(sorry for the unnecessary length. this is a thinking-out-loud sorta comment.)
pretty sure things are always physical shapes, even when they insist really hard that they aren’t; I’d also say that all physical stuff is part of some thing, but that the natural thingness abstraction scene graph of nesting of things may not be very deep for some stuff, such as the inside of the sun, which probably has relatively few discretely referenceable, thing-grade patterns, just a bunch of stuff happening.
anyway, let’s see how “things are when stuff’s shape is coherent” holds up on your test cases.
table: a set of shapes of physical object; an object is a set of shapes of energy in mass fields.
elephant: also a set of shapes of physical object.
carbon atom: also a set of shapes of physical configuration.
France: a different kind of selector, but still a set of shapes of physical configuration.
Martin Luther King: a person; people are shapes of physical objects; a person who is gone, so in other words, the physical object has diffused away and what is meant now is that person’s impact on the world, such as writing, speeches, etc; those writing and speeches are also parts of physical objects, but they’re incoherent in spacetime, in contrast to the examples so far. this is only because MLK is gone, and any other physical shape that is gone would have the same pattern.
Insertion sort: phew okay not sure about this one chief. I’m not sure insertion sort is often a whole thing unto itself. it’s almost always part of something else. but I guess you can say that the physical shape of insertion sort is shared by all instances of insertion sort. insertion sort is therefore a pattern in the surface of other matter.
Chess: i guess it’s a shared shape of physical configuration, sure. its precise definition would include matcher-generators for shared pieces and unshared team identifying parts, but ultimately all instances of it take a certain relationship in their physical shapes. it’s still a kind of physical object, but it’s abstract over type of parts instantiating it, just like insertion sort.
Unicorn: so far so good, unicorn is also a description of a shape of physical object. the way the set “unicorn” is defined accepts images as description of a unicorn’s shape. There are no species of genetically descended thing that quite match the attributes of a unicorn’s shape, but things that qualify as a unicorn and images that qualify as images of a unicorn have been made by human artistic endeavor, and both of those are physical things. it would be possible to shape genetics so that a unicorn instantiated with genetically descended parts could become real. (rhinos might be upset about this.)
Learning: okay so, learning is only a physical object if you accept, as described above, that algorithms are themselves patterns in the shapes of physical objects. learning is a set of changes of an object’s shape in order to make some inner part of the physical object share patterns with some external environment, potentially in ways steered to make the object’s shape have effects outside itself.
Seven: a basic shape of physical matter that can be made of many kinds of part; numbers are a very very general description of shapes of matter. Seven has to be of a type of part, such as successor function nestings on a page or screen or ram chip, or of cells. notably, this means that “seven”, “7″, etc are not seven the thing, they are references to seven. seven is satisfied by [. . . . . . .].
Towel: another complex grammar of shapes with default settings.
strand: a complex grammar of shapes but significantly less complex than a towel; notably, almost always a subshape of a towel. a component thing.
sidenote: towels also contain a lot of sevens (sevens of atoms, or sevens of molecules, or sevens of strands...)
wing: yep, physical object, covered by examples so far.
crystal: much more precise set of physical objects.
finger: see wing.
space: physical shape that is “almost no energy in this window”? or alternately, any physical shape within a given window or something.
diffraction: oh man uh I guess this is a shape?
The laws of electromagnetism: this is not a physical object no matter how hard I stretch it, oh man. I don’t think this one belongs in this list, actually. or, well, I guess the laws of electromagnetism are still a set of weighted possibilities of physical shapes, so maybe the ontology still works?
The first World War: shares attributes with france (large aggregate network of shapes comprise it as a thing), MLK (gone now, had lasting impacts)
coherent, potentially-reinstantiable shapes of physical objects with heavy self-connectivity. thingness is probably some form of clustering of repeatable patterns of components, such as how a towel is made of many possible grammars of strands and sequences of atoms.
seems like it would help to separate instances of things, references to things, and detailed description of the things sufficient to make a new instance, but which does not itself qualify as an instance of the thing. for example, “seven” is not a description of how to make a new instance of seven. (“four” is the only word lucky enough to describe itself in english; on the surface of your screen is the thing four in every place the word four shows up.) I’d also say 7 is not the thing, it is a reference. the laws of electromagnetism are a concrete physical shape which is instantiated everywhere, but the way we write down the variations allowed by that shape is a symbolic manipulation of patterns allowed by the math that describes so reliably what we see upon experiment. (and hence why we suspect that these near-perfect grooves in reality may add up to fundamental sameness such as living on a quantum turing machine or whatever.)
