously that's where our disagreement lies. But if human choices are "not caused" then it would seem hard to me to explain why they appear to be.

But if you acknowledge that human choices do have causes, then I'm not really sure what the objection is supposed to be. Is the claim that the properties of objects don't play a determinant role in distinctions? That what is considered "good" has nothing to do with either the properties of things or human nature?

I've long had the suspicion that appeals to "pragmatism" that also deny any objective reality or determinateness to "what is considered good," are in danger of vicious circularity. Everything ends up malleable, determined man's practical concerns, but then the Good itself, the target is practical reason, turns out to also be something that is "pragmatically" determined? Then everything seems to be "pragmatics" all the way down, in which case distinctions and choices should be arbitrary. But they don't appear to be.

Quoting Wayfarer

But you seem to be leaning towards an idealist view yourself. Can you say why you're not?

To re-quote your Pinter snippet:

Mind and the Cosmic Order, Charles Pinter:The atoms of a teacup do not collude together to form a teacup: The object is a teacup because it is constituted that way from a perspective outside of itself.

That sounds somewhat like idealism as well and I totally agree with it. Something (humans, whatever) finds pragmatic utility in the grouping of a subset of matter into a named subset, which is what makes an object out of that subset. That's the similarity with idealism. But if I am correct, idealism stops there. Mind does not supervene on anything. There's no external reality, especially a reality lacking in names and other concepts to group it all intelligibly. There is only 'cup', and no cup.
Idealism leads to solipsism. Intellects sharing categorization via language does not.

M-U would word it differently I imagine.


Quoting Fire Ologist

because of change, the still object referenced in the “moon” is really an ideal moon, because the actual moon isn’t a still object.

I personally never think of the moon as a 'still', unchanging ideal. Seeing its shadow come right at me really drove home that point. Yes, like all things designated as 'objects', they change and will eventually no longer be that object, if only by the lack of something to so name it.

Quoting Fire Ologist

It very much seems you cannot since there's nothing that says to continue while it's a pumpkin, but not beyond, where it ceases to be pumpkin. And certainly nothing to say that 'pumpkin' is what matters in the first place.
— noAxioms

You couldn’t give the example of how a pumpkin is not a distinct object if there were no distinct objects. You certainly couldn’t covey such a thought to me from your mind if you didn’t place an object, like a pumpkin, translated as “pumpkin” into language, but otherwise able to be thrown in the direction of my head, in between us. You could have said “gourd” or “cheese sandwich” but you made reference to a distinct thing instead.

Unless you, like me think, some distinctions are ideal, and others are physical.

Some distinctions are indeed physical. Object boundaries don't seem to be one of them.

[quote]hgtiigumsolee

I was envisioning something more like 'this'. Making up a word with no reference is running away from the issue of a reference without a word.

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

and the nature of the animal.

Yes, so you have lots of animals engaging with the same world. This doesn't really count for animals though because they aren't using words.

The sheep distinguishing a "wolf" is not part of this conceptual thing because it doesn't have a word for it, it is just making distinctions in the world. It can make any number of distinctions in line with its capabilities that are completely degenerate and redundant, so there is in no sense a fixed set of bounded distinctions a sheep can make. You can get it to pay attention to some features or to others. It will react to the presence of a wolf. It will also react if it learns that certain features of a wolf imply different things. It doesn't need to put things into labelled boxes to do this.

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

why different peoples make largely the same sorts of distinctions despite having developed their languages and cultures largely in isolation.

Because they are the same animal that behaves in the similar ways and interacts with the environment in similar ways.

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

But can you think of one culture that doesn't distinguish types of animal or doesn't use terms for colors but rather blends color and shape, color and size, etc.?

You miss my point. My point is that we are always capable of making these distinctions.

And in fact, itis actually relatively well documentes that there are some cultures that use very different colour categories (e.g. tribes that distinguish only about 3 color categories). Even relatively similar cultures can have different categories. But even if cultures have different categories, it is extremely likely we all have the same color distinction capabilities. So in fact, our ability to tell apart colors greatly transcends the kind of words we use. And it is this ability to make distinctions beyond categories shows that inherent boundaries don't exist. I am using actualities because it doesn't matter what cultures tend to use or not. No one uses bleen or grue. But they are coherent concepts. YOU perfectly understand what these concepts mean or any combination. You can use them if you want. I have decided to use them right now and I will be able to score high in a test of distinctions. My ability to use non-standard concepts is an actuality. They are perfectly coherent. The fact I can use them shows my abilities to engage in the world transcends fixed boundaries.

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

Everything is "could, "can," "is possible," or "if." But can you think of one culture that doesn't distinguish types of animal or doesn't use terms for colors but rather blends color and shape, color and size, etc.?

Its not hard to find words that are non-standard or don't have a direct one-to-one translation in another language. Some may be random, some may be conditioned by the way people live or interact that they have words for particular things that have unusual significance for them but no where else.

https://ourworldenglish.com/28-untranslatable-words-from-around-the-world/

Even though there is no one-to-one correspondence in many of these words, do I have any problems understanding them? Not really, at least superficially. Would be able to convey some unique words in english to a person not familiar? Probably. Why? Because concepts are redundant and degenerate. Our ability to engage with the world is not confined to fixed boundaries. There is always inherent overlap.

Again, my point is not that people use different schemes. The point is that peoples engagement with the world transcends fixed boundaries. People can make up new words, new concepts any way they want and other people can understand because we don't perceive the world in fixed discrete objects. What we perceive is much more high-dimensional than that.

The appeal to pragmatism isn't meant to say that people have different uses and so end up with different words.

What I mean by that is that our engagement with the world and our ability to perceive the world is not in words or fixed categories. We don't need them. Animals don't need them. Words come about through the need to communicate which is a pragmatic act. It doesn't matter if we end up using many words the same (which would be because we share similar lives and similar things are relevant to us).

The point is that the words are not the the thing, they are a tool that we fit to the world for our own use. But our actual engagement with the world perceptually and physically far outstrips that.

Once you remove words from the equation then the idea of fixed boundaries loses good definition (not that it had any in the first place since our use of words is totally fuzzy and degenerate). Once you remove words then ultimately what you have is the idea that we react to the world in a certain way and there is a continuum of similarity and differentiation. And even that imo is an idealization because I don't think the way we (I) hold attention to things is particularly tangible either. Its not apparent to me that I attend the world in discrete quanta. Personally there is something obscured about how I attend to the world in a way which allows me to act in a way indicative of someone paying attention. Obviously there is always some kins of example of something like "focus hard and see the shape of this like" which seems like it should be straightforward ( I am not sure, but will give benefit of doubt) but this is only an extremely simplistic example which is not representative of the fact that we are attending to things all the time at different breadths and intensities and different levels of vagueness.

Quoting noAxioms

Making up a word with no reference is running away from the issue of a reference without a word.

It’s not word. Don’t idealize it.

It’s a physical pile of black and white. Can you see the border? I could go cut and paste it for you.

Quoting Fire Ologist

It’s not word. Don’t idealize it.

It’s a physical pile of black and white. Can you see the border? I could go cut and paste it for you.

Ah, OK. In that case I don't know where you're pointing. Perhaps it is only the msc part that is the pile of black and white in question, situated between different shaped physical piles of black and white. How would I know?

Quoting noAxioms

How would I know?

You would have to use physical eyes and senses because it’s a physical thing, so you may get it wrong (as any eye would), but that’s the only way to investigate and find if you see border or edge or particular “object” if you need word for what we are talking about.

And this border is distinct from the center of “it” too at least that’s what I can see.

Quoting Fire Ologist

You would have to use physical eyes and senses because it’s a physical thing

I did, but lacking knowledge of the bounds of the physical thing, I was reduced to guessing, which I did. That's the msc

That guess is likely wrong, but lacking any physical definition of object bounds, it's as good as any other guess.

that’s the only way to investigate and find if you see border or edge or particular “object

I did all that, and found an object, but probably not the object you meant, since all I had to go on was the physical.

And this border is distinct

That wording makes it sound like there's one preferred border, when in fact there is an arbitrarily large number of ways the border can be assigned, none better than any other. There is no 'this border'. There is only 'a border', among many other possibilities.

Reply to noAxioms

Quoting noAxioms

"what constitutes an 'object' is entirely a matter of language/convention. There's no physical basis for it."

Quoting ucarr

Is this the premise you're examining?

Quoting noAxioms

Yes.

Quoting ucarr

Can a sentient being cognize a thing-in-itself without the mediation of language?

Quoting noAxioms

Any cognition is at some level a language, but I suppose it depends on how 'language' is defined.

language - a system of human communication rooted in variations in the form of a verb (inflection) by which users identify voice, mood, tense, number and person.

Perhaps we can illuminate some ramifications of the premise by drawing a parallel: cognition is to the natural world as word-processing software is to verbal language. In both cases, the former, an organizing function, formats the latter, a collection of data.

In both cases, after the formatting function does its job, the collection of data is delineated into parts. As cognition delineates trees into trunks, branches and leaves, word-processing software delineates language into sentences, paragraphs and chapters.

Language divorced from the referents of the natural world devolves into meaningless circularity.

Since the referents of the natural world impart meaning to language, language must reside within a subject-object interface connecting the two. This tells us that language is a system of signs that simulates the organized contents of the natural world by perceiving it literally and connecting with it symbolically.

Now we see that the ordering of language, so as to be meaningful, cannot be wholly internal.

When we look at the premise: What constitutes an 'object' is entirely a matter of language/convention. There's no physical basis for it., we see that the interface connecting cognitive language with physical parts of the natural world is denied.

This denial raises the question: How does language internally bridge the gap separating it from the referents of the natural world that give it meaning?

