Within the framework of onticology I’ve had difficulty articulating just what I have in mind by the concept of a “flat ontology”. The term “flat ontology” is, of course, derived from the work of Manuel DeLanda. In Intensive Science & Virtual Philosophy DeLanda describes flat ontology thus:
…while an ontology based on relations between general types and particular instances is hierarchical, each level representing a different ontological category (organism, species, genera), an approach in terms of interacting parts and emergent wholes leads to a flat ontology, one made exclusively of unique, singular individuals, differing in spatio-temporal scale but not in ontological status. (47)
For DeLanda, then, flat ontology signifies an ontology in which there is only one ontological “type”: individuals. Thus for DeLanda the relationship between species and organism is not a relationship between the universal or essence that is eternal and unchanging and the particular or the organism as an instance of the species. Rather, both species and organisms are individuals that are situated in time and space. If species are not eternal essences or forms defining what is common to all particulars of that species, if they exist in space and time, then this is because species, as conceived by biology are not types but rather are really existing reproductive populations located in a particular geography at a particular point in time. For DeLanda, then, being is composed entirely of individuals.
While I find much that is commendable in DeLanda’s ontology, where the sorts of entities that populate being are concerned, I’m a bit more circumspect. At present I’m not ready to throw in with DeLanda and the thesis that there are only individuals. I am agnostic on the question of whether universals exist, and my intuitions strongly lean in the Platonic direction of treating numbers as real objects in their own right that have being independent of human minds. If this is the case, if numbers are real, then I have a difficult time seeing how they can be treated as individuals in the sense that DeLanda intends and, moreover, I do not think that the genetic concerns that preoccupy DeLanda are relevant to questions of number, i.e., a genetic account of how numbers come to be– if, in fact, they do come to be and are not eternal objects –does not get at what numbers are.
read on!
Consequently, if, within the framework of onticology, “flat ontology” doesn’t signify that only individuals exist, what does it signify? On the one hand, it signifies the trivial thesis that all things that are are objects. Objects differ amongst one another having their own unique properties and qualities (e.g. numbers have a different structure than organisms, obviously) but they are no less objects for this reason. On the other hand, and more fundamentally, flat ontology is designed to stave off strategies of what Harman refers to as ways of undermining and overmining objects. In short, a flat ontology is an ontology that refuses to undermine or overmine objects.
What, then, does it mean to undermine or overmine objects. Of the two strategies, the concept of undermining is the easiest to get. Undermining is that operation by which the thinker attempts to dissolve the object in something deeper of which the object is said to be an unreal effect. Consequently, the minimal operation of undermining lies in 1) the assertion of a fundamental strata of reality that constitutes the “really real”, and 2) the dissolution of the object in and through that stratum. Lucretius is a prime example of an underminer. When Lucretius compares atoms to the alphabet and objects and states-of-affairs to words and sentences, what he is claiming is that atoms are the “really real” and that objects composed of atoms are bare epiphenomena that do not really have being in their own right (this is somewhat unfair to Lucretius as he does nod here and there to emergent properties that result only from relations among atoms). Likewise, when Plato distinguishes between the forms and appearances, he reveals a strategy of undermining. All the entities and states-of-affairs we see in the world around us are, under one reading of Plato, mere copies of the forms that lack genuine and full being in their own right. When Badiou claims that being qua being is pure multiplicity without one, he is an underminer, treating structured situations as mere ephemera that are not true realities in their own right.
