Names are Objective September 29, 2009
Posted by Michael in Epistemology, Language.1 comment so far
What’s in a name? How does a name relate to the thing it names? This question has always fascinated philosophers, and continues to be fertile ground for philosophy. The view of objects I describe in No Boundaries and The Objective Gap casts the problem of names in a new light.
A name clearly is a property; the question has been, a property of what exactly. This becomes a problem when we consider the names of fictional characters, cases of mistaken identity and other situations where the exact thing being named is ambiguous, incorrect or even nonexistent. To address this problem, many philosophers have turned to exotic ideas such as many worlds theories and modal logic.
From an object-oriented point of view, however, the source of the problem is clear: the objective gap. Names are rigid designators of objects, not substance. An object is a mental construction which is imprecisely, incompletely and tentatively mapped to reality. The object itself always exists, as an object; but mapping it to something real doesn’t always mean that reality is what the object says it is. The object called Santa Claus clearly exists, and might be mapped to all sorts of things — a picture, a guy in a costume at the mall, the words “Ho ho ho!”. All of these things are real, and they are all Santa Claus in a sense, but they are more something else than they are Santa — other objects can be mapped to them with more plausible claims of existence.
But mapping Santa Claus to things that aren’t literally Santa Claus is not only possible, it can be useful. It lets us judge the quality of the mall guy’s Santa performance — how convincing is his protrayal? How much like the “real” Santa?
Let’s say, though, that we recognize the guy in the Santa suit, and he’s someone we know named Al Jones. In that case we will apply another object, “Al Jones”, which is an identity rather than a role. So this mapping will be more exclusive and permanent: we expect the man to remain Al Jones even after changing out of the suit, and we don’t expect the man to also be Bill Smith or anyone else. In other words, we accept this mapping’s claim to existence.
But a funny thing happens at that point. Instead of judging flesh-and-blood Al Jones against the “Al Jones” object, the way we judged him against the “Santa Claus” object, we judge the “Al Jones” object against Al Jones. That is, we compare the object to our perceptions, and if there’s a problem we modify the object to match the perceptions, or throw it out.
So if we walk up to Santa and find out we were wrong, and see that it’s actually Bill Smith in the Santa suit, we must unmap “Al Jones” and map “Bill Smith” instead. This has no impact on the existence of the real Al Jones or the real Bill Smith, or for that matter the “Al Jones” or and “Bill Smith” objects. Ontologically, nothing has changed. All that changed was the mapping.
In many ways, this view is resembles contextualism, only as an ontology rather than an epistemology. Contextualism says that what we can claim to know depends on the context. An object-oriented ontology says that we what we can claim exists depends on the context, context in this case meaning the selected object mapping. In particular, we cannot say that an object exists based purely on its own properties. Those properties were selected on the basis of a mapping, and other properties were not selected. To justify our belief in the object we have to look at the whole picture.
In this way, objects are like shadows. A shadow exists only by virtue of non-shadow; if there weren’t light to be obstructed, there wouldn’t be a shadow. A shadow is a subtraction.
The process of deciding what exists is also largely a process of subtraction, of removing noise so we can detect the signal. There are an infinite number of things that might exist, and many, many that might plausibly exist at any moment, so many that we must eliminate huge numbers of them at every turn.
But we also have the power to use mappings that don’t completely fit reality, but are nevertheless useful — metaphors, analogies, figures of speech. In such cases, the object’s properties are more valuable than its claim to existence, so the later is disclaimed.
Logical propositions are in this category. To reason about an object, knowing its properties is more important than whether or not it exists. In fact, you could say that much of the power of classical logic is precisely the ability to reason about things that you’re not sure really exist, or even know for a fact don’t exist — things that lay in the future, for example.
The Objective Gap September 25, 2009
Posted by Michael in Ontology.1 comment so far
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.— William Shakespeare, Midsummer Night’s Dream
I create objects for a living. My profession is programming, and my technique of choice is object-oriented programming. OOP, as it is affectionately known, has been dominant in the software engineering field for close to a quarter century. There are many reasons for this. Chief among them is the fact that humans naturally understand things in terms of objects.
(Side note: programs are written primarily for humans, not computers. If a program cannot be understood by a computer because of syntax errors or other reasons, the programmer soon finds out, typically getting a detailed error message stating the precise location and nature of the error. So errors of human-computer communication are more often than not quickly detected and easily fixed. However, if the human-human communication function of a program fails, i.e., if the program cannot be understood by human programmers, it can’t be maintained or extended or reused, and so is destined to become worthless, even if it works to begin with.)
Objects are an excellent way of reducing large, complex data sets into simple models with only a few data points — a name, a category and a bundle of properties. Simplification of this sort is essential for human understanding because the bandwidth of human consciousness is so low — under a hundred bits per second, according to psychological researchers (thus the well-known rule of seven: a typical human being can think about a maximum of roughly seven things at once, which is why effective powerpoint presentations seldom have more than seven points per screen).