Quoting noAxioms

I was reduced to guessing, which I did. That's the msc

That guess is likely wrong

We should compare guesses.

In order to communicate our guesses we have to speak words, so we will now be using idealizations for sake of communication. But my guess is the object looks like this at its borders:
h …. e with some black and white sections in the middle.

If we both guess the same, then we have the object itself as referent and the additional measurement tools of each other’s eyes.

With all of that in sight, if our guesses are at least similar, we have a reasonable basis to start using the distinctions we discover with our eyes to be brought to us from a separate physical object. Metaphorically speaking, the physical object “told” us its distinction.

If you guess z……x then we are back to square one.

Reply to Wayfarer

I'll have to get around to reading that some day. It sounds like a good one.

Reply to noAxioms

That wording makes it sound like there's one preferred border, when in fact there is an arbitrarily large number of ways the border can be assigned, none better than any other. There is no 'this border'. There is only 'a border', among many other possibilities

Isn't there a middle ground between there being "one canonical border," and any assignments being arbitrary? If assignments were truly completely arbitrary then people should make such distinctions at random. But they clearly don't do so. So wouldn't it make sense to look for the object in exactly what causes people to delineate them in such and such a way in the first place?

Moreover our concepts vis-á-vis objects have been refined throughout history, and they often tend to be refined by the sciences. That is, people's understandings of which boundaries are relevant, which distinctions we should keep, and which are spurious, seems to unfold from a very close examination of (potential?) objects. This to me says the properties of the objects themselves play a very large role in determining how we define and delineate them, even if this always occurs through their relationships to minds.

That sounds somewhat like idealism as well and I totally agree with it. Something (humans, whatever) finds pragmatic utility in the grouping of a subset of matter into a named subset, which is what makes an object out of that subset. That's the similarity with idealism. But if I am correct, idealism stops there. Mind does not supervene on anything. There's no external reality, especially a reality lacking in names and other concepts to group it all intelligibly. There is only 'cup', and no cup.
Idealism leads to solipsism. Intellects sharing categorization via language does not.

Depends on the type of idealism. Plato and Hegel, who often get labeled "idealists" do not in any way deny the reality of rocks and trees or the existence of nature outside of individuals' awareness of nature. In a lot of ways they are a lot more "realist" about external entities than modern Kant-inspired theorists, who often instead have it that all intelligibility in the world is the sui generis creation of minds.

But ideas might be said to be "more real." Here is one way to think of it:

Things might have a lot of different relationships. Salt can interact with all sorts of stuff. So can pumpkins, etc. However, over any given interval of time (some spacio-temporal region) any thing only actualizes a very small number of its properties. Salt only actualizes the ability to dissolve in water when it is placed in water. It only reflects wavelengths of light so as to appear white in a dark room. It only "appears white" to a person when a person looks at it under "normal" (full visible spectrum) light conditions. So, during any given snap shot interval, very few of a thing's properties are being actualized (and in "no time at all" no properties are being actualized, except perhaps some sort of bare "existence").

Only in the mind of the knower do things exemplify (potentially) all their properties at once. Water can become ice or steam, but it doesn't do both simultaneously. But the mind can know that water freezes and boils, it can know that salt does all sorts of different things in different contexts. In this way, things most "are what they are," when they are known.

If things are defined by their physical relationships with other things, then it is their relationship to human minds, which carefully examine and triangulate all such properties through things like science, that seems to pull together what they are the most. And I think this is what Hegel gets at in his doctrines of notion and concept, as well as the idea that objects and their related concepts are mutually self-consituting. Robert Sokolowski gets at how this works historically from the Aristotlean and Thomist perspectives as well.

It's worth considering that before the rise of "the view from nowhere" as the gold standard of knowledge the gold standard was "the view from the mind of God." Such a view isn't defined as "reality versus mere appearances" but rather as absolute, and so including appearances (the sum total of ALL appearances thus being included).

Reply to Fire Ologist

Right, and our current set of "objects" has been built up from millennia of observations and close inspections of physical interactions. Cultural inertia certainly plays a role, as does "what seems intuitive by nature" but I don't think there is any reason to think we are incapable of hitting on better and better distinctions. Technology is sort of the proof of theory. It doesn't prove that any theory is "the one true absolute standard," but it tends to suggest that it gets at least SOMETHING right. We might radically change our concept of lift in the future, but it's going to be something consistent with the fact that the current theory lets us build flying machines.

Quoting noAxioms

Idealism leads to solipsism.

I think that’s a misrepresentation of idealism. None of the canonical idealist philosophers believe that only my mind is real.

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

It's worth considering that before the rise of "the view from nowhere" as the gold standard of knowledge the gold standard was "the view from the mind of God."

There’s a book that caught my eye on the pre-Socratic philosophers, called To Think Like God. In the Greek texts there are references to the supposed ‘divinity’ of the philosophers, and Parmenides is said to have ‘received’ his wisdom from ‘the Goddess’. Then there’s ‘The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science’, Peter Harrison, which documents the belief that science was originally conceived as techniques for ameliorating the cognitive damage wrought by human sin. a means of recapturing the knowledge of nature that Adam had once possessed. There’s a sense in which scientific objectivity is supposed to emulate the impersonal detachment of the sage or mystic. But modern science becomes essentially Promethean in nature, based on the conviction that unassisted it could reveal universal truth without any reference to a supposedly religious notion of the absolute.

Quoting Fire Ologist

We should compare guesses.

I indicated my guess and it was different than yours. Now what? Is yours also a guess? Which of us is wrong? Both seems likely.
Your guess seemed to include everything (all of the black and white pattern repeated three times), which is sort of one of the obvious defaults. The entire universe turns to gold because King Midas cannot avoid touching the universe. My guess was obviously smaller. Are we back to square one?


Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

Isn't there a middle ground between there being "one canonical border," and any assignments being arbitrary?

It would be nice, yes. We're 150 posts in here, and no such middle ground that holds water has been suggested yet, but I'm open to it.
Any suggested bound is going to be put to the test of one of my OP examples, or the Midas thing.

If assignments were truly completely arbitrary then people should make such distinctions at random.

Nonsense. People can create conventions to put the distinctions at pragmatically useful places. Nothing random about that.

But they clearly don't do so. So wouldn't it make sense to look for the object in exactly what causes people to delineate them in such and such a way in the first place?

That seems to be along the lines of giving AI and thus conventions to devices, difficult to do with an energy beam. The OP mentioned a teleporter that moves that to which it is 'attached'. So (kindly ignore the fact that I'm using language here) it gets strapped to a railing at the edge of the roof of a building that is integrated into a city block of building connected by shared walls and interconnecting passageways. Question is, what are the bounds of what the device teleports?
I picked this example because it's not clear even to a human what the requirement is, so a device that tries to demark objects the way a human does would make a clear determination.

Water can become ice or steam, but it doesn't do both simultaneously.

Not so. We boiled water until it froze, as an illustration of how to reach the triple point. The boiling was done via pumping air (and steam) out of the jar with the water. After not long, ice forms on the boiling surface.
Just some off topic FYI.

I'm well aware of the idealism that goes on with our categorization of the world, but in the end, I want to resolve the issue brought up in the OP. If the idea can't do that, then it doesn't seem to help.


Quoting Wayfarer

I think [idealism leading to solipsism] is a misrepresentation of idealism.

I suspect you're right. I'm no authority, but other people/minds are nothing but ideals themselves to me, and one has to get around that. I don't know how its done.

None of the canonical idealist philosophers believe that only my mind is real.

So they must have solved the problem then. Again, I know very little of the positions pushed by various famous philosophers. I'd not pass a philosophy course in school since that's mostly what they teach, sort of like how history was taught to us.


Quoting ucarr

language - a system of human communication rooted in variations in the form of a verb (inflection) by which users identify voice, mood, tense, number and person.

Ah, human speech and representations thereof. If 'language' only refers to that, then a sentient being can definitely cognize a things without the mediation of language

word-processing software delineates language into sentences, paragraphs and chapters.

I suspect that word processing software has no more awareness that it is dealing with language than does my tongue.

we see that the interface connecting cognitive language with physical parts of the natural world is denied.

This denial raises the question: How does language internally bridge the gap separating it from the referents of the natural world that give it meaning?

I don't see a denial of the indicated connection, so it's a question you must answer.

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

However, in the same way, you can't delineate the boundaries of anything without the idea/universal. The idea is what tells you "include this, not that," or "stop here."

You cannot arrive at the universal/ idea without a pre-conceptual gestalt that stands out for you. Inanimate objects like clouds, mountains, rivers, stones are perhaps less definitively bounded than living, self-organizing entities.

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

You don't get any discrete boundaries if you exclude any reference to minds.

Things seem to be constituted by differential intensities in an overall dynamic energy field. So the universe is presumably not an amorphous blob, but an everchanging energy field consisting of locally differing intensities.

It seems reasonable to think that these differing intensities in the field give rise to the different colours, textures, hardnesses, densities and masses that we encounter everywhere, and that it is on those physical bases that things stand out for us.

Quoting noAxioms

I suspect you're right. I'm no authority, but other people/minds are nothing but ideals themselves to me, and one has to get around that. I don't know how it’s done.

Take a look at The Mind-Created World.

Reply to Janus

:up:

Agree 100%, those are the points I've been arguing for.

Reply to noAxioms

It would be nice, yes. We're 150 posts in here, and no such middle ground that holds water has been suggested yet, but I'm open to it.
Any suggested bound is going to be put to the test of one of my OP examples, or the Midas thing.

Dontcha think this might have to do with the standards all being magical devices? Harry Potter's magical tent that is bigger on the inside than the outside causes similar problems (does it shrink things or create a wormhole or what?) without involving delineating anything. The magic might be the problem.