(I want an anti-repetition tool omg I repeat myself as much as any llm ugh)
I don’t think we know to what extent abstract objects need to share isomorphic neural structures that represent them in different individuals.
To present an extreme example, imagine a human and a hypothetical alien, the human and the alien both share an emotion that we can categorise behaviourally as “love”, but their neural structures are unrelated. In both cases we can use the same concept of “love” to make predictions and inductive reasoning. The concept of “love” applies to both.
Should we think they share the same relevant neural structures to share the concept of “love”? I would not expect that, entirely different neural structures could conceivably produce ‘things’ that are clearly analogous, we could say that here there’s no one ‘love’, but two different emotions, but we can say the same thing about many other ‘things’ that we consider one thing or their own, like different designs of table.
This might be the case for mental representations in humans. To what extent should we think that two humans represent things by having the same neural structures? I don’t know.
but there must be a shared property of both physical shapes in order to describe that property’s dynamics and call it love, yeah? as long as we limit ourselves to describing physical data using our abstractions, the impact of being abstract is that the shape of the concept is built out of a grammar that generates and accepts more structural variations—the grammar defining the concept “love” presumably involves component features such as “agentic caring”, which is a feature of action patterns within and between brains, those actions themselves a spacetime shape of energy transfer, or of “enjoyment”, a feature I would guess is defined by the satisfaction of agentic caring, which is to say that the networks of pattern in whatever brain you happen to have implementing agentic caring about another brain are in a state of satisfaction within the range of target shapes they’d like the cared-about object to take, this satisfaction in turn defined by lack of intervening action generated by the other brain’s state according to the evaluating brain.
obviously love has a lot of parts and we’re always hesitant to ensure we don’t miss parts, as love is a fuzzy thing and we’re never totally sure we’ve labeled it right.
but to the degree it’s the same, it has to have some sort of structural similarity. abstraction exists In terms of what patterns we can call the same due to shared features of their grammar.
Do they have to share a structure though? I was trying to present a possible exception.
Part of my point was that evolutionary processes might be able to create two different processes that are behaviorally equivalent. It could be something analogous to two machines giving the same output through entirely different inner processes.
‘Love’ is ultimately just a high-level description of behavior in living systems, people are even arguing how much our folk mental concepts are accurate descriptions of brain states.
There’s also the fact that we can seemingly abstract as much as we want the precision of structures to define ‘things’, specially with artifacts, like tables (because of the metaphysical concept of ‘purpose’). If we unrestrict composition, that any two instances of what we call the same thing share a common descriptive basic structure becomes trivial. I believe this is part of the reason numbers are so ‘useful’, they are such generic/basic/undefined constructs that is difficult to imagine an universe in which there’s no stuff that we can abstract into things to count.
If we don’t want the idea of shared structure to be trivial, we need to restrict the idea of ‘thing’ to something that is ‘natural’ instead of ‘social’. For an emotion to be ‘natural’, it means that it’s an accurate and consistent description of a brain state separate from other so-called ‘emotions’ with somewhat defined boundaries. I’m assuming a computational theory of mind.
Then, if we have ‘human love ‘and ‘alien love’, it might just be that the neural structures that identify ‘alien love’ are not anymore similar to ‘human love’ than to any other human emotions. Then the thing that they would share to be called “love” would be their behavioral effects, their effects on the peripherals of the brain-body system and their subsequent behavior. This might be possible through the process of convergent evolution; if it’s not possible, that means there has to be a shared computational structure for the same behavioral program called that we identify as ‘love’.
In a theory of embodied mind, the peripherals would be part of the mental process of ‘love’, so they would probably need to share a common structure by necessity.