Objects can be viewed as a form of digitization — that is, intentionally lossy compression. The point is to lose the noise. We assign an object a color, and a million data points become one. In truth, except maybe for lasers, objects have no single color. Every photon reflected or radiated by the object has a color. So we filter and combine and average and otherwise process the sample of photons we detect, and in so doing boil down all this data to a single color. So the color of an object is a computed value.
One a priori requirement of this process is deciding which photons, out of all the photons we detect, belong to the object whose color we are computing. This is an a priori requirement since the data itself does not come to us labeled or organized by object — before we can say anything about the physical properties of an object, including whether it even exists, we need some empirical data about the object, and in order to have that we need to somehow decide which data out of all the data we have is about that object.
The visual systems of animals, including humans, have evolved to do precisely this. The process is not completely understood by any means, but it clearly begins in the eye. The receptors in the eye come in clusters, and many of the clusters specifically detect boundaries — linear demarcations between areas of sharp contrast. That such complex systems evolved is clear proof of the functional value, and validity, of defining boundaries in this way. Nonetheless, it’s undeniable that the boundary comes before the object. The object exists in our mind only because we have identified a boundary. And since the properties of the object depend on the boundary, they cannot properly be said to be inherent in the object. They, and the object, may be inherent in the boundary we have chosen, but first that choice must occur.
In short, we don’t perceive objects; we perceive substance, we divide substance into objects, and we assign the perceptions to the objects. Therefore, before objects can exist there needs to be
- substance
- an observer
- perception
Substance comes first. Substance enables perception, perception enables objects. There is a gap between substance and objects, which I will call the objective gap.
Note that this is not the same as the idea that our perceptions are of representations of reality rather than reality. That line of thinking does not challenge the existence of objects in the real world; it simply denies that we can directly perceive them. The objective gap is not about perception; it’s about objects themselves. Substance is not made out of objects.
Note also that the objective gap doesn’t require that objects be vague. On the contrary, an object can be more precise than any of our perceptions can possibly warrant. The vagueness is in the mapping of objects to substance.
No Boundaries September 22, 2009
Posted by Michael in Ontology.2 comments
Boundaries as we conceive them do not exist in the real world.
The evidence for this is abundant. In summary:
- Boundaries are fractal and fuzzy.
- Boundaries are unknowable.
- Boundaries are immaterial (because they are functional).
- Boundaries are unnecessary (there are boundary-free ways of organizing perceptions and understanding reality).
The first assertion has to do with the empirically observed properties of objects at their boundaries. Look at any natural object through a high-powered microscope; you will see something closer to a landscape than the straight lines or smooth surfaces you see at a casual glance. Not only that, but, just like a landscape, if you zoom in further you find yet more details. As Benoit Mandelbrot pointed out regarding the length of the coastline of Britain, the shape and length of the boundary of any object depends on the length of your yardstick. Geometrically precise boundaries above the molecular scale are virtually nonexistent. Real objects have fractal boundaries.
Not only that, but they are uncertain as well. In the real world, objects are constantly changing — wearing down, reacting chemically with the environment, even, if it’s a living object, ingesting and excreting. Catch any of these processes in the act, so to speak, and you will find ambiguity — bits of material in the process of falling off or attaching or chemically transforming. It doesn’t help to look more closely, either; the ambiguity goes all the way down — to the planck distance, beyond which it is impossible to know.
This leads to the second assertion — boundaries are unknowable. The uncertainty principle is one reason, but there is another reason which operates at any scale. Determining a boundary is a computation. Computations take time. So boundaries always refer to the past. If an object is capable of change during the computational lag, you can’t be certain the boundary you computed is still accurate.
The obvious objection to the above assertions is that they amount to nitpicking. They may be technically accurate, but are of no practical import. When you pick up a bowling ball and roll it down the lane, how it does it matter in the slightest if a few million molecules fall off in the process? It’s still a bowliing ball. It’s still the bowling ball.
All of which is true. But this argument merely states that the functional definition of an object is not subject to the problems faced by the physical definition, and that meeting the functional definition is enough to prove the existence of the object.
If you are a materialist, however, this amounts to sleight-of-hand. Consider this: what if all the bowling balls at your alley look pretty much the same, and you can’t tell for sure if the bowling ball now being delivered by the return mechanism is the same one you rolled a moment ago, or the one someone else rolled at the same time in the next lane. Applying the functional argument here, you could claim that it’s the same object because it’s functionally the same. But no materialist would accept this. The material comprising your original bowling ball didn’t disappear into a functional cloud; within perhaps a fraction of a milligram that same material is either rolling back into your hands or it isn’t. Its existence doesn’t depend on your knowledge of its existence.