This was, in fact, the problem with Maxwell's Demon. It took a very long time to figure out why it couldn't exist, but finally people thought to challenge the assumption of the thing essentially having a non-physical/magical memory.

If the idea can't do that, then it doesn't seem to help.

I think it does. It tells you that pipes, sheep, cars, etc. are not defined by particle ensembles. They're defined by a set physical properties and their relations to mind. If you zoom in to the scale of particles, you have generally already left these sorts of macroscopic objects behind.

Think about it this way, if "being a pipe" or "being a cow' is "strongly emergent" or something like that, then it's quite impossible to determine if some particle belongs to a cow, etc. or not. The phenomena in question simply does not exist at those scales. This doesn't mean that we cannot say such things are "made up" of molecules, atoms, etc. It says we cannot reduce them, or their boundaries, to such things.

Delineating things in terms of building block particles seems to presume a certain sort of reductionism, but it's such a common view that I think this often goes unacknowledged.

Reply to noAxioms

Quoting ucarr

When we look at the premise: What constitutes an 'object' is entirely a matter of language/convention. There's no physical basis for it., we see that the interface connecting language with physical parts of the natural world is denied.

How is my understanding of your quote a mis-reading of it?

Reply to Count Timothy von Icarus :up: :cool:

Quoting noAxioms

King Midas cannot avoid touching

Was there a before King Midas touched, when the world wasn’t gold, and then what happened to Midas’ finger afterwards?

Physical objects are distinguishable everywhere with no eyes and no words, you just can’t picture them or speak about them easily.

You guessed somewhere near my guess, and my guess now is that we could work it out. It was the black and the white where there were no words. Close enough.

Quoting Wayfarer

Take a look at The Mind-Created World.

Pretty much like Pinter seems to say. But your paper doesn't seem to be the position held by most self-identified idealists who consider mind to be fundamental, supervening on nothing else.

So barring the label, I agree with most of it. The though experiment near the top is questionable. There can be a view from nowhere, but it would be by definition not perspectival. A simple classical example would be a spacetime diagram, especially a gif that continuously rotates it through frame transformations so as not to imply a preferred one.
Take away 'classical' and the view from nowhere can get far more abstract since semi-perspectival things like worldlines might go away. A perspective can collapse a wave function. Can God (with the supposed 'view from nowhere') do that?


Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

Dontcha think this might have to do with the standards all being magical devices?

Since it seemingly cannot actually be done, all such devices are necessarily fictional/magical, yes. If there were a solution to the problem, we could find a non-fictional example to illustrate the point.

This was, in fact, the problem with Maxwell's Demon. It took a very long time to figure out why it couldn't exist, but finally people thought to challenge the assumption of the thing essentially having a non-physical/magical memory.

Godel certainly shoots that down, but perhaps it was already shot down by that point.

Think about it this way, if "being a pipe" or "being a cow' is "strongly emergent" or something like that, then it's quite impossible to determine if some particle belongs to a cow, etc. or not.

You seem to still be approaching the problem from the wrong end. You're taking a cow and looking for a very precise (down to the atomic level) demarcation of that already defined convention.
I am starting with only 'this', an indication of some classically local substance, say the non-air surface (say a leg exoskeletal surface of a 0.1 mm bug sitting on a shirt) upon which the phaser energy beam is focused. Now this beam needs to perform its function to the entirety of the 'object' of which that surface is a part. The energy beam itself (and not the gun) needs to figure this out. And worse, it cannot perform its function until after the beam shuts off, but that problem is not entirely related to this topic.
The description of the bug leg is very specific, but any real beam held active for 0.6 seconds is going to wiggle around and not remain focused on the bug leg the whole time. It will at least directly hit 'shirt' for some percentage of the time.


Quoting Fire Ologist

Was there a before King Midas touched, when the world wasn’t gold, and then what happened to Midas afterwards?

The story does not describe the universe being converted, so the supplied physical definition is not the correct convention obviously.
It means my guess of msc was closer to the Midas example than was your guess.



Quoting ucarr

When we look at the premise: What constitutes an 'object' is entirely a matter of language/convention. There's no physical basis for it., we see that the interface connecting language with physical parts of the natural world is denied.
— ucarr

How is my understanding of your quote a mis-reading of it?

Well for one, the suggestion is that convention is very much the interface between the physical world and 'object'. Convention comes from language and/or utility. So the interface is not denied, but instead enabled by these things.

Quoting noAxioms

The energy beam itself (and not the gun) needs to figure this out.

I’m beginning to lose sight of the question (the object of your inquiry so to speak).

It’s a fictional thing, a laser gun that shoots an entire bug but leaves the shirt. The impossibility of that thing can be solved by as much fiction. The laser beam just does. Shirt is always fine. Laser beams are really cool. So is Midas’s gold. Problem solved.

It’s not the laser beam, right? Who gives a crap how ridiculous or accidentally accurate our fictions can be or can’t?

But if you are grappling with atoms and void and finding not enough void anywhere between groupings of atoms…

Or not finding any difference between atom and not-atom such that one or the other cannot exist and there can be only one…

Or are you saying a man can’t step into the same river twice, or even once, because no thing is identical to itself long enough to be a fixed object or be identified as such…

Or are you just being contrarian, because none of these problems have been solved down to a nice little explanation?

Quoting noAxioms

But your paper doesn't seem to be the position held by most self-identified idealists who consider mind to be fundamental, supervening on nothing else.

Thanks for looking at it, I appreciate your feedback. But I’d like to think that the essay is compatible with the canonical idealists, such as Berkeley (with some caveats), Kant, Schopenhauer, and our contemporary, Bernardo Kastrup.

Quoting noAxioms

A perspective can collapse a wave function. Can God (with the supposed 'view from nowhere') do that?

Werner Heisenberg might have had an answer to that, in his writings on Physics and Philosophy, as he was both a pioneer of quantum physics, and someone whom I think could be described as a Christian Platonist. But I won’t pursue that here.

Reply to Fire Ologist If you don’t mind my stepping in: one response that comes to mind is from Arthur Schopenhauer. There’s a section of a book, Schopenhaur’s Philosophy, Bryan Magee called ‘No Object without a Subject’. Magee explicates one of the central tenets of Schopenhauer’s metaphysical and epistemological views: the idea that the existence of objects is intrinsically tied to the presence of a subject that perceives them.

Schopenhauer’s philosophy is built on the premise that our understanding of the world is mediated through perception and cognition. He argues that objects, as we know them, do not exist independently of our perception. This aligns with the broader philosophical stance of idealism.

Schopenhauer was deeply influenced by Immanuel Kant, particularly the notion that the world as we perceive it (phenomena) is shaped by our cognitive faculties. However, Schopenhauer extends this idea, positing that the will is the fundamental reality behind all appearances.

According to Schopenhauer, what we perceive are representations (Vorstellungen), which are dependent on the subject (I would add, as well as the object, as I don’t deny that objects exist). The “thing-in-itself” (noumenon), which Kant suggested lies beyond our perceptual faculties, is, for Schopenhauer, the will.

Schopenhauer asserts that the existence of the objective world is contingent upon a perceiving subject. Without a subject to perceive, there can be no object. This challenges the notion of an independently existing material world - or independently-existing objects, for that matter!

Hello.


Quoting noAxioms

So this got me thinking, and I could only conclude that what constitutes an 'object' is entirely a matter of language/convention.

When we say that objects are a product of language, we are simply shifting the problem from the external world to the interiority of language. We then say that there are objects in language.

We might rather ask why language functions and allows us to operate as subjects who are part of reality and act within it. Doesn't this mean that if there are objects in language, then there are also objects-ish in "the world external to language" that authorize and enable our language to function? Why aren't we crazy animals wich constantly fails to interact effectively with the world?

This breaks with the skepticism that seeks to radically separate language from reality or the external world. If there were no certain ontological continuity between language and the world, we would simply be animals incapable of grabbing a rock, striking it with another, and creating fire.

Hey Wayfarer,
No interruption at all!

Quoting Wayfarer

Schopenhauer’s philosophy is built on the premise that our understanding of the world is mediated through perception and cognition.

The phenomenal veil, of our own construction, that cloaks and hides the thing-in-itself. Yes, love it. Straight out of Kant, and I like Schop too, the old curmudgeon.

Quoting Wayfarer

However, Schopenhauer extends this idea, positing that the will is the fundamental reality behind all appearances.

Yes, the objects are ideal, and they are brought about when we will, will to hold them as phenomenal objects. We not only make them by mediation of senses and cognition, but we will the sensing and the cogitating. And also, the will is preserved at the heart of the things-in-themselves that pour in the data, wiling-themselves towards our senses and cognition, as we transform this into our phenomenal experience.

Reply to noAxioms

Quoting Wayfarer

He (Schop) argues that objects, as we know them, do not exist independently of our perception.

I bolded “as we know them” because that is the key to me. We have objects as we do NOT know them (things in themselves), we apply our senses and cognition to those objects (and/or those objects apply themselves to our senses and cognition), and we get the objects as we know them (phenomena).

Quoting Wayfarer

According to Schopenhauer, what we perceive are representations (Vorstellungen), which are dependent on the subject (I would add, as well as the object, as I don’t deny that objects exist).

I agree with your parenthetical. The things in themselves are existing objects. They are out there and I am with them. They shape my phenomenal experience too. I see no reason to conclude otherwise. We just only know those objects indirectly, mediated - we experience objects subjected to an influence outside or beyond those objects, namely me, the subject.

But this gets to noAxiom’s question. If we can’t know the objects in themselves and unmediated, then all “objects” should have quotes around them. They are ideal only.