You might be interested in Quine’s collection of essays Theories and Things, where he defends some version of “things as space-time regions”. I’m pretty skeptical of your version though; or at least, I’m interested in why 7 seems like an object.
chess is a grammar for physical systems, which I started trying to write out, before realizing I don’t know the rules well enough. but anyway it defines a network of position representations connected in a grid pattern with state transitions constraints; the chess grammar can be implemented by many physical substrates, eg a physical board with a grid on it, or a list of randomly shuffled board location names on a whiteboard—changing the projected geometry doesn’t change the game unless the movement metric changes, so I’d still classify the aggregate physical system as chess. It could be quite valid to argue that the variety of possible instances of that grammar includes many physical systems which are not single objects, due to binding the word “object” only to physical systems that have connected internal molecular bonds or such things.
Also, I don’t intuitive understand scientific laws as instantiated on physical objects by themselves. This might just be a double standard, but I understand scientific laws as epistemic states or descriptions of phenomena, so they are contained as information in brains and machines.
You don’t need to tell an electron how to electron but it happens on its own. An electron doesn’t proton, there are personalities/dynamics that it eschews and this is happening restrictive.
When you try to write claims in prose of english there is nothing restricting you from writing an inaccurate description in contrast to an accurate one.
For a complicated thing the only human endeavor that knows about it is a scientific one. There are not a lot of doorsellers that need to refer to binary stars in their job. “doorsales law” could be that getting your foot in the dooor before it closes increases conditions under which a sale happens. “scientific” in that sense is the dealing with the weird just for the sake of eruditeness (kind of a synonym for “paranormal”).
“Epistemic descriptions” is the better meaning, imo.
perhaps laws are the writing. but they describe a reliable pattern in the shape of the fields; the law is the math expression that traces the measured shape of the field out on a piece of paper or a screen, perhaps. to look up visual examples of the shapes I’d look up electromagnetics measurement experiment demonstrations on youtube or so. there’s all sorts of good rf visual demonstrations.
(sorry for the unnecessary length. this is a thinking-out-loud sorta comment.)
pretty sure things are always physical shapes, even when they insist really hard that they aren’t; I’d also say that all physical stuff is part of some thing, but that the natural thingness abstraction scene graph of nesting of things may not be very deep for some stuff, such as the inside of the sun, which probably has relatively few discretely referenceable, thing-grade patterns, just a bunch of stuff happening.
anyway, let’s see how “things are when stuff’s shape is coherent” holds up on your test cases.
table: a set of shapes of physical object; an object is a set of shapes of energy in mass fields.
elephant: also a set of shapes of physical object.
carbon atom: also a set of shapes of physical configuration.
France: a different kind of selector, but still a set of shapes of physical configuration.
Martin Luther King: a person; people are shapes of physical objects; a person who is gone, so in other words, the physical object has diffused away and what is meant now is that person’s impact on the world, such as writing, speeches, etc; those writing and speeches are also parts of physical objects, but they’re incoherent in spacetime, in contrast to the examples so far. this is only because MLK is gone, and any other physical shape that is gone would have the same pattern.
Insertion sort: phew okay not sure about this one chief. I’m not sure insertion sort is often a whole thing unto itself. it’s almost always part of something else. but I guess you can say that the physical shape of insertion sort is shared by all instances of insertion sort. insertion sort is therefore a pattern in the surface of other matter.
Chess: i guess it’s a shared shape of physical configuration, sure. its precise definition would include matcher-generators for shared pieces and unshared team identifying parts, but ultimately all instances of it take a certain relationship in their physical shapes. it’s still a kind of physical object, but it’s abstract over type of parts instantiating it, just like insertion sort.
Unicorn: so far so good, unicorn is also a description of a shape of physical object. the way the set “unicorn” is defined accepts images as description of a unicorn’s shape. There are no species of genetically descended thing that quite match the attributes of a unicorn’s shape, but things that qualify as a unicorn and images that qualify as images of a unicorn have been made by human artistic endeavor, and both of those are physical things. it would be possible to shape genetics so that a unicorn instantiated with genetically descended parts could become real. (rhinos might be upset about this.)