Consequently, one claim of the flat ontology advocated by onticology is a vigorous rejection of this sort of reductivism. To be sure, the mereological considerations borne out of OOO dictate that objects are composed of other objects, or that a rock also contains atomic particles and perhaps even “strings”, but the being of each and every object is irreducible in its own right. While it is certainly true that rocks are made up of atoms, the atoms are not more real than the rock and the rock is not less real than the atoms or atomic particles. This is the “weird mereology” of OOO, so forcefully developed by Harman and presenting a real challenge and alternative to the infinite multiplicities of Badiou, that undermines our traditional understanding of part-whole relations. The atoms are objects in their own right. The rock is an object in its own right. The being of the rock is not shorthand for “collection of atoms”. There is a link between these objects but it is a link between distinct objects. Within the framework of onticology, the proper being of an object is its virtual endo-relational structure and that endo-relational structure is not a property of the parts that compose the object, but rather belongs to the object itself. The parts of my body, for example, are constantly changing (cells die, cells are produced) but my proper being as an object or substance, my virtual endo-relational structure, remains the same. The flatness of flat ontology is thus first and foremost the refusal to treat one strata of reality as the really real over and against all others. It doesn’t forbid or reject talking about interesting correlations among objects such as the relation between atoms and a rock or a person and the neuronal web of the brain, but it does hold that this is a relation between objects, not a relation between appearance on the one hand and reality on the other hand. In this respect, flat ontology endorses Latour’s thesis that “nothing is, by itself, either reducible or irreducible to anything else” (Irreductions, 1.1.1).
Harman’s concept of overmining is a bit more difficult to follow. Where undermining treats the object as a false appearance produced as an effect of what is alleged to be really real being such as atoms, overmining charges objects with being “falsely deep” and dissolves them in a more superficial strata of phenomena. What does this mean? First, when we describe an object as being “deep” we’re talking about the way in which no description or set of relations ever exhausts the being of the object. Objects, as Adorno liked to say, are never identical to their concept. There’s always something about the object that eludes any description or experience of the object. Thus, properly speaking, objects are one and all infinite in their depths. They can never be exhausted. The overminer is one who treats this depth as a false depth or a sort of illusion by treating the object’s being as really the result of something far more superficial. Thus, for example, Hume overmines objects by treating them as mere bundles of sensations. There is no substantiality, infinity, or depth belonging to objects, Hume claims. Rather what we call objects are just aggregates of sensation. Likewise, in the force and understanding chapter of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, the thing-in-itself is treated as an illusion of the ego or transcendental subject projecting itself into the experience of the object. Flat ontology refuses any overmining of objects that would treat objects as mere effects of actions, events, language games, intentions, signifiers, signs, sensations, a transcendental subject, economic forces, etc. In this respect, onticology and flat ontology practices the irreducible difference between concept and object. To be sure, language games, signifiers, signs, sensations, economic forces, and all the rest really exist. The point is that things cannot be dissolved by these other entities. The relationship between things and, for example, signs is like the relationship between a duck’s feathers and water. Those feathers are a real thing. That water is a real thing. The one cannot be reduced to the other and there’s always something of the thing that exceeds any of these encounters. That’s the central lesson of flat ontology: A refusal of our intoxication for undermining and overmining. Investigate mereological part-whole relations all you like, investigate relations among actants all you like, but do not dissolve things!
Bogost captures the central intuition of flat ontology nicely in his recent post on materialism:
I get the sense that many people misconstrue object-oriented ontology as a singular material affair, as a reductionism: “everything’s an object.” But instead, proponents of OOO hold that all things equally exist, yet they do not exist equally. The funeral pyre is not the same as the aardvark; the porcelatta is not equivalent to the rubgy ball. Not only are neither pair reducible to human encounter, but also neither are reducible to one another. In this respect, McLuhan is a better place to look for materialism than is Marx.
Notice Bogost’s skillful inversion of the difference between equally existing and existing equally. The two concepts are not identical. To say, as flat ontology says, that things equally exist is not to say that things exist equally. Both the sun and my coffee mug equally exist, but it is not the case that they exist equally. In terms of its range of effects, the sun has a far more extensive impact on other objects than my coffee cup. Both entities are, but it is not the case that both entities affect other entities to the same degree. There are a couple of points worth making in this connection. First, flat ontology is not a prescriptive thesis or a moral thesis. And this for two reasons. On the one hand, it is not the moral call to treat all beings as equal. These are ontological matters, not ethical matters. Each entity relates selectively to other entities and as such does not relate to other entities equally. If we distinguish between object, world, and environment we can see how this is the case. The world is the infinite totality of objects that exist, whereas the environment consists of the selective relations dictated by the structure of an object. Thus, for example, an automobile belongs to the world in which a snake exists, but it does not belong to the environment of a snake. For the snake automobiles might as well not exist. The snake’s environment is instead populated by all sorts of scent and heat signatures pertaining to mating and food. The point here is that the snake relates selectively to the world.