But we just admitted there are objects separate from me, things in themselves out of which I fashion my phenomenal veil over them.

And the OP is about the “physical basis for what constitutes a thing or an object.”

I think we have to take the “physical basis” to be another term for “thing-in-itself”, in which case we may never be able to properly have this conversation or know a physical basis for what constitutes a thing.

In the end, I can only intuit that distinctions exist in physical form, in the various distinct many things in themselves, but I think they are there, apart from me and my cognitions. But I do so intuit.

And there are also clearly distinctions between the ideal forms we make, but that is not the question, and that is easy to find, since I can make the ideal distinctions clear myself.

The overlap, to me, is the phenomenal world that we take as representing the physical form.

I am trying to equate where you said “as we know them” with “that we take as representing the physical form.”

You said “them”. Objects as we know “them.” The “them” here are the physical forms. There are now objects, and separately there are objects as we know them or as we take them to represent things in themselves (as phenomena).

So we have two different objects (things and ideals, or, in-themselves and phenomena), and call them both objects. We should only be calling one of them the object. But we aren’t having any luck at that.

Which is why I said in my first post this might be an impossible question to answer (or pose), and in my last post above I said that I am losing site of the question.

We are tasked by noAxiom with using words to demonstrate some thing, some physical object, in the act (willing) of speaking for itself.

So I posted a word of gibberish in attempt to create such a thing right here, now, for us to play with.

My only solution to poke a small hole in the phenomenal veil is to triangulate towards the thing-in-itself by comparing the ideals from other minds who together investigate the same or at least similar phenomena. We both point to “that pumpkin” and we post it our ideal of where pumpkin begins and ends, where some thing in itself over there meets human sense and cognition, where we sense something apart from the single subject, and together sense where “that pumpkin” makes sense to both of us.

This sounds like Kantian transcendence, but I see it as more than that (because if the things will, it’s own essence for itself), enough to try and answer noAxiom’s question as “yes, there are physical objects that are not the same as our ideal objects, and we can know these objects exist.”

Just takes some willingness to see willingness apart from oneself.

PS.
Maybe essence is will, in each thing in itself be it physical or not, and phenomena are these wills as object, where we attempt to capture the essence, the will of something beyond the subject. Maybe?

I think Schopenhauer’s will, taken up by Nietzsche, is an underdeveloped metaphysical wisdom. (Because Nietzsche shattered metaphysics.). It’s also in Aristotle as desire and telos.

Quoting Fire Ologist

If we can’t know the objects in themselves and unmediated, then all “objects” should have quotes around them. They are ideal only.

Bingo. That, I think, is near to what 'the idea' stands for in Schop's World as Will and Idea. And that goes right back to the origin of metaphysics itself - that 'to be, is to be intelligible'. Why? Because if it appears to us as 'a thing', its identity must be cognisable: it's vegetable (pumpkin), or an animal (cat) or a particle (electron) etc. That if it doesn't have a form (eidos, idea) then it's not anything. (I'm still wrestling with all this, though - there are many devils in the detail.)

Quoting Fire Ologist

My only solution to poke a small hole in the phenomenal veil is to triangulate towards the thing-in-itself by comparing the ideals from other minds who together investigate the same or at least similar phenomena.

I also see it that way - this is the basis of that rather post-modernist term 'inter-subjective agreement'.

Where I think the real issue lies, is that our scientific selves want 'the world' to be precisely what it is, when we're not around to see it. That Phillip K. Dick quote, 'reality is what persists when you stop believing in it'. Because of the enormity and immense age of the universe revealed by science, in which we appear as 'mere blips'. It's a view which attempts to exclude the subject and subjectivity altogether, so as to grasp what is 'really there'. But it's precisely that which has been called into question by quantum physics (the Copenhagen interpretation, in particular. Hence the popularity of sci-fi series appealing to the many-worlds interpretation, like Dark Matter and Constellation, to mention a couple.)

But to take your broader point - while I agree there are existing objects they're still always real for a subject. They are not ultimately-existing in the sense of being existent apart from the act of knowing. That actually has echoes of the Buddhist ??nyat?, which I've studied, but it's also notoriously difficult to understand. (I'm interested in the convergence between Kant, Schopenhauer and Buddhism. There's a marvellous French philosopher of science, Michel Bitbol, whom I learned of through this forum, who has many interesting things to say about all that.)

Quoting Wayfarer

It's a view which attempts to exclude the subject and subjectivity altogether, so as to grasp what is 'really there'.

I see three things:
The world which is there (for ages).
Us in it, the human subject, also there, but now there with.
And our perspectival experience the unique picture made of the other two, existing only in our head, filled with “objects” that are unlike the other two things.

Like the subject is there with its phenomenal constructions, the body is there with other bodies.

Like we can’t have phenomena without noumena taken up in the subject, we can’t have sensations without objects in the world taken up by the senses.

We need all three.

The “objective world” that is “really there” requires not just the ideals to the subject, but also the idealized thing without the subject (however that thing appears to me, or better, to us.)

Quoting Fire Ologist

The world which is there (for ages).
Us in it, the human subject, also there, but now there with.
And our perspectival experience the unique picture made of the other two, existing only in our head, filled with “objects” that are unlike the other two things.

With some apprehension, I will challenge that. I think it's basically grounded in the assumptions of scientific realism. Which is OK - so long as it's understood to be a grounding assumption, as it were - not a statement about the nature of "what is". I know that sounds far-fetched but consider, if the nature of objects is imputed by the observer, then why doesn't the same apply to the ‘external world?’

I'm well aware this is the point on which idealism usually founders, but there's a stock quotation I call on, once again from Bryan Magee's book Schopenhauer's Philosophy, as follows:

[quote=Bryan Magee Schopenhauer's Philosophy, Pp 106-107]'Everyone knows that the earth, and a fortiori the universe, existed for a long time before there were any living beings, and therefore any perceiving subjects. But according to Kant ... that is impossible.'*

Schopenhauer's defence of Kant on this score was [that] the objector has not understood to the very bottom the Kantian demonstration that time is one of the forms of our sensibility. The earth, say, as it was before there was life, is a field of empirical enquiry in which we have come to know a great deal; its reality is no more being denied than is the reality of perceived objects in the same room.

The point is, the whole of the empirical world in space and time is the creation of our understanding, which apprehends all the objects of empirical knowledge within it as being in some part of that space and at some part of that time: and this is as true of the earth before there was life as it is of the pen I am now holding a few inches in front of my face and seeing slightly out of focus as it moves across the paper. [/quote]

Bold but true, I believe.

Reply to noAxioms

You seem to still be approaching the problem from the wrong end. You're taking a cow and looking for a very precise (down to the atomic level) demarcation of that already defined convention.
I am starting with only 'this', an indication of some classically local substance, say the non-air surface (say a leg exoskeletal surface of a 0.1 mm bug sitting on a shirt) upon which the phaser energy beam is focused. Now this beam needs to perform its function to the entirety of the 'object' of which that surface is a part.

Like I said, I don't think this is the wrong direction. How can you possibly demarcate where some object ends without [I]any[/I] idea at all of what it is you want to demarcate? The questions are not unrelated and the what of the universal determines the demarcation of the particular. The question of where a particular Borg's feet end and where the floor begins requires a reference to what "Borg" and "floor" are.

If I understand you right, you want some beam to paint a particular bug, pumpkin, etc. and lable them "thing" against some background not labeled "thing." But this is never going to work. Individual things aren't what they are as discrete objects because of some relationship between them and their immediate enviornment that exists at the molecular level without reference to any broader context. Things are what they are as discrete objects because of the role they play in the larger whole vis-á-vis minds. Your "beam" can't determine that role only by looking at the object and it's immediate enviornment. The best you can do is program heuristics for finding such distinctions into it based on already existing demarcations, it can't "go out and find them in objects."

Godel certainly shoots that down, but perhaps it was already shot down by that point.

The widely accepted solution has to wait until the 1980s and Landscapers Principle. The problem for the Maxwell's Demon is that erasing its memory so that it can overwrite it increases entropy.

Reply to Wayfarer

The point is, the whole of the empirical world in space and time is the creation of our understanding, which apprehends all the objects of empirical knowledge within it as being in some part of that space and at some part of that time: and this is as true of the earth before there was life as it is of the pen I am now holding a few inches in front of my face and seeing slightly out of focus as it moves across the paper.

I personally think this is a view that comes around from accepting very bad, and often unchallenged metaphysical assumptions that Kant inherited from Locke and some of the other empiricists.

It sets up a false dichotomy between "things-in-themselves" and "things-as-known." The correct dichotomy would be something like: "things-as-they-relate-to-everything-but-mind," and "things-as-known."

"Things-in-themselves," aren't just completely epistemicaly inaccessible, they also can play no role in "how the world is" even outside the phenomenal realm. The properties a thing has when it interacts with absolutely nothing else (and with no parts of itself) isn't just epistemicaly inaccessible, it is metaphysically superfluous because such properties cannot ever make a difference for how a thing interacts with anything else. You might as well posit such properties as existing in an entirely sui generis, second sort of being, or as existing in an entirely different universe that has no connection to ours. Yet for Locke and many of the earlier moderns, the mistake was to think that such properties must actually somehow undergird everything observed.

Of course, smuggled into their reasoning is the idea that such "in-themselves" properties actually do shape all interactions (including all those related to mind). But to allow for this is actually to give up on "in-itselfness"— properties that are non-relational and "in objects alone" —and to start talking about relational properties grounded in interaction.

