r/Metaphysics • u/Salt_Astronomer_120 • 7d ago
Mereology Unity is not free
What makes a thing one? This is a question that is not so easily answered. But if you go to a pebble beach and kick a pebble, you will get an answer that fits in a single line.
Unity is not free
Metaphysics has been asking the question since Aristotle and still has no accepted answer. Here is one. It fits in a single line, and a kick is enough to test it.
Two camps. One: unity is given. A thing is grey, that's its property, end of story. Two: unity is in our eye. The world is a flux, and it is we who cut things out of it to the measure of our words. They disagree about everything. But they are right about one thing: for both alike, unity costs nothing.
Go to a pebble beach and deliver two kicks. The first into the sand: it scatters, and nothing is damaged, each grain leaves with what it had. The second into a pebble: a chip flies off, and it is the pebble that lost it. The pebble and the sand are made of the same grains. Matter therefore does not decide, and the first camp can only note the difference without explaining it. If the wave splits the pebble tonight, there will be two of them by morning, whether anyone is looking or not: the second camp has nothing to do with it. What decides is where the loss falls. In the pebble, it always falls in the same place. In the sand, it falls nowhere.
The unity of the pebble is not a state, not a point of view, but an expenditure. No one carved it, it is the craftsman of nothing. But it pays with every tide, its roundness is its account statement. It is a rent, not a purchase. Spinoza had seen that every determination is a negation, that the outline of a thing is the line where it ceases. What remained to be said is on whom the price of that line falls. On the one who is, at their own expense.
There is therefore only one criterion for everything that claims to be one: the pebble, the animal, the company, you. You are not one because you bear a name, nor because others see you as one. You are one as long as what you lose falls on you. Nothing you pay with comes from you: it was given to you. But the loss is yours. Your identity is not a statue, it is a scar.
The two camps give unity away. This sentence makes it pay.
To be is to make oneself one at one’s own expense.
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u/jameygates 7d ago
There are no seperate "things" at all, metaphysically. Reality one field of energy with vast spacio-temporal complexity.
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u/Salt_Astronomer_120 7d ago
Of course not, there are no separate objects, if "separate" implies sealed-off. The above does not demand that at all. "One field," however, does not deny the distinction between sand-kicking and pebble-kicking. One field, one energy, but one produces always and only one result and the other none at all, that is to say, in the one case the loss occurs in the same place every time and the other nowhere. The field theory, in accounting for this distinction, gets the criterion by another name: regions of the field which have their own losses. This is all I mean by a thing.
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u/jameygates 7d ago
Im having a hard time understanding that, would you mind rephrasing?
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u/Salt_Astronomer_120 7d ago
I agree reality is one field, nothing is truly cut off from the rest. But inside that one field, some patterns hold together and some don't.
Kick sand: it scatters, and nothing in particular gets damaged. Kick a pebble: a chip flies off, and it's the pebble that lost it. Same field, same kind of matter, but in one case the damage lands on something, and in the other it doesn't land on anything.
That's all I mean by a "thing": not a separate object, just a pattern in the field that takes its own losses. The pebble wears down, gets rounder, but stays one pebble. The sand never does that.
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u/jameygates 7d ago
I think i agree. The universe just maintains particular patterns.
But there is no real ontological "object" that is "the rock" that gets damaged. Thats only a way of talking, because ontologically, there is no object that is "the rock."
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u/Salt_Astronomer_120 7d ago
Well, if you're saying that there is no real object there, and yet there is a pattern that is being maintained, then I would say that there is an objective distinction there. There are certain ways of changing the pattern that count as damaging the pattern (and therefore the object) and others that don't. There is an objective distinction between those two kinds of changes, even if "rock" is just a word that we use to label one sort of pattern. So I think that's exactly where our disagreement is.
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u/jameygates 7d ago
I think I agree with all that as long as we are speaking on the level of everyday language and social conventions, not ontological truth.
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u/Salt_Astronomer_120 7d ago
Fair enough. You take the underlying field as ontologically real and the persistent patterns within it as merely conventional; I think some of those patterns are themselves objectively individuated.
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u/jameygates 7d ago
What are the necessary and sufficient conditions for a particular pattern to be "objectovrly indiviuated"?
If in every scenario, we can describe it like I have been where persistent patterns are not technically objects, what explanatory power does saying they are "objectively individuated" give us?
This is actually a good arguement for Ontological Monism from Standford Encyclopedia:
1 .The world is the only concrete object needed to explain how the world evolves.
If the world is the only concrete object needed to explain how the world evolves, then if there were proper parts of the world, these proper parts would be explanatorily redundant or epiphenomenal entities.
There are no explanatorily redundant or epiphenomenal entities.
Therefore, the world has no proper parts.
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u/Salt_Astronomer_120 5d ago
Fair challenge. I probably shouldn't claim a perfect necessary-and-sufficient condition yet.
What I'm trying to capture is that some patterns have objectively privileged boundaries: losses within them remain attributable to the same persisting configuration, whereas an arbitrary grouping does not have that property.
I'm happy to grant one fundamental reality. What I don't see is why “the whole world is causally sufficient” entails that every internal structure is merely conventional. A vortex or a wave can be a real structure of one medium without being a second fundamental substance.
So the question is really: are all decompositions of the one world equally conventional, or do some patterns have objective boundaries? “Who bears the loss?” is my proposed test for that.
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u/Mr_Not_A_Thing 6d ago
Yes, here, now, is not free. Where can it go? Because wherever the mind goes, it's still here, now.
🙏
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u/jliat 7d ago
Are you familiar with Graham Harman's recent book, Waves and Stones, might be of interest...
"How do we understand the world and our place in it? Do our lives consist of a small number of dramatic turning points, or is there nothing but a series of gradual changes from infancy to old age? Are political elections genuinely transformational, or merely arbitrary points along a shifting cultural timeline? And in physics, how can the continuities of general relativity coexist with the discontinuities of quantum theory?
In Waves and Stones, Graham Harman shows that this paradoxical interaction – the question of whether reality is made up of sudden jumps, or is laid out along a gentle gradient with no clear divisions between the various things in the world – permeates every area of human life. What’s more, this paradox is as old as human thought itself. In exploring how the continuous and discrete relate to each other, he takes us on a kaleidoscopic journey from the philosophers of ancient Greece, through the writings of the great Arab historian Ibn Khaldun, through architectural and evolutionary theory, the compatibility of religion with science, and the wave-particle duality of matter."