On the other hand, ontologically we want to, as Plato put it, “carve being at the joints”. If this is to be possible we need to recognize the inequalities among objects, the degree to which they unequally affect the world about them, if we are to properly understand the being of beings. Yes beings equally exist but they don’t exist equally amongst themselves. However, it should also be borne in mind that this determination of inequalities amongst beings is a moving target. The most humble pebble can suddenly take on maximum impact on other entities if it enters into the right assemblage. Drawing on Harman’s example from Prince of Networks, the emperor of the Roman empire can choke on that pebble and die, generating a whole cascade of consequences for the empire of Rome. These are variable determinations. Likewise, drawing on Bennett’s example, a humble tree can fall on a power line contributing to the 2003 Northeast blackout that had a whole cascade of consequences for people’s lives, economy, the institutions that provided power, and government regulation. Here it’s worthwhile to recall Deleuze and Guattari’s contrast between the games of go and chess.
Second, the claim that all beings equally exist is not the claim that all beings are the same. Beings, one and all, have their own internal structure, essence, or nature and these internal differences should be tracked and understood. The fictional world of Avatar might have an equal claim to existence with the sun, but nothing about this suggests that there aren’t important differences between fictions and natural entities like the sun, or that the two entities exist equally. Avatar produces all sorts of effects in the world as Adrian Ivakhiv has noted, but this is not to make the absurd claim that you can jump on one of those winged creatures and fly about as they do in the film. The film has a claim to being because it produces aleatory effects that exceed any of the intentions of the writers, directors, and producers and that can never be summed up by any of the viewers, but the differences or effects this fictional entity produces differ from the sorts of effects a natural pterodactyl would have if it came back into existence. The latter can eat fish, is very light (around 165lbs), flies about, makes all sorts of sounds, etc. The former can do none of these things. Part of ontology consists in the activity of regional ontology, and a big part of regional ontology consists in determining the internal ontological structure of different types of beings. Yes, they both equally exist but they do not exist in the same way or have the same kinds of causal powers.
Larval Subjects . 
February 24, 2010 at 4:09 am
Thank you!
February 24, 2010 at 5:12 am
This way you can’t delimit objects in number, because each composition ( a cup on my table + the Andromeda galaxy + … ) is itself an object. This is not so different from powerset constructions in the end even though one might frame them within time and space ( a doubtful operation given that matter and spacetime are not indepedent of each other ).
I hold this for a very bad result, not much different in quality from a contradiction in a formal system which makes all assertions true. The flat ontology ( just like the logical system with a contradiction ) turns out to be a self-trivialization.
IMO one should re-consider “overmining” and its constraints by foundations – and if you like it, one can also democratize it.
February 24, 2010 at 5:17 am
Kay,
Not so. We have to distinguish between real relations and relations in thought alone. Within my framework this spins on whether genuinely new powers or capacities emerge in the relation, i.e., is the assemblage capable of things that the parts are not.
February 24, 2010 at 9:15 am
Great post, but I have a question I hope you could answer. Given OOO’s anti-reductivist goals, how does it answer to the claim that atoms are somehow more real than a larger scale object because the atoms function as a necessary condition for that object (either causal, logical or transcendental) and that this relation of dependency is asymmetrical (i.e. we can imagine a world with atoms but without larger scale objects, but we could not as easily imagine a world with larger scale objects without atoms)? I am not sufficiently familiar to the work of Harman to figure out an answer to this question.
February 24, 2010 at 2:59 pm
Kalle,
As I said in the post, the rock can’t exist without the atoms but is something distinct from those atoms. I individuate objects by their powers or capacities. Consequently, the mark of whether or not an aggregate of other objects is itself an object lies in whether new powers or capacities emerge in this aggregation of objects. Think, for example, of a car. The car has many parts and could not exist without these parts. Each of these parts is itself an object. However, the car has powers or capacities that none of the parts have and is therefore itself an object distinct from those parts. Likewise with atoms and larger scale objects.