So the proper question, IMO, looks something like this:

We have the set of all the relational properties or all interactions in the world. We can split this into two subsets: those that do not involve minds and those that do. The question is then, why do we think the first set has [I]any[/I] members? To suppose it does essentially amounts to positing some sort of second category of being, one that must, by definition, be completely unrelated to the one we live in, where an entirely different set of relations exist. The relations in this first set can never, ever, affect anything in the second set on pain of having to join the second set, since such a relation/interaction now bears some relation to mind. But then what is the point of positing unrelated, second sorts of being?

The classical/scholastic arguments for Unity as a Transcendental property all apply here. To be is to in some way interact with everything that exists (even if relations between any two given things might always be "mediated"). But here we seem to be rejecting this and essentially posting two unrelated "types of being," which I'd argue makes no sense.

Of course, Kant is quite right that we can never experience the world "as it is like," without a mind. This is trivial though IMO. But I don't think he has any grounds for positing his noumenal realm, and even if he posits it, he can't have it actually making any difference for the world we live in.

There is also the whole thing of assuming ideas/perceptions/words/theories are not the " things through which we know," but instead "what we know" at work here.

(Side note: I also think some of Kant's arguments for space and time being creations of the mind are extremely weak. I'm thinking in particular of the incongruous counterparts argument. Chiral asymmetry is as much a property of shapes as anything else. I think he is largely stuck on refuting (a perhaps unfair) version of Leibniz and then taking this as a refutation of the classical tradition and relational ontologies in general)

Quoting JuanZu

When we say that objects are a product of language, we are simply shifting the problem from the external world to the interiority of language. We then say that there are objects in language.

Perhaps I used the wrong words. It has become more clear in the subsequent posts. What most everyone seems to have concluded is that 'object' is an ideal. Ideals are manipulated (expressed to others say) through language, and my initial post focused on the language and convention part instead of naming it for what it was: an ideal.
My attempts to find a non-fictional example of an object not being an ideal has failed. This is strong evidence for the conclusion reached.

Doesn't this mean that if there are objects in language, then there are also objects-ish in "the world external to language" that authorize and enable our language to function?

Apparently not. No example of this has been found, at least if you alter the statement to say 'external to ideals'. There are certainly things that arguably don't use language as we know it that nevertheless treat preferred groups of material as 'objects'.


Quoting Fire Ologist

It’s a fictional thing.
Problem solved.

I don't think there ever was a 'problem', only an observation, an investigation into such things.

But if you are grappling with atoms and void and finding not enough void anywhere between groupings of atoms…

Ah, 'sufficient void between groups', except that me and the ground one since there's no void between us. Human convention usually considers air and liquid to be classified as 'void' for such purposes. King Midas still breathes air, not gold.

Or are you saying a man can’t step into the same river twice

A river is an object by convention, and you step into the same river each time. If it's a different river each time, then it's also a different me each time doing it, so a man cannot even 'be' twice since, like the river, the material changes from moment to moment. Anyway, no, I'm not saying that. I talk about identity quite often, but this topic is not about that.
The 'river', and 'me' stepping in it, are both ideals.

Or are you just being contrarian

Pretty much everybody is concluding the same thing, so it doesn't seem to be an example of being contrarian.



Quoting Wayfarer

Thanks for looking at it, I appreciate your feedback. But I’d like to think that the essay is compatible with the canonical idealists, such as Berkeley (with some caveats), Kant, Schopenhauer, and our contemporary, Bernardo Kastrup.

Problem is, several people, (you especially) throw these names around, which is great for the readers that know them and their views, but I'm not one of those. I don't know the names, and I'm apparently discovering things for myself that have already been discussed somewhere by these famous guys. I'm behind the curve. I didn't bother with learning a lot of the history because so many of them were pre-20th century and the main reason I came to this site (well, the old PF actually) was because nobody seemed to discuss the philosophical implications of 20th century science, such as the nature of time, of identity, of the finite age of the universe, of wave function collapse and such. All these modern findings really put a hole in a lot of the older views, forcing their adherents to look the other way instead of face the new issues.

Anyway, point is, I don't much know the teachings of the famous guys, but that also means I am covering ground that has already been covered by somebody else. Relevant quotes are helpful. Names are noi.


Quoting Wayfarer

the idea that the existence of objects is intrinsically tied to the presence of a subject that perceives them.

I've come to agree with that, but I would put 'object' in scare quotes since the thing in itself (or better worded, the stuff in itself) is not so tied to perception. A subject yes, but not necessarily a perceiving one.

If one defines 'reality' to be what one knows about, that epistemological definition leads to proper idealism. Mind is fundamentally real (so still a realist position) in that view since without mind, nothing is known and thus nothing exists.

A standard scientific realist view is not about epistemology at all. It says loosely that there is a set of what is real, and anything not in that set isn't real. What is and isn't real cannot be known. MWI for instance is a hard realist interpretation: the universal wave function is real, and it evolves according to the Schrodinger equation.

I don't consider myself to be a realist of either kind since the reality of whatever is posited to be fundamentally real, say the mind or the universal wave function, cannot be explained.

I take a relational view where if state X is part of the cause of state Y, then X exists (is real) to Y. It is a sort of backwards ontology. Future things cause past things to exist relative to them by being affected by said past things. There is no objective reality with such a definition, no meaningful 'view from nowhere'. And none of the above has dependence on epistemology or 'minds', so fundamentally, it's not idealism.

our understanding of the world is mediated through perception and cognition. He argues that objects, as we know them, do not exist independently of our perception. This aligns with the broader philosophical stance of idealism.

Agree with this, at least until perception becomes fundamental, and fundamental properties are given to 'the will' like it's something more special.

Schopenhauer asserts that the existence of the objective world is contingent upon a perceiving subject. Without a subject to perceive, there can be no object. This challenges the notion of an independently existing material world.

No, it just challenges 'object', one of a list of words that can similarly be demonstrated to be ideals. That we put words to sets of material that we find useful does not imply that the material behind it is challenged.


Quoting Fire Ologist

The phenomenal veil, of our own construction, that cloaks and hides the thing-in-itself.

Maybe because there's only 'stuff in itself'. It's us that makes 'things' of it all.


Quoting Fire Ologist

I see three things:
The world which is there (for ages).
Us in it, the human subject, also there, but now there with.
And our perspectival experience the unique picture made of the other two, existing only in our head, filled with “objects” that are unlike the other two things.

Pretty much a realist stance, with some of the findings of this topic highlighted.

We need all three.

The “objective world” that is “really there” requires not just the ideals to the subject, but also the idealized thing without the subject (however that thing appears to me, or better, to us.)

An objective world, by definition, would not require a subject or its ideals at all.


Quoting Wayfarer

consider, if the nature of objects is imputed by the observer, then why doesn't the same apply to the ‘external world?’

It likely does. Consider if MWI were true, then 'world' right there is an ideal. The theory itself does not posit them. It's only a side effect of entanglement of states, and even 'states' becomes an ideal. There's not much left to objective reality except that one wave function and its evolution.

Bold but true, I believe.

That was in reaction to your Magee quote, and it seems to presume a more fundamental (proper) idealism than the one described by your paper or Pinter.


Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

How can you possibly demarcate where some object ends without any idea at all of what it is you want to demarcate?

From the lack of examples outside of fiction, it seems pretty obvious that you can't.

If I understand you right, you want some beam to paint a particular bug, pumpkin, etc. and lable them "thing" against some background not labeled "thing."

In a search for an objective object, yes, I want that. Seems completely impossible, so the conclusion is that all these things are but ideals.

Reply to Wayfarer

Bryan Magee Schopenhauer's Philosophy, Pp 106-107:The point is, the whole of the empirical world in space and time is the creation of our understanding,

I agree with this. We can replace “in space and time” with the “as we understand it” from your description above.

Because the OP asked about “physical world”, I am trying focus more on the thing-in-itself part of the equation, which as empirical, is the world mediated by senses.

To paraphrase, the below three say basically the same thing:

1. The point is, the whole of the empirical world in space and time is the creation of our understanding,

2. The point is, the whole of the empirical world as we understand it is the creation of our understanding,

3. The point is, the whole of the empirical world that we take as representation is the creation of our understanding,

The first puts the separate thing in it self in context of extension and temporality which are features of the understanding. The second focuses on the operation of the understanding upon the thing in itself (really saying the same thing more generally and not just in context of space and time). The third focuses on the operation of the thing in itself upon the senses that build the representation.

But they build the representation out of two sources - the understanding AND the thing in itself.

There is a tendency to ignore the thing in itself in the equation. Just because our understanding can only be comprised of phenomena, this doesn’t mean phenomena are only comprised of our understanding. There still is (or can be I should say) an empirical world absent perspective and sensation. Such a world-in-itself is wholly inaccessible, like each thing we would intuit about the objects created by sensation, but nevertheless must exist to build up all of this apparatus called subjective experience.

Quoting noAxioms

An objective world, by definition, would not require a subject or its ideals at all.

Are you utterly isolated, perhaps the sole being there is, fabricating each of the impressions or ideals in your experience?

Or are you utterly isolated, fabricating each of the impressions or ideals in your experience using incomplete and vague data from outside of you like a sort of mental clay? So you are not the only thing in the universe, you just cannot communicate with any of the other things, and instead translate and transform those things into nice packages for your own isolated world?

Or are you one of many physical things that occasionally has to avoid being hit when crossing the street to pick out a unique and distinct sandwich to be placed in a distinct belly to relieve a distinct and localized feeling of hunger, and you just can’t explain all of that clearly because of the second option?

The only way to save any knowledge of the thing in itself is to understand that we couldn’t have this conversation without something separate from both of us to mediate it. We aren’t using telepathy. We are using material objects between us. They exist with no need to declare their distinctions. Through things physical objects, we can demonstrate mental ideals that only other minds can take up. We make our own idealistic declarations out of those separate objects like when Intake the alphabet of shapely things in themselves and make the phenomena known as “alphabet”. But we who can translate sounds and colors into “objects” know something in itself is also declared when some other mind returns with a rebuttal that is not gibberish.

