In physics, if A is part of B, it means it’s a spatial part. I think the “parts” of a conscious experience are part of it in some other way. I say this very metaphorically, and only metaphorically, but it’s more like the way that polyhedra have faces. The components of a conscious experience, I would think, don’t even occur independently of conscious experiences.
There’s a whole sub-branch of ontology concerning part-whole relations, called mereology. It potentially encompasses not only spatial parts, but also subsets, “logical parts”, “metaphysical parts” (e.g. the property is part of the thing with the property), the “organic wholes” of various holisms, and so on. Of course, this is philosophy, so you have people with sparse ontologies, who think most of this is not really real, and then you have the people who are realists about various abstract or exotic relations.
I think I’ve invented a name for my own ontological position, by the way—reverse monism. I’ll have to explain what that means somewhere…
Before I respond to this: how much physics have you studied? Just high school, or the standard three semesters of college work? How well did you do in those classes? Have you read any popular-science discussions of physics, etc. outside of the classes you took? Have you studied any particular field of physics-related problems (e.g. materials science/engineering)?
I’m asking this because your discussion of part-whole relations doesn’t sound like something a scientist would invoke. If you are an expert, I’ll back off, but I have to wonder if you’ve ever used Newton’s Laws on a deeper level than cannonballs fired off cliffs.
I come from theoretical physics. I’ve trashed my career several times over, but I’ve always remained engaged with the culture. However, I’ve also studied philosophy, and that’s where all this talk of ontology comes from.
Can you explain that in terms of physics? According to my understanding, ‘part-whole relations’ are never explicitly described in the models; only implicit in the solution to the common special cases. For example, quantum mechanics includes no description of temperature; we prove temperature in quantum mechanics through statistical mechanics, without ever invoking additional laws.
Certainly there’s no fundamental physical law which talks about part-whole relations. “Spatial part” is a higher-order concept. But it’s still an utterly basic one. If I say “the proton is part of that nucleus”, that’s a physically meaningful statement.
We might have avoided this digression if, instead of part-whole relations, I’d mentioned something like “spatial and temporal adjacency” as an example of the “modes of combination” of fundamental entities which exist in physical ontology. If you take the basic physical reality to be “something at a point in space-time” (where something might be a particle or a bit of field), and then say, how do I conceptually build up bigger, more complicated things? - you do that by putting other somethings at the space-time points “next door”—locations adjacent in space, or upstream/downstream in time.
There are other perspectives on how to make complexity out of simplicity in physics. A more physical perspective would look at interaction, and separate objects becoming dynamically bound in some way. This is the basis of Mario Bunge’s philosophy of systems (Bunge was a physicist before he became a philosopher); it’s causal interaction which binds subsystems into systems.
So, trying to sum up, we can say that the modes of combination of basic entities in physics have a non-causal aspect—connectedness, being next to each other, in space and time—and a causal aspect—interaction, the state of one affecting the state of another. And these aspects are even related, in that spatiotemporal proximity is required for causal interaction to occur.
Finally, returning to your question—how do I expect physical ontology to change—part of the answer is that I expect the elementary non-causal bindings between things to include options besides spatial adjacency. Spatial proximity builds up spatial geometry and spatially extended objects. I think there will be ontological complexes where the relational glue is something other than space, that conscious states are an instance of this, and that such complexes show up in our present physics in the form of entanglement. Going back to the language of monads—spatial relations are inter-monadic, but intra-monadic relations will be something else.
The basic ingredients and their modes of combination (not interaction, but things like part-whole relations) need to be different. See descriptions of the second type and I want to be a monist.
What are “part-whole relations”? That doesn’t sound like a natural category in physics.
In physics, if A is part of B, it means it’s a spatial part. I think the “parts” of a conscious experience are part of it in some other way. I say this very metaphorically, and only metaphorically, but it’s more like the way that polyhedra have faces. The components of a conscious experience, I would think, don’t even occur independently of conscious experiences.
There’s a whole sub-branch of ontology concerning part-whole relations, called mereology. It potentially encompasses not only spatial parts, but also subsets, “logical parts”, “metaphysical parts” (e.g. the property is part of the thing with the property), the “organic wholes” of various holisms, and so on. Of course, this is philosophy, so you have people with sparse ontologies, who think most of this is not really real, and then you have the people who are realists about various abstract or exotic relations.
I think I’ve invented a name for my own ontological position, by the way—reverse monism. I’ll have to explain what that means somewhere…
Before I respond to this: how much physics have you studied? Just high school, or the standard three semesters of college work? How well did you do in those classes? Have you read any popular-science discussions of physics, etc. outside of the classes you took? Have you studied any particular field of physics-related problems (e.g. materials science/engineering)?
I’m asking this because your discussion of part-whole relations doesn’t sound like something a scientist would invoke. If you are an expert, I’ll back off, but I have to wonder if you’ve ever used Newton’s Laws on a deeper level than cannonballs fired off cliffs.
I come from theoretical physics. I’ve trashed my career several times over, but I’ve always remained engaged with the culture. However, I’ve also studied philosophy, and that’s where all this talk of ontology comes from.
Fair enough—I will read through the thread and make a new response.
Can you explain that in terms of physics? According to my understanding, ‘part-whole relations’ are never explicitly described in the models; only implicit in the solution to the common special cases. For example, quantum mechanics includes no description of temperature; we prove temperature in quantum mechanics through statistical mechanics, without ever invoking additional laws.
Certainly there’s no fundamental physical law which talks about part-whole relations. “Spatial part” is a higher-order concept. But it’s still an utterly basic one. If I say “the proton is part of that nucleus”, that’s a physically meaningful statement.
We might have avoided this digression if, instead of part-whole relations, I’d mentioned something like “spatial and temporal adjacency” as an example of the “modes of combination” of fundamental entities which exist in physical ontology. If you take the basic physical reality to be “something at a point in space-time” (where something might be a particle or a bit of field), and then say, how do I conceptually build up bigger, more complicated things? - you do that by putting other somethings at the space-time points “next door”—locations adjacent in space, or upstream/downstream in time.
There are other perspectives on how to make complexity out of simplicity in physics. A more physical perspective would look at interaction, and separate objects becoming dynamically bound in some way. This is the basis of Mario Bunge’s philosophy of systems (Bunge was a physicist before he became a philosopher); it’s causal interaction which binds subsystems into systems.
So, trying to sum up, we can say that the modes of combination of basic entities in physics have a non-causal aspect—connectedness, being next to each other, in space and time—and a causal aspect—interaction, the state of one affecting the state of another. And these aspects are even related, in that spatiotemporal proximity is required for causal interaction to occur.
Finally, returning to your question—how do I expect physical ontology to change—part of the answer is that I expect the elementary non-causal bindings between things to include options besides spatial adjacency. Spatial proximity builds up spatial geometry and spatially extended objects. I think there will be ontological complexes where the relational glue is something other than space, that conscious states are an instance of this, and that such complexes show up in our present physics in the form of entanglement. Going back to the language of monads—spatial relations are inter-monadic, but intra-monadic relations will be something else.