February 24, 2010 at 5:38 pm
Hi Levi,
Is permaculture is a good example of OOO’s flat ontology opposed to Delanda’s…
One term Michael Pollan gets from Permaculturalist Joel Salatin is Holon. From the Greek term ‘holos’ meaning whole and the suffix ‘on’ as in proton–an entity that from one perspective is a self contained whole and from another perspective is a dependent part (such as a car part). A way to help understand that permaculture is more than science–yes it is important to understand how animals are hardwired but just as important to understand particular animals are not static–a universal approach will not always suffice. This of course pertains to grass as well as soil… The holon aggregates with other holons but also inside other holons, or better yet as a Möbius strip of inside and outside at the same time, depending on point of view (the grass or the animal or the adjacent forest). Ecology, farm, species, individual, and parts all working independently yet assembling in non-hierarchical ways.
Or is this just collapsing undermining and overmining and missing the point entirely by introducing perspective–point of view?
February 24, 2010 at 6:09 pm
Hi John,
I’m not familiar with permaculture, so it would be difficult for me to say. For me the issue is not so much that objects are “more than science”, but rather that objects aren’t just their parts. I’m all for, for example, the investigation of how animals are put together, what their structure is, etc. But these are properties of that animal and the animal has powers and capacities that it’s parts do not have. I refer to this dimension of the object as its “endo-relational structure”.
February 24, 2010 at 7:40 pm
re. permaculture: I am not sure that the concept of holon is an immediate fit with flat ontology. I can’t say where Salatin derives his term from, but I think its use in the 20th c. largely stems from Arthur Koestler and then from Ken Wilber. It is true that Salatin and permaculture generally aspire to non-hierarchical praxis, but reading Wilber, you find that “holon” as he uses it fits into an unapologetically (albeit not simplistically) hierarchical ontology– ye olde Great Chain of Being, updated. Wilber of course takes this to be a virtue, since (he argues), one can’t dispense with hierarchy; there just is a hierarchy from quarks to atoms to molecules to cells to organs to organisms. Clearly this can still be made to fit with Salatin’s objectives, so I would imagine that it could also be worked out as fitting in with an OO approach; but it would take some thinking-through, and I’m not sure it would look “flat.”
February 24, 2010 at 8:04 pm
“…and my intuitions strongly lean in the Platonic direction of treating numbers as real objects in their own right…”
What are your thoughts on multiplicity?
Will
February 24, 2010 at 8:29 pm
That’s a pretty broad question, Will.
February 25, 2010 at 10:07 pm
Perhaps this is a silly question but I want to make sure that I am understanding this correctly.
As you have said in many of your other posts, there is a split between the an object’s local manifestations and their virtual or proper being. In this post you make the point that nothing is, by itself, reducible or irreducible to anything else and that there is no “really real” strata of reality, or no split between reality on the one hand and appearance on the other but a relation between objects equally existing.
Are we then to suppose that an object cannot be reduced to its virtual or proper being? Because objects can only relate in their local manifestations? By saying that an object has a proper being are we saying it has a “really real” or “more real” that is just withdrawn? Is the virtual a transcendental virtual that just does not exist to the same degree that a local manifestation exists but is the condition for its existence?
Thanks
February 26, 2010 at 12:31 am
William,
The virtual dimension of an object is not more real than its local manifestation. The local manifestation is every bit as real as its virtual dimension. All the virtual dimension marks is that there are more potentials open to an object than it manifests at any point in time.
