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.
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.