Quoting noAxioms

My attempts to find a non-fictional example of an object not being an ideal has failed. This is strong evidence for the conclusion reached.

Think about the embodied-mind. There would be a relation between our ability to grasp objects and the appearance of things as objects in our perception.

I think what you expect to find is an object unmediated by our categories, for example. But that is like saying we are going to perceive something without perceiving. Every perception involves an adaptation, an interpretation. There is no access to reality that is not mediated, but we can ask why our means are embedded in reality, and above all, we can ask why they work and what the link is between the world we are in and our categories, our language, our ideas, etc. Therefore, the world would have something ideal-ish that allows our thinking and our perception to maintain a certain continuity with the world.

Reply to noAxioms

In a search for an objective object, yes, I want that. Seems completely impossible, so the conclusion is that all these things are but ideals.

I would agree to that, with the large caveat that "ideals," (inclusive of the accidental properties of particulars) are generated by the physical properties of objects, which include (perhaps irreducible) relations to minds. So, I think that is the right conclusion, just not in the sense that objects exist "only in the mind." Objects exist in as a function of the relationships between minds and the things that lie outside them.

Baring some sort of solipsism, ontological differences have to underpin phenomenal differences. This would be true even for Berkeley. And "physical" seems to be a good concept for denoting how these differences exist.

Reply to noAxioms

Quoting JuanZu

I think what you expect to find is an object unmediated by our categories, for example. But that is like saying we are going to perceive something without perceiving. Every perception involves an adaptation, an interpretation. There is no access to reality that is not mediated, but we can ask why our means are embedded in reality, and above all, we can ask why they work and what the link is between the world we are in and our categories, our language, our ideas, etc. Therefore, the world would have something ideal-ish that allows our thinking and our perception to maintain a certain continuity with the world.

This is exactly what I’m trying to say.

There is a reason we can speak meaningfully to each other, that we can carry ideals to other minds; there is some basis in a world separate from both of us, something ideal-ish or objective.

Just because we can’t be realists, doesn’t mean realism is not there. It’s cloaked.

Quoting Fire Ologist

Are you utterly isolated, perhaps the sole being there is, fabricating each of the impressions or ideals in your experience?

Or are you utterly isolated, fabricating each of the impressions or ideals in your experience using incomplete and vague data from outside of you like a sort of mental clay? So you are not the only thing in the universe, you just cannot communicate with any of the other things, and instead translate and transform those things into nice packages for your own isolated world?

Or are you one of many physical things that occasionally has to avoid being hit when crossing the street to pick out a unique and distinct sandwich to be placed in a distinct belly to relieve a distinct and localized feeling of hunger, and you just can’t explain all of that clearly because of the second option?

None of the above. Third option looks like an argument either for or against free will. I do admit the use of ideals in my interactions with the world 'out there'.

to understand that we couldn’t have this conversation without something separate from both of us to mediate it.

Agree with this. The separate mediation is apparently not a 'thing'. It is just physics, motion of material and such, having no meaning until reinterpreted back into ideals by something that isn't me.

We are using material objects between us.

Material yes. Objects, not so much. Their being objects is only an ideal, per pretty much unanimous consensus of the posters in this topic. Physics works and does its thing all without human designations of where the boundaries of 'separate systems' are. The need to declare their distinctions is only a need of the communicating intellects.


Thank you for your continued input. It seems we're mostly hacking out the same ideas with different language surrounding it. I'm not in the habit of articulating this sort of interaction since it's sort of a different way of looking at things for me.


Quoting JuanZu

I think what you expect to find is an object unmediated by our categories, for example. But that is like saying we are going to perceive something without perceiving. Every perception involves an adaptation, an interpretation. There is no access to reality that is not mediated, but we can ask why our means are embedded in reality, and above all, we can ask why they work and what the link is between the world we are in and our categories, our language, our ideas, etc. Therefore, the world would have something ideal-ish that allows our thinking and our perception to maintain a certain continuity with the world.

Agree with all this. Some comments. We have little access to reality that is not mediated. Reality itself has such unmediated access, but that doesn't qualify as perception.


Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

I would agree to that, with the large caveat that "ideals," (inclusive of the accidental properties of particulars) are generated by the physical properties of objects, which include (perhaps irreducible) relations to minds.

Some examples would help here. Are you only talking about relations to minds?
Not otherwise sure of what you're saying. In particular, what sort of properties (other than a relation to a mind) would an object have that a mere subset of material doesn't? What would distinguish the two cases? There is 'kind' for instance. Here is a relatively contiguous region of state X or material M, such as what a human would designate as a cloud. The atmospheric conditions external to the cloud are different than the conditions within it, and that simple change of kind from one region to the next defines a fairly natural boundary for a physical object. It isn't 'connected' (one of the attempted but failed definitions), but at least it is (more or less) contiguous. The more-or-less part comes into play when it gets less defined if there is one cloud or two smaller ones that are merely nearby. Physics obviously cares not about this distinction.

Quoting noAxioms

Agree with this. The separate mediation is apparently not a 'thing'. It is just physics, motion of material and such, having no meaning until reinterpreted back into ideals by something that isn't me.

So if you would admit there are two distinct people in the universe, but don’t see any distinct physical objects apart from your own idealizations, is the distinction you make between you and me only ideal, or do I have to have some sort of physics to me that you can let speak for itself?

Quoting noAxioms

I don't much know the teachings of the famous guys

Bernardo Kastrup is worth becoming acquainted with if you want to know something about current philosophical idealism. Interview here. (His organisation has just published the second book by Federico Faggin, who developed the first microprocessor before having a major epiphany and turning his attention to "consciousness studies". I read his "Silicon" last year.)

Quoting noAxioms

That was in reaction to your Magee quote, and it seems to presume a more fundamental (proper) idealism than the one described by your paper or Pinter.

Oh, I don't know. True, Pinter's books doesn't mention 'idealism' but there are 27 references to Kant. And there's a strong (if contested) relationship between Kant and modern cognitive science. It's actually very hard to get clear on what idealism actually means, but it certainly doesn't mean what a lot of people take it for, 'spooky ethereal mind-stuff'.

Quoting noAxioms

That we put words to sets of material that we find useful does not imply that the material behind it is challenged.

That there is 'material behind it' is precisely the belief in question!

Reply to noAxioms

Quoting ucarr

When we look at the premise: What constitutes an 'object' is entirely a matter of language/convention. There's no physical basis for it., we see that the interface connecting language with physical parts of the natural world is denied.

Is ‘object’ the antecedent of ‘it.’?

Quoting noAxioms

Well for one, the suggestion is that convention is very much the interface between the physical world and 'object'. Convention comes from language and/or utility. So the interface is not denied, but instead enabled by these things.

Does “convention” equal “A way in which something is usually done in accordance with an established pattern.”?

Are “convention” and “utility” the antecedents for “things.”?

Are you saying ‘object’ is a non-physical construction of the mind?

Are you saying the mind constructs an interpretation of the physical world, and that that construction is radically different in form from its source?

Does the mind_physical world interface come before the interpretation?

If the mind_physical world interface is contemporary with the interpretation, must we conclude the mind never perceives the physical world directly?

I know those questions are for @noAxioms, but they are so interesting that I want to dive into them as well.

Quoting ucarr

Does “convention” equal “A way in which something is usually done in accordance with an established pattern.”?

I think it does. But the point here is to know to what extent things exist or not due to universal convention. I would like to use the example of a few pages before: a twig is followed by a tree and then the combination of these two makes the forest. This set is interesting. I personally believe a set of different things are dependent on universal convention, for instance. Furthermore, if we are focused on non-material “things” like time, justice, property or democracy.

Quoting ucarr

Are “convention” and “utility” the antecedents for “things.”?

ucarr, what do you mean by “antecedents” here? I think convention and utility are attachments to physical objects.

Quoting ucarr

Are you saying ‘object’ is a non-physical construction of the mind?

This is a great question. I would like to know the answer of @noAxioms. When I exchanged some thoughts with him, he claimed everything object is connected to something. I guess he was referring to the construction of the mind.

Quoting ucarr

Is ‘object’ the antecedent of ‘it.’?

Ahh, which came first? The classic golden question. I think an object is a representation of reality which holds both primary and secondary qualities. I mean, we call the “object” the thing that can be measured, seen, colored, compared, etc. and other types of properties which make the object an “it”. So, even if I might be wrong, I would say “object” came first than “it.”

Apologies to all for slow reply. It's gets busy on some days.


Quoting Fire Ologist

So if you would admit there are two distinct people in the universe, but don’t see any distinct physical objects apart from your own idealizations, is the distinction you make between you and me only ideal, or do I have to have some sort of physics to me that you can let speak for itself?

I'll try to clarify. There are multiple fields, and a given description must be consistent with one of the fields. This xkcd comic illustrates what I mean:

The fields as I see relevant here are ideals, mind, biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics. One can use any of them, but the two in bold are frequently referenced. In the mental field, there are ideals, which are say people, forum posts, letters, sounds, etc. In the physics field, there are none of these things. Objects are at best particles interacting with each other according to physical law.
So yes, I am a being with a mind, and that lets me identify/name my ideals: of multiple people existing for instance, including myself (just another ideal). The mind is not fundamental at all since each field supervenes on the field to the right of it. Hard idealism stops the list there, making mind fundamental. I don't know which philosophers suggests that sort of hard idealism. I don't much care.