Learning: okay so, learning is only a physical object if you accept, as described above, that algorithms are themselves patterns in the shapes of physical objects. learning is a set of changes of an object’s shape in order to make some inner part of the physical object share patterns with some external environment, potentially in ways steered to make the object’s shape have effects outside itself.
Seven: a basic shape of physical matter that can be made of many kinds of part; numbers are a very very general description of shapes of matter. Seven has to be of a type of part, such as successor function nestings on a page or screen or ram chip, or of cells. notably, this means that “seven”, “7″, etc are not seven the thing, they are references to seven. seven is satisfied by [. . . . . . .].
Towel: another complex grammar of shapes with default settings.
strand: a complex grammar of shapes but significantly less complex than a towel; notably, almost always a subshape of a towel. a component thing.
sidenote: towels also contain a lot of sevens (sevens of atoms, or sevens of molecules, or sevens of strands...)
wing: yep, physical object, covered by examples so far.
crystal: much more precise set of physical objects.
finger: see wing.
space: physical shape that is “almost no energy in this window”? or alternately, any physical shape within a given window or something.
diffraction: oh man uh I guess this is a shape?
The laws of electromagnetism: this is not a physical object no matter how hard I stretch it, oh man. I don’t think this one belongs in this list, actually. or, well, I guess the laws of electromagnetism are still a set of weighted possibilities of physical shapes, so maybe the ontology still works?
The first World War: shares attributes with france (large aggregate network of shapes comprise it as a thing), MLK (gone now, had lasting impacts)
coherent, potentially-reinstantiable shapes of physical objects with heavy self-connectivity. thingness is probably some form of clustering of repeatable patterns of components, such as how a towel is made of many possible grammars of strands and sequences of atoms.
seems like it would help to separate instances of things, references to things, and detailed description of the things sufficient to make a new instance, but which does not itself qualify as an instance of the thing. for example, “seven” is not a description of how to make a new instance of seven. (“four” is the only word lucky enough to describe itself in english; on the surface of your screen is the thing four in every place the word four shows up.) I’d also say 7 is not the thing, it is a reference. the laws of electromagnetism are a concrete physical shape which is instantiated everywhere, but the way we write down the variations allowed by that shape is a symbolic manipulation of patterns allowed by the math that describes so reliably what we see upon experiment. (and hence why we suspect that these near-perfect grooves in reality may add up to fundamental sameness such as living on a quantum turing machine or whatever.)
(I want an anti-repetition tool omg I repeat myself as much as any llm ugh)
I don’t think we know to what extent abstract objects need to share isomorphic neural structures that represent them in different individuals.
To present an extreme example, imagine a human and a hypothetical alien, the human and the alien both share an emotion that we can categorise behaviourally as “love”, but their neural structures are unrelated. In both cases we can use the same concept of “love” to make predictions and inductive reasoning. The concept of “love” applies to both.
Should we think they share the same relevant neural structures to share the concept of “love”? I would not expect that, entirely different neural structures could conceivably produce ‘things’ that are clearly analogous, we could say that here there’s no one ‘love’, but two different emotions, but we can say the same thing about many other ‘things’ that we consider one thing or their own, like different designs of table.
This might be the case for mental representations in humans. To what extent should we think that two humans represent things by having the same neural structures? I don’t know.
but there must be a shared property of both physical shapes in order to describe that property’s dynamics and call it love, yeah? as long as we limit ourselves to describing physical data using our abstractions, the impact of being abstract is that the shape of the concept is built out of a grammar that generates and accepts more structural variations—the grammar defining the concept “love” presumably involves component features such as “agentic caring”, which is a feature of action patterns within and between brains, those actions themselves a spacetime shape of energy transfer, or of “enjoyment”, a feature I would guess is defined by the satisfaction of agentic caring, which is to say that the networks of pattern in whatever brain you happen to have implementing agentic caring about another brain are in a state of satisfaction within the range of target shapes they’d like the cared-about object to take, this satisfaction in turn defined by lack of intervening action generated by the other brain’s state according to the evaluating brain.
obviously love has a lot of parts and we’re always hesitant to ensure we don’t miss parts, as love is a fuzzy thing and we’re never totally sure we’ve labeled it right.
but to the degree it’s the same, it has to have some sort of structural similarity. abstraction exists In terms of what patterns we can call the same due to shared features of their grammar.