A functional definition, in short, is immaterial, so cannot by itself justify the existence of something physical, such as a physical object or its boundary.
One final justification for the existence of boundaries is to argue from necessity. Logically, a physical object must have a boundary. So if we can show that an object exists, we know that its boundary exists; we don’t need to actually identify it. And, plainly, some objects do exist. It’s hard to argue against the existence of a bowling ball, for example — to resolve any doubts, hold it directly over your toes and let go.
But this is just a failure of imagination. It’s possible to conceive of other ways of organizing our knowledge of the world and categorizing its contents, including bowling balls, that don’t rely on objects. I will mention two.
The first one could be called atomic reductionism. An atomic reductionist accepts the existence of no object larger than an atom. To such a thinker, a bowling ball, like all physical objects, is a collection of atoms. All chemical and biological processes consist simply of the movement and rearrangement of atoms, as do all physical processes (apart from fission and fusion, which transform atoms from one kind to another but in a limited and predictable fashion).
In principle, there is nothing we can know about the things we call objects that an atomic reductionist can’t, even though in practical terms the atomic reductionist faces a probably insurmountable burden in managing the huge quantities of information required to understand objects at familiar scales.
A second non-object-oriented way to think about the world is inspired by wavelets, a very elegant and powerful mathematical technique for representing information. A wavelet-oriented thinker, or waveleteer as I will call her, conceives of the world as made of matter organized into fields, one for each conceptual category. The field for a category determines the amplitude of matter organized according to that category at any point in space and time. So, for example, there exists a bowling ball field, which registers high amplitudes in bowling alleys and very low amplitudes almost everywhere else.
To a waveleteer, every noun is a non-count noun, like air or water. “There is a lot of bowling ball here,” the waveleteer might say upon walking into a bowling alley. It may seem like an odd description, but it is just as valid as an object-oriented description. And unlike atomic reductionism, waveletism could be a quite practical and useful way to think about the world, undoubtedly more useful in some ways than the object-oriented approach.
Both of the above ways of thinking about things may seem strange to us, and one of them is indeed not only strange but highly impractical. But as far as I can see they have just as much ontological validity and explanatory power as our “objective” way of thinking. And they do not require the boundaries our objects do. So boundaries are not, after all, a necessity for thinking about the world.
Shadows on the Wall September 16, 2009
Posted by Michael in Ontology.add a comment
Let’s begin with ontology (where else?).
It’s time, in my view, for ontology to take into account the advances of all the scientific and mathematical geniuses that have come along since Kant. They have bequeathed us a much deeper understanding of the physical world than was available in the eighteenth century, one that in my view renders certain long-running preoccupations of metaphysics obsolete.
I propose that scientific advances have fatally weakened the skeptic’s argument — the argument that our knowledge of the world is inferred from appearances, and that there is no way to verify that this knowledge corresponds to what really exists, and that therefore we cannot really know if what we think exists is what does exist.
It’s not that science can prove that the real world matches our perceptions. Quite the contrary, it’s that science can prove that the real world does not match our perceptions, and therefore our knowledge must come from something beyond perception.
My argument is as follows. In the course of that last century, physics has led us to an understanding of the physical world highly at odds with our perception. Physics persuades us to believe in whole families of particles that we cannot see, behaving according to rules that we can work out on paper but bear no resemblance to anything we can directly perceive. Quantum mechanics and relativity are so weird, yet so reliably predictive, that they cannot possibly be products of our imagination.
True, there are always perceptions involved. But the perceptions behind the inferences of modern physics are perceptions of symbols, representing complex formulas, calculations and data from elaborate experiments performed with extremely sophisticated devices. It defies reason to believe that this depth and complexity can be explained as mere artifacts of perception. Something beyond perception must be involved.
I’ll admit that the above is not iron-clad proof. But I think proof is in fact possible. The way to do it would be to look at the mind as a computer, using introspective observation to discover its computational properties and limits, and then find experimental results that corroborate a prediction about the world, but are provably beyond the limits of our mental ability to compute, and are therefore not explainable as a purely mental object.
But that’s only a preliminary argument. It doesn’t matter whether you accept it or not, because science tells us something else that the skeptic already believes: the objects we think are out there aren’t really out there.
We really are back to Plato and shadows on the wall, but not for the reason philosophers have thought. A modern ontologist would say that the shadows are in our head, our perceptions of real objects. But it turns out the real objects are shadows too.
The reason is that we define objects by their boundaries in space and time. But matter broader than a molecule does not have boundaries (unless it’s a black hole). If an object is defined by its boundaries, and if those boundaries do not exist, then how can the object be said to exist?
This may be a lot to swallow, so I’ll separate my claim into two parts and devote a post to each: first, that boundaries don’t exist, and, second, that without boundaries, objects don’t exist.