Confusion results if fields are mixed. For instance, there are those that assert that computers can't be conscious because their operation is nothing but transistors switching on and off, which is like saying that humans can't be conscious because they're nothing but neurons switching on and off. The comments are not even wrong because they mix fields (mind vs electronics say).
Of course, the people that assert the lack of machine consciousness are often ones that also assert that human consciousness is not a function of neuron operation, so there's that.


Quoting Wayfarer

one Federico Faggin, who developed the first microprocessor

What, like the 4040 or something even older? Interesting read I bet.

True, Pinter's books doesn't mention 'idealism'

Well, what you quote from Pinter seems to make sense, and if he never mentions idealism, then there's your significant difference between idealism and what is becoming fairly clear to me.
I never considered idealism to be spooky etherial mind stuff. It is actually fairly consistent, a version of realism (with the problems that come with that), and it simply uses an epistemological definition of what is real. There is nothing wrong or spooky with such a definition. I just don't choose to use it.

That there is 'material behind it' is precisely the belief in question!

I know. I didn't say otherwise.



Quoting ucarr

Does “convention” equal “A way in which something is usually done in accordance with an established pattern.”?

Pretty much that, yes. If humans find sufficient utility in a given convention, a word might be assigned to it. So you have one word 'grape' that identifies an edible unit of food from this one species of vine, and 'cluster' as a different unit describing what is picked from the vine, as opposed to what is left behind. We find utility in both those units, so two words are coined to make this convention part of our language.

Are you saying ‘object’ is a non-physical construction of the mind?

An ideal, which yes, is a construct of the mind. As for it being non-physical, not so keen on that since mind seems to be as physical as anything else. Opinions on this vary of course.

Are you saying the mind constructs an interpretation of the physical world, and that that construction is radically different in form from its source?

I'll agree with that even if I didn't particularly say as much anywhere in this topic.

Does the mind_physical world interface come before the interpretation?

Don't know what you mean by ';comes before'. That the interface happens at an earlier time than the interpretation that forms from it? Much of interpretation is instinctive, meaning it evolved long before the birth of an individual and the interface to that individual.

must we conclude the mind never perceives the physical world directly?

People have different definitions of what it means to directly perceive something, what the boundaries are for instance. There's no one convention that everybody uses.


Quoting javi2541997

But the point here is to know to what extent things exist or not due to universal convention.

This sounds like 'objective convention', and the lack of example seems to suggest the conventions are either human or that of some other cognitive entity. Many different things will find utility in the same conventions, so there is some aspect of universality to it.

I would like to use the example of a few pages before: a twig is followed by a tree and then the combination of these two makes the forest. This set is interesting. I personally believe a set of different things are dependent on universal convention, for instance.

That example was meant to demonstrate the opposite. If I reach out and touch the bark and ask how large 'this' is, am I talking about the twig, branch, tree, forest, or something else? If there was a physical convention, there'd be an answer to that. There seemingly isn't.

When I exchanged some thoughts with him, he claimed everything object is connected to something.

That was given a definition of 'connected' as 'the existence of forces between the two halves in question'. I didn't like that definition precisely because it rendered everything connected. There cannot be two things.

Quoting noAxioms

Objects are at best particles interacting with each other according to physical law.

Physical, not mental, basis?

And I guess the distinctions between psychology and biology and physics are ideal only?

My point is, you cannot speak, we cannot form an ideal, without some real distinctions apart from the mind on which we make any move, perform any act, posit any field, say anything like “particle”.

We may always be wrong about the separate mind-independent object, except that it is there, otherwise we cannot speak. Speaking places the ideal back into a separate world of objects (letters, words, sentences, paragraphs), where, like the other objects, they can either float freely among, or butt up against, or connect with, the world. These words only express their meaning in other minds. But they are still particles, or in a distinct field that is there regardless of my idealistic abilities.

Quoting noAxioms

If I reach out and touch the bark and ask how large 'this' is, am I talking about the twig, branch, tree, forest, or something else?

Why did we ever conceive of the notion of “object” in the first place? Why did we not always know “when I reach out and touch, I am touching one giant dinstiction-free object?”

Why would a “twig” or a “tree” confuse us when we touch “this”?

Are we constructing the problem AND constructing the objects that purport to solve the problem?

Quoting noAxioms

That example was meant to demonstrate the opposite. If I reach out and touch the bark and ask how large 'this' is, am I talking about the twig, branch, tree, forest, or something else

I think I understand you better, mate. But it surprised me when I read that, according to your view, the Midas example proves the opposite of what I say. Well, yes, if we talk about measurement, and you ask me how large the bark is, we are in different physical objects independent of each other then.
Nonetheless, I think we should not dismiss the fact of the “set” of the physical object “tree” and the physical group “forest”. I still claim they are all a dependent set. If there is no twig, there is no bark either to measure.
Imagine a building for a second. This structure encloses walls, roof, floors, columns, etc. If I talk about a “building” I also refer to all those elements, right?
Well, the same happens to a tree and therefore the forest. Whatever part I am referring to, it includes the sum of the set.

Quoting noAxioms

If there was a physical convention, there'd be an answer to that. There seemingly isn't.

Why does it appear like there are no answers?

Reply to noAxioms

Quoting ucarr

Are you saying ‘object’ is a non-physical construction of the mind?

Quoting noAxioms

An ideal, which yes, is a construct of the mind. As for it being non-physical, not so keen on that since mind seems to be as physical as anything else. Opinions on this vary of course.

Consider: a human individual navigates his way through the natural world. His perceiving mind processes the incoming data from his senses towards the construction of an interpretation. His interpretation is his mental picture. It resides within his cranium. As such, it is an internalized representation of something at least partially outside of and beyond the dimensions of his cranium.

Do the material details of the natural world constrain to some measurable degree the material details of the human's constructed interpretation? For example, there's a tree that the man sees outside of his house. If we can understand that the tree, as an independent material detail of an independent reality beyond the dimensions of the man's cranium, has a height of ten feet, whereas the man's house has a height of fifteen feet, can we conclude that the constructed interpretation within the man's cranium will likewise depict a tree with a height shorter than the height of the house?

If we arrive at this conclusion, do we know that the constructed interpretation has an analogical relationship with the independent and external world?

Can we answer "yes," the independent and external world does indeed constrain to some measurable degree the material details of the human's constructed interpretation?

Reply to javi2541997

Quoting ucarr

Are “convention” and “utility” the antecedents for “things.”?

Quoting javi2541997

ucarr, what do you mean by “antecedents” here? I think convention and utility are attachments to physical objects.

Okay. Let's look at my dialog with noAxiom once again:

Reply to noAxioms

Quoting ucarr

When we look at the premise: What constitutes an 'object' is entirely a matter of language/convention. There's no physical basis for it., we see that the interface connecting language with physical parts of the natural world is denied.

Quoting ucarr

...we see that the interface connecting cognitive language with physical parts of the natural world is denied.

Quoting ucarr

This denial raises the question: How does language internally bridge the gap separating it from the referents of the natural world that give it meaning?

Quoting noAxioms

I don't see a denial of the indicated connection, so it's a question you must answer.

Quoting ucarr

How is my understanding of your quote a mis-reading of it?

Quoting noAxioms

Well for one, the suggestion is that convention is very much the interface between the physical world and 'object'. Convention comes from language and/or utility. So the interface is not denied, but instead enabled by these things.

Quoting ucarr

Are “convention” and “utility” the antecedents for “things.”?

If find it useful to begin an exam of the writer's post by asking grammatical questions. That's all I'm investigating here. I'm not yet examining philosophical content.

If the answer is "yes," "convention," and "utility" are the antecedents for "things," then noAxioms is telling me the interface between physical world and object consists of established language patterns interwoven with sensory (visual, tactile etc.) data. Words are signs with material details of the natural world as referents.

Some important details about how the interweave of physical world and object is configured is what I'm now examining.

Quoting Fire Ologist

Physical, not mental, basis?

There is no mental anything at the physics level. I'm talking about territory here, not map. Map is our only interface from mental ideals to territory. A real particle in itself probably bears little resemblance to our typical mental model of it.

And I guess the distinctions between psychology and biology and physics are ideal only?

Those words all refer to ideals, so yes, distinctions between them seem ideal.

My point is, you cannot speak, we cannot form an ideal, without some real distinctions apart from the mind on which we make any move, perform any act, posit any field, say anything like “particle”.

Unclear on what you mean here. Examples perhaps? I think we're talking past each other since there's talk of both ideals (references) and the referents, of both map and territory.

Quoting Fire Ologist

Why did we ever conceive of the notion of “object” in the first place?

It has utility, a general word to encompass a given subset of material without further classification into a more specific object kind.

Why did we not always know “when I reach out and touch, I am touching one giant dinstiction-free object?”

We don't know what is being referenced, but even in the act of reaching out and touching in a specific way, a convention is conveyed, and I would probably guess correctly on first try what was meant. Clue: Probably not the forest.


Quoting javi2541997

But it surprised me when I read that, according to your view, the Midas example proves the opposite of what I say.

Remind me what the Midas example 'proves'...

and you ask me how large the bark is

That's a lot different than asking what 'this' is, and touching the twig bark. But even if the 'object' is partially demarked by the word 'bark', it still leaves the extent of it unspecified. Bark of just the twig? The whole tree? Something else?

Imagine a building for a second. This structure encloses walls, roof, floors, columns, etc. If I talk about a “building” I also refer to all those elements, right?

Probably, yes. The word invokes a convention, and the convention typically includes all those parts, but how about the piles or the utility hookups? Where does the building stop? Does it include the furniture and people? That question was asked in the OP where I explore the concept of what you weigh, and exactly when that weight changes.

But in the absence of language, how does anything 'know' that 'building' is the object of interest?

Why does it appear like there are no answers?