September 22, 2010 at 1:18 pm
[…] that relies on humans to solve spatial problems which computers can’t. He also suggested that flat ontology might offer a key to our understanding of ourselves not as determined by a chain of genes and […]
July 4, 2011 at 2:54 pm
[…] science-technology studies, rhetorical readings, codicology, thin and thick description, flat ontology, new scholasticism, ludology, etc. — and let’s not forget the nominalists. And when in doubt, […]
October 14, 2011 at 2:45 am
[…] In Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture (2006), Alexander Galloway argues that a theory of realism in videogames cannot take the form of a representational model. An image-referent structure works fine when addressing photography or film; however videogames are a an action-based medium. As Galloway puts it, gaming “is not a stand-in for activity. It is activity” (104). The enactment that constitutes the game, in other words, is itself a significant event, as real as what it depicts. How, then, do we conceive of a realism that is not structured in a representational binary and does not distinguish image and referent? What would it mean to call a videogame realistic? How might we understand the mimetic function of media from the perspective of a flat ontology? […]
November 9, 2011 at 8:17 pm
transgenic animals…
[…]Flat Ontology « Larval Subjects .[…]…
February 20, 2012 at 10:49 pm
Nice post Levi,
I have for one never understood the thesis against Badiou that being is pure multiplicity is undermining objects, or claiming the non-reality of the one. There is nothing ‘epiphenomenal’ or ‘ephermal’ about ones or about appearance; ontology qua discourse for Badiou deals with being qua being insofar as one looks at the generic properties of anything without concern for their specific mode of appearance in a world, that is, without regard for qualitative determinations. But ontology is just one situation, among others, which simply thinks being qua indifferent pure mulplicity, since it thinks what is proper to all beings qua indistinct multiples. It is not to say that objects are not ‘real’, or that there is nothing to beings besides their being as sets; Badiou explicitly argues that in non-ontological situations the One is, and that phenomenology is about the doctrine of appearance. And the continuity of the two registers is articulated through a theory of atoms of appearance and the axiom of materialism.
To say that being is pure multiple does not undermine the specificity of objects anymore than the claim that everything that is constitutes an object with a virtual structure and local manifestations; just because one describes this as the general feature of every being, it does not follow that the specific structure of each being is rendered epiphenomenal. It is simply to acknowledge that ontology, at least ‘general ontology’, describes the features proper to being indistinctly from its specific differences, i.e. as an indifferent pure multiplicity. Just because to say ‘the cat is on the mat’ is not an ontological proposition, this doesn’t mean that the statement pertains to something unreal: ontology gives the most general characterization of being possible qua a set, and so it is not a doctrine of local appearance. But this is just what ontology does: it doesn’t rule out your capacity to distinguish consistency at the level of given worlds or situations as being perfectly real. Cats and parties are objects, they not just pure indistinct sets, But both sets and parties are real. Being appears in a concrete situation as objects with determinate features.
February 21, 2012 at 2:32 am
Daniel:
Where are cats and parties in Badiou’s philosophy? Anywhere? Even if you grant that they are real for Badiou—and I think you could argue just how real they are for Badiou—the point is that they are not *important* for Badiou. Just contrast him with Latour for a moment. Or Whitehead. Objects with determinate features subtracted from human and nonhuman relations are not the center of Badiou’s work, pure and simple.
Even if one grants your points, the task ahead remains the same: to develop an ontology in which being is not a pure multiple, but composed of discrete units at the maximum possible differences in scale and duration. Badiou’s ontology can only seem a strange abstraction from what is actually extant.
February 21, 2012 at 5:14 pm
@Joseph:
Cats and parties are objects; they are phenomena in worlds that appear in accordance with the laws of a transcendental and that therefore appear in accordance with laws of transitivity, reflexivity and anti-symmetry. They have variable degrees of appearance, There is an indexing of multiple being to the transcendental of the world via an identity function Id(x, y) which measures for the transcendental T the degree of apparent identity between any two multiples in a world: x and y. The valuation of differences of the multiple with other multiples is the phenomenon or the object in the world, and which determines its phenomenality. Existence for its part is the evaluation of the degree of appearance of a multiple with itself [Id(x, x)] in a given world, and whose value can range from minimal (non-existent) to maximal (highest assignable degree of intensity in a world).