Do they have to share a structure though? I was trying to present a possible exception. Part of my point was that evolutionary processes might be able to create two different processes that are behaviorally equivalent. It could be something analogous to two machines giving the same output through entirely different inner processes.
‘Love’ is ultimately just a high-level description of behavior in living systems, people are even arguing how much our folk mental concepts are accurate descriptions of brain states.
There’s also the fact that we can seemingly abstract as much as we want the precision of structures to define ‘things’, specially with artifacts, like tables (because of the metaphysical concept of ‘purpose’). If we unrestrict composition, that any two instances of what we call the same thing share a common descriptive basic structure becomes trivial. I believe this is part of the reason numbers are so ‘useful’, they are such generic/basic/undefined constructs that is difficult to imagine an universe in which there’s no stuff that we can abstract into things to count.
If we don’t want the idea of shared structure to be trivial, we need to restrict the idea of ‘thing’ to something that is ‘natural’ instead of ‘social’. For an emotion to be ‘natural’, it means that it’s an accurate and consistent description of a brain state separate from other so-called ‘emotions’ with somewhat defined boundaries. I’m assuming a computational theory of mind.
Then, if we have ‘human love ‘and ‘alien love’, it might just be that the neural structures that identify ‘alien love’ are not anymore similar to ‘human love’ than to any other human emotions. Then the thing that they would share to be called “love” would be their behavioral effects, their effects on the peripherals of the brain-body system and their subsequent behavior. This might be possible through the process of convergent evolution; if it’s not possible, that means there has to be a shared computational structure for the same behavioral program called that we identify as ‘love’.
In a theory of embodied mind, the peripherals would be part of the mental process of ‘love’, so they would probably need to share a common structure by necessity.
You might be interested in Quine’s collection of essays Theories and Things, where he defends some version of “things as space-time regions”. I’m pretty skeptical of your version though; or at least, I’m interested in why 7 seems like an object.
chess is a grammar for physical systems, which I started trying to write out, before realizing I don’t know the rules well enough. but anyway it defines a network of position representations connected in a grid pattern with state transitions constraints; the chess grammar can be implemented by many physical substrates, eg a physical board with a grid on it, or a list of randomly shuffled board location names on a whiteboard—changing the projected geometry doesn’t change the game unless the movement metric changes, so I’d still classify the aggregate physical system as chess. It could be quite valid to argue that the variety of possible instances of that grammar includes many physical systems which are not single objects, due to binding the word “object” only to physical systems that have connected internal molecular bonds or such things.
I’ll have to check out the reference.
Also, I don’t intuitive understand scientific laws as instantiated on physical objects by themselves. This might just be a double standard, but I understand scientific laws as epistemic states or descriptions of phenomena, so they are contained as information in brains and machines.
You don’t need to tell an electron how to electron but it happens on its own. An electron doesn’t proton, there are personalities/dynamics that it eschews and this is happening restrictive.
When you try to write claims in prose of english there is nothing restricting you from writing an inaccurate description in contrast to an accurate one.
For a complicated thing the only human endeavor that knows about it is a scientific one. There are not a lot of doorsellers that need to refer to binary stars in their job. “doorsales law” could be that getting your foot in the dooor before it closes increases conditions under which a sale happens. “scientific” in that sense is the dealing with the weird just for the sake of eruditeness (kind of a synonym for “paranormal”).
“Epistemic descriptions” is the better meaning, imo.
perhaps laws are the writing. but they describe a reliable pattern in the shape of the fields; the law is the math expression that traces the measured shape of the field out on a piece of paper or a screen, perhaps. to look up visual examples of the shapes I’d look up electromagnetics measurement experiment demonstrations on youtube or so. there’s all sorts of good rf visual demonstrations.