Matter Thinks

The Objective Gap September 25, 2009

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

1. substance
2. an observer
3. 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.