The logic appearance takes the form of a pure algebra which relates at base atoms of appearing to atoms of being (that is, minimal components of localized multiples along their elementary composition as multiple beings). The correlation between degrees of appearance and multiple-being through the indexing of the transcendental is what is called a sheaf, in formal terms. With this in place we can define objects on the basis of the properties assigned to multiples by transcendental indexing and its respective markers for appearing: localization, compatibility, order, the envelope which marks unity of being-qua-object on being-qua-being, etc. This is thoroughly formalized and developed in Books II (the transcendental) and III (the object) of LOW, and his corresponding account of relation in Book IV. The account of change begins in Part V.
So cats and parties are objects, just like galaxies and battles. Badiou devotes entire analyses to show how things such as paintings, plays, planetary systems, numbers, the architecture of cities, and political demonstrations are articulated within this logic irrespective of any experiential determinants. The claim that because Badiou doesn’t speak of cats in particular that goes to show some kind of weakness in the descriptive power of his account strikes me as utterly demagogic in tenor: where are painted toenails, coriander infused beers, and pistachio shells in Hegel? Or in OOO for that matter? What should we make of the fact no philosopher ever talks about them? Should we take that as evidence that because I bring them up in an arbitrarily conjured up litany I am better equipped philosophically to describe them than Hegel, Badiou, or Harman? Or that those philosophers cannot give them their do, since they do not? What’s the point in pointing out those entities are not anywhere Badiou’s texts? I can similary produce an infinite, veritable varied stock of entities which do not figure in any philosopher’s exemplifying roster.
Which entities one chooses to platform and focus one’s analysis is highly contingent on context, but the really important question is whether one CAN account for those entities that one does not deal with, and nothing in what you say suggests that Badiou cannot deal with either parties, or cats.
And, frankly, I don’t see how ‘cats’ are any more ‘important’ to OOO, or any other philosopher (barring Donna Haraway), just because they might take place in a Latour-litany. Badiou could just as easily have written that objects are: numbers, Christmas trees with no presents underneath them, blank sheets of paper, betamax tapes, and earphone replacement warranty slips from bestbuy. Hegel could do the same without making that any more informative. That certainly doesn’t tell us a whole lot about cats. And that doesn’t make these items any more ‘important’ to anyone’s philosophy any more than the Bald King of France was important to Russell, or green ties were important to Sellars. Just because Levi chooses to focus on societies or cells as opposed to galaxies or paintings doesn’t mean either is less capable of explaining what they do not. The question is whether these entities COULD be accounted for. What exactly has Whitehead or Graham ever said about cats that makes you think they are of particular importance to them?
To say objects are all phenomena in accordance with the categorical strictures of the algebra described above is not any more ‘abstract’ than it is to say cats, parties and betamax tapes are all substances, objects, virtual proper beings that undergo local manifestations, generative mechanisms which actualize themselves in accordance with basins of attraction, or anything else. Ontology and phenomenology are not concerned with giving an itinerary and analysis of anything one may crop to mind in advance. The task is not to account for EACH possible thinkable entity in the world, but to be sufficiently general while having the tools to be maximally descriptive in local engagement so as to not be trivial. With Badiou we have a fully equipped logic which supports intuitionistic contexts with variable degrees of appearance of objects in worlds, an ontology which supports classical contexts for pure extensionally-determined multiples, an account of objectual unity and local indexing, components, relation, envelopment, conjunction, disjunction, maximality, non-existence, synthesis, worldhood, function, change, etc. And he goes a long, long way, making detailed analyses of each of the cases he chooses to illustrate the descriptive power of his greater logic, which range over all kinds of items. You conflate Levi’s more specific claim which is that Badiou denies the real status of objects in favor of multiples, with the general claim objects are not important for Badiou tout court. Both claims are false: objects are perfectly real and have nothing to do with humans, they are just accounted for in logic rather than ontology. And given that the entire second volume of Being and Event is devoted to the study of objectivity, I would say objects are pretty important to him.