Category error. There are answers, but not in the wrong category.


Quoting ucarr

His interpretation is his mental picture. It resides within his cranium. As such, it is an internalized representation of something at least partially outside of and beyond the dimensions of his cranium.

Fine. That's a fairly concise summary of a physicalist view.

Do the material details of the natural world constrain to some measurable degree the material details of the human's constructed interpretation?

Yes. The mental model is built from perceived experiences. First tree, then he perceives the tree, and puts the short tree into his mental model of the local reality.

If we arrive at this conclusion, do we know that the constructed interpretation has an analogical relationship with the independent and external world?

We assume that. Saying 'know' presumes some details that cannot be known, per say Cartesian skepticism. I'm indeed assuming that my perception of the tree outside is not a lie.


Quoting ucarr

How is my understanding of your quote a mis-reading of it?

Maybe I'm misreading your quotes. I don't know. Given a convention, an object can often be demarked. Language is one way to convey the desired convention.

If find it useful to begin an exam of the writer's post by asking grammatical questions. That's all I'm investigating here. I'm not yet examining philosophical content.

Convention in this context is the binding of an agreed upon demarking of a specific thing with a language construct, a word say, but not always a word. Utility is used like 'usefulness'. There is utility in assigning the word 'mug' to the collection of ceramic that holds my coffee. A mug is a fairly unambiguous 'object' to a typical human, although one can still indicate its parts in some contexts.

Quoting noAxioms

There is no mental anything at the physics level. I'm talking about territory here, not map. Map is our only interface from mental ideals to territory.

If you say there is any level where there is “no mental anything” aren’t you pointing out a non-ideal thing, an object in itself regardless of the mental? Haven’t you admitted there is a physical (non-mental) world where objects (particles) speak for themselves?

Quoting noAxioms

The word invokes a convention, and the convention typically includes all those parts, but how about the piles or the utility hookups? Where does the building stop? Does it include the furniture and people? That question was asked in the OP where I explore the concept of what you weigh, and exactly when that weight changes.

Yes, I follow you and the sense of your OP. I remember when we talked about chopping the twig off, for instance. I know that it would sound silly to say that without a twig, the tree no longer exists, and therefore, the forest either. But this is exactly the trace I want to keep up! I think the example of the house is better.
You asked me: Where does the building stop? Does it include the furniture and people?
Of course, it includes furniture and people. :smile:
What would be the point of constructing a building, then? The building, as an object, precisely stops when it lacks everything above. The combination of the walls, furniture, ceiling, roof, and people makes the 'building', and when an element of the set is left, the building as an object is senseless. I wish I could go deeper regarding the example of the twig and the forest because I still see symmetry in both cases. 


Quoting noAxioms

But in the absence of language, how does anything 'know' that 'building' is the object of interest?

The object of interest is inherent in the building. The remaining 'things' are attached to it. They ‘know’ that the building is of interest to them.

xQuoting Fire Ologist

If you say there is any level where there is “no mental anything” aren’t you pointing out a non-ideal thing, an object in itself regardless of the mental? Haven’t you admitted there is a physical (non-mental) world where objects (particles) speak for themselves?

Yes to all, except maybe the 'speak' part. Not sure how you meant that choice of word.
'Level' is a better word than the 'field' that xkcd used, which was meant more as a field of study.


Quoting javi2541997

Yes, I follow you and the sense of your OP. I remember when we talked about chopping the twig off, for instance. I know that it would sound silly to say that without a twig, the tree no longer exists

If I point to a severed twig, I'm probably not indicating the tree, although severed twigs and such are very much still part of a forest, so barring a convention, what is being indicated is still questionable.

You asked me: Where does the building stop?

No, I asked where 'this' stops. I never said 'building'. Using a word like that invokes the convention, however inexact.

Of course, it includes furniture and people. :smile:

I'm part of a building if in one. Not sure if that's standard convention. Most would say the humans occupy it, but are not themselves part of the building. But my early example of a human typically includes anything that occupies or is even carried by the human. They're all part of the human. Not so much with the building. Different convention.

What would be the point of constructing a building, then?

Is it relevant? It could be. An object is demarked by its purpose, but that doesn't help. I point to 'this', and am I talking about the brick (purpose to support and seal a wall), the wall (similar purposes), the suite, or the building (different purposes), or something else (to generate rent income)
Still, purpose is defined by the humans that find utility in the 'object'. The topic is about an object in absence of such ideals such as purpose.

They ‘know’ that the building is of interest to them.

I don't think a beam of energy say 'knows' anything about human purpose.

Quoting noAxioms

No, I asked where 'this' stops. I never said 'building'.

Are you really sure? ...

Quoting noAxioms

Where does the building stop?

Quoting noAxioms

Still, purpose is defined by the humans that find utility in the 'object'. The topic is about an object in absence of such ideals such as purpose.

I agree. Human convention defines 'purpose,' and the building exemplifies this. What I don't understand is why you wish to eliminate such principles. As far as I can tell from this thread, most objects and things are defined by human conventions or other categories that make them 'interesting.' Are you arguing that there could be an intriguing object that lacks human ideals?

Quoting noAxioms

I don't think a beam of energy say 'knows' anything about human purpose.

Obviously, and I don't think it is necessary to go too far. What I tried to argue is that there are objects which are dependent upon others just for need. The furniture, walls, ceilings, etc. are attached objects to the principal which is the building. Otherwise, where would you put furniture? In middle of the forest? That would be senseless. You claim this is due to human purpose, but I think those 'objects' know the destination of its utility.

Quoting javi2541997

Are you really sure? ...

Yes. The whole point ot the topic is about when human demarcation is absent.

noAxioms:Where does the building stop?

This was a different context, meant to illustrate that even when a human convention is invoked, the demarcation is still never precisely defined.

What I don't understand is why you wish to eliminate such principles.

I didn't want to eliminate them. I wanted to show where they stand in the hierarchy of levels.
BTW, the heirarchy (ideal mind bio chem phys math) is kind of a human one. Different paths can lead to 'building' being meaningful, such as (ideal, cognitive entity, computation, electrical, physics, math) which means that our AI would probably be able to demark a building despite it not being a biological mind.

Are you arguing that there could be an intriguing object that lacks human ideals?

I meant to look for one in reality. Found plenty in fiction. The fact that they're only in fiction shows that such concepts have no actual physical basis, and 2) people readily accept/presume otherwise.

I don't think a beam of energy say 'knows' anything about human purpose.
— noAxioms
Obviously

Yes, obviously, except nobody complains when a beam of energy does exactly that in a fictional story.

What I tried to argue is that there are objects which are dependent upon others just for need. The furniture, walls, ceilings, etc. are attached objects to the principal which is the building. Otherwise, where would you put furniture? In middle of the forest?

But it isn't even furniture without humans to name them so. They serve purpose to humans. Your examples are of human made artifacts, which serve a specific purpose to a human.

So at the biological level, there are objects of sorts. Not so much twig say, but maybe 'pollen', which is a natural unit of reproduction to many plants. The beam of light, not being biological, cannot demark one pollen bit, but a different plant (than the one that made it) can. It's not an ideal to the plant, so it serves a physical purpose as an object, and not just as an ideal of an object.

Similarly, DNA constitutes information, perhaps below the biological level and reaching down to the chemical level. This is information (objects of a kind) without being ideals. So there are examples out there.

I think those 'objects' know the destination of its utility.

A sofa 'knows' it is a sofa, or at least where its boundaries are, or that it is useful to humans? in what way does that make sense?

Quoting noAxioms

Yes. The whole point of the topic is about when human demarcation is absent.

:up:

Quoting noAxioms

But it isn't even furniture without humans to name them so. They serve purpose to humans. Your examples are of human made artifacts, which serve a specific purpose to a human.

I agree. All of those objects serve a purpose for humans, but I think this is not the main point of my argument. Although they are dependent on human purposes, they are necessarily part of a house. I mean, you would not put a sofa or a fridge in the moon, just as a twig would not flourish randomly in a corridor. We can imagine in the abstract, but I think there should be a basic sense in order to attach things to others. You claim (if I am not mistaken) that their ‘attachment’ serves human purposes, but I still believe they have intrinsic value. I will not light up a candle in the sun. Would you? How will the latter satisfy my purpose? 


Quoting noAxioms

A sofa 'knows' it is a sofa, or at least where its boundaries are, or that it is useful to humans? in what way does that make sense?

But why should everything be useful to us? Didn’t you ever think of the pure lonely existence of that sofa?
Consider what happens if a nuclear bomb destroys all of human life and leaves only that sofa. Do you believe the sofa will lose its sense since it will no longer meet a human need?

Quoting javi2541997

All of those objects serve a purpose for humans, but I think this is not the main point of my argument. Although they are dependent on human purposes, they are necessarily part of a house.

I don't get your point at all. Perhaps a summary is in order. Without people,there is no house at all, just a collection of material, not particularly a bounded one either. It's a house only because humans consider it to be one.

You use the word 'flourish' in your post, which seems only something that reproduces does (not necessarily a life form). I don't see meaning of that word at lower levels.

And yes,the last candle I lit up was in the sun, just a coincidence

Didn’t you ever think of the pure lonely existence of that sofa?

All I'm worried about is what demarks objects in the absence of a name. Calling something a sofa automatically invokes a convention. I am trying to find object in absence of human convention. What use humans have in one object doesn't seem to come into relevance in pursuit of that investigation.

Consider what happens if a nuclear bomb destroys all of human life and leaves only that sofa. Do you believe the sofa will lose its sense since it will no longer meet a human need?

No, I don't think a sofa has a sense of anything. There is still the narrator of the story about the bomb that is giving the object a name. But what if it isn't named at all?