Also, your claims border on plain disavowal rather than argument. For Badiou, objects have nothing to do, in their phenomenological or ontological constitution, with human relations or experience:
“We posit that appearing has nothing to do with a subject (whether empirical or transcendental), naming instead the logic of being-there, we clearly cannot oppose an inner to an outer experience. In fact, no experience whatsoever is involved. But we are obliged to establish that an object is indeed the being-there of an ontologically determinate being; or that the logic of appearing does not exhaustively constitute the intelligibility of objects, which also presupposes an ontological halting point that is at the basis of appearing as the determination of objects-in-the-world.” (LOW, Pg. 195)
To take Badiou’s phenomenology completely out of the picture and claim that his ‘ontology is a removed abstraction’ strikes me as a profoundly lazy gesture, and is not philosophically fair to any extent. Have you even read LOW?
Best,
Dan
May 29, 2012 at 8:54 pm
If you made a program that modeled the whole universe perfectly, you would never need a single variable to stand for a species, or a rock, or a cow, or a tree,or a person, all the variables would stand for particles (amplitudes in configuration space). And you would not need any rule that handled trees, differently from rocks, all evolution of the system would be governed by one law governing the transfer of amplitude in config space.
So if you want to say that rocks exist, I’m cool with that; anything made out of fundamental objects does exist, but if OOO means to imply that the laws that govern the universe mention things like chairs, as well as amplitude configs, I would suggest you think about exactly what the TOE would have to look like for that to be true.
There are levels to perception, not to reality. A tree has no causal effect, which is not the result of physical law operating on its most fundamental parts. Even if the tree has its own space-time volume, and stands in its own relational point in a larger system, all the stuff a tree does, to other objects or to it self, it does because of its physical internal structure.
It seems an OOOer must deny that the world’s causality actually operates on the lowest level of reality, and hence that OOOers must not believe in a physical ToE.
Most theories that attempt to mention just the fundamental objects are very hard to compute, so we use lots of theories that don’t. And they work reliably and accurately, but never precisely. We have never caught the universe cheating and using an easier algorithm to produce the future than the fundamental laws. There is not a Newtonian level, and then a relativistic level and then a quantum level, the universe uses one law on one level.
The configuration of a rock is different from the configuration of a work of fiction, both exist, but neither is fundamental, for you could simulate the whole universe without one variable representing a rock or a work of fiction, and you wouldn’t miss a single detail.
May 29, 2012 at 8:59 pm
Ronny,
What you propose here is a highly contentious thesis even in the sciences. Scientists readily recognize that there are emergent levels of causality that while dependent on smaller strata of nature nonetheless are emergent and which have their own causal powers. A good example is water. H2O is able to do things that hydrogen and oxygen alone can’t do.
May 29, 2012 at 9:07 pm
Think of Conway’s life. There are gliders, turing machines, replicating structures, explosions, and a whole variety of things. They are all made of the same thing: blips, even though the configuration of blips of a glider, is different from the configuration of a blinker.
Nonetheless, blinkers, gliders, turing machines, etc. are never mentioned by the fundamental law of Conway’s life. The one law of Conway’s life only mentions blips, and it doesn’t miss any of the details in the higher order structures, even though it doesn’t have laws to deal with higher level structure. The higher level structures are governed totally and exclusively by the fundamental laws.
Why wouldn’t the universe be setup this way?
May 29, 2012 at 9:11 pm
Larvalsubjects,
“H2O is able to do things that hydrogen and oxygen alone can’t do.” This is a poor example from delanda, because atomic models of water, hydrogen and oxygen, act as we expect them to (don’t even need to go quantum). This “new” causal power of water, does not imply a new level of reality, just as the new causal potency of two gliders, which are different from those of one, does not imply a new level of law in conway’s life.
May 29, 2012 at 9:13 pm
Ronny,
Being governed by the fundamental laws, whatever those might be, is quite different from claiming that those fundamental laws account for every feature of the universe in advance. At different levels of scale you’re going to get different powers and capacities on the part of entities that are both contingent and that function in their own specific ways. These powers are consistent with those laws you evoke, but also have their own dynamics. The fact that these things are based on fundamental laws does not somehow eradicate these entities or cause them to disappear.
May 29, 2012 at 9:16 pm
Ronny,
The point is not that H2O does not act as we expect it to, but that there are capacities here– the ability to boil at particular temperatures, to freeze at particular temperatures, to put out fires, etc. –only arise through this particular combination of oxygen and hydrogen. Hydrogen and oxygen themselves have very different powers and react in very different ways. The idea is not that the powers of water are some magical emergence, nor that they don’t arise from hydrogen and oxygen, but that these powers only arise in this combination or level of scale. That stands in direct contrast to your thesis.
May 29, 2012 at 9:22 pm
I am not suggesting that they disappear. I am suggesting that they are not fundamental. And that other things are. These “new” powers, must be consistent with those laws, for it is those laws that CAUSE them to happen. Not only are they consistent with the laws, but they are the only result allowed by the laws.
These are not new powers, for it was already specified in these laws that if you arranged amplitudes in the configuration that we call a “car”, and pushed the part of that configuration that we call a “pedal”, that the car would accelerate. That hypothetical was already contained in the fundamental laws, just as the new power of a certain turing machine to compute sums in a Conway’s life simulation, was already accounted for by the fundamental laws of Conway’s life. It is not that the turring machine is not really in Conway’s life, or that it isn’t cpable of computing sums, it is simply that the only laws that govern this turing machine are the fundamental laws of Conway’s life. No more no less is required to know exactly what it will do.
May 29, 2012 at 9:25 pm
We expect water, hydrogen, and oxygen to do those things, at the corresponding scale, because of the nature of water, hydrogen, oxygen at the atomic scale. These “new” powers of water, were already implied in atomic law. That was my point when I said we expect water to act as it does thanks to atomic models.
May 29, 2012 at 9:28 pm
We’re partially in agreement. What you’re missing with your analysis of Conway’s game of life (which I’ve written about quite a bit here on the blog) is the initial arrangement of the elements. It’s not the laws themselves that determine which universes will arise, but also the tiles that are turned on. In each of those universes you will get some configurations that are possible and some that are not and these universes will have different higher-order laws governing them that are mutually exclusive even though they all obey the same fundamental laws. Thats the point. There will be some universes, for example, where iron does not exist because stars never became massive enough to produce iron atoms.
May 29, 2012 at 9:30 pm
Ronny, I already said the lower levels explain the higher levels (ie, your point about expectations). What it does not do is eliminate them. You’re tilting at a windmill in your own imagination, not a position I’m defending. All I’m defending is attending to these powers at each level.
May 29, 2012 at 9:41 pm
It still seems to me like you’re relying on higher level laws. The point I want to make, is that even if there are higher level objects (which I lean towards there are) there are no higher order laws. And the fundamental laws do not mention higher order objects. Any “higher level law”, is a special case of, or an exploitable regularity of, the fundamental laws. It is not an extra part to the source code, but a regularity in the source code. Not a line of code, but a deducible consequence of the structure of the code.
(when i say given conway’s life simulation, I mean given initial conditions.)
May 29, 2012 at 9:43 pm
The universe itself, does not use different laws for different “strata”. It has one law on one level. What seem like higher level laws to flat ontologies, are actually exploitable regularities in the source code, not new parts to the source code. That is my thesis.
May 29, 2012 at 10:17 pm
Ronny,
As I understand it, a law is merely a constraint on how things can and cannot be combined or related and what follows from these combinations. As you get emergent entities you get new systems of constraints that are specific to that strata or level of entities. These laws of constraints are consistent with the lower, more fundamental levels, but are also unique to the level at which they appear. Let’s return to Conway’s game of life. With the emergence of, say, gliders it will become impossible for other configurations of “on” tiles to appear because of the configuration unique to this particular universe. These higher-level laws are perfectly consistent with the four fundamental rules of Conway’s game in its initial conditions, but are also unique to that strata and are not found in universes or games that had different conditions. Before any tiles are selected in Conway’s game the set of possibilities is nearly infinite. Those four rules don’t specify any particular universes or games, nor do they specify what laws will govern any particular universe. It is only with the emergence of a particular universe that these higher level laws appear. A TOE doesn’t capture these higher level constraints because it’s a completely open set.
June 1, 2012 at 10:34 pm
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