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Let's start with this question: What makes an object an object? Find an object in the room, say a chair. What imbues the chair with "chairness"? Why is it c

by orasis 11y ago

Let's start with this question: What makes an object an object? Find an object in the room, say a chair. What imbues the chair with "chairness"? Why is it considered separate from the floor? If you investigate this you will find that all objects are mind created. There is no essense or Platonic form of an object inherent to the object. The object cannot be said to have inherent existence apart from the mind perceiving it. This concept is called "Emptiness" in Buddhism and training the mind to recognize the truth of emptiness frees the mind of all sorts of pathology (except maybe sounding weird when trying to explain this to people)

kleer001 11y ago
> Why is it considered separate from the floor? Because it can be easily moved. That is the property all objects share. There are a few exceptions, but they are illustrative. Consider a rusted on bolt. Can it be moved? Not without a lot of effort. However a fresh new loose bolt of the same kind demonstrates movable-objectness. What about a chair bolted to the floor? It was once loose, it's an object. What about a chair welded to the floor? Same thing. What about a chair that's constructed of the floor its self, like a large lump or bend up from steel or molded? I would submit that that's the floor acting like a chair, and not an object chair, but a chair like part of the floor. An even more technical definition would be along the lines of "Objects are the static locus of continuity within a sharp boundary." And by static I mean to include floppy objects like plants or leather. And by sharp boundary I mean in relative space to the observer and their understanding of their environment. From the ground a cloud looks like it has a relatively sharp boundary, sure, it's complex, but the difference in the color and shading from the sky gives it away. If you're IN the cloud it just looks like fog. Is fog an object? Sure, it's in high contrast to the regular state of the air. Is air an object? Sure, it's in high contrast to the ground, and from a certain perspective interstellar space. Does liver fit this definition? If it's separated from the organism, sure. If it's still in a living body, it's an organ, not an object. >all objects are mind created. I would go even further and say that "All patterns are mind events." Phurpa drop! (A phurpa is a triple sided ritual dagger which in Buddhism symbolizes the slaying or destruction of foe or obstructions.)
- soneca 11y ago
  I would consider a wall an object. Why a plant and not a dog? Myself I would consider any physical body without life an object.
- drdeca 11y ago
  If you apply the same force as you would to a cup handle it order to pick up the cup, to a single atom of the surface of the cup, couldn't that remove the atom? "Can be removed using a specific level of force" is then not sufficient for determining whether a collection of particles form an object. Perhaps if one instead uses some amount of force applied on the collection of particles which depends on the mass of the collection? That seems like it could be tricky, because I don't think I would generally consider fluids to be objects (in the sense we are speaking of), but I would not be too surprised if some fluid could be removed from a glass with a given level of force depending on the mass of a portion of the liquid, applied evenly over the portion, while keeping the portion of the liquid contiguous. Which would seem to indicate that and portion of the liquid is an object. However, maybe that is actually a solution, by adding the additional restriction that no part of an object is an object? (In a particular sense of object). Or alternatively, the intersection of any two objects is empty? So, the section of the liquid is not an object, because a smaller part would then also be an object, and therefore, the individual molecules would be the objects. That seems plausible to me...
  - pdonis 11y ago
    > If you apply the same force as you would to a cup handle it order to pick up the cup, to a single atom of the surface of the cup, couldn't that remove the atom? No, because the forces holding the atoms of the cup together are much stronger than the forces holding the cup to the floor. That's the underlying physical reason why it makes sense to consider the cup as an "object".
    - jacobolus 11y ago
      More to the point, if someone decides to reject that the chair is an object, that’s entirely fine, it’s just a semantic dispute, not a dispute about the underlying reality. The individual atoms (or really, electrons and quarks) which make up the chair and the floor and the air around it don’t behave differently based on what object boundaries some person attaches in their mind. Some of the atoms which the human considers to be “part of” the chair get left behind on the floor, while the bottoms of the chair legs pick some atoms up from the floor. Water molecules are constantly being traded between the chair surface and the air. And so on. The object boundary is in some sense arbitrary and porous. The way we define it is based on our own practical use and experience, and the aggregated/emergent properties which are relevant to us, since we don’t have the means to simultaneously apprehend every individual particle in our surroundings.
visarga 11y ago
Google, in 2012, made a neural net that "discovered" the concept of cat on its own, by unsupervised training, the same way we form our concepts. A neural net compresses data, and in this process, the concept of "chair" emerges. There is no such thing as "chariness" outside our brains, it's just a compressed form of representation of many perceptions.
- shostack 11y ago
  I'd argue that it discovered the concept of a cat under the limitations of its setup. Missing from that concept are all of the memories and societal connotations of "catness" that most people would by default have as part of their learned concept of cats.
- orasis 11y ago
  I concur with this. Compression and Generation are fundamentally what neurons do and how objects are "created".
joshuacc 11y ago
> There is no essense or Platonic form of an object inherent to the object. While I understand that Platonism isn't popular, the Platonic form thesis needs a bit more refutation than "this is obviously false" in a serious discussion. But then, maybe you weren't trying to have a serious discussion. :-)
- orasis 11y ago
  I'll point you to Nagarjuna, who can do a much better job of explaining the subtlety than I can. http://www.wisdompubs.org/sites/default/files/preview/Nagarjuna's-Middle-Way-Book-Preview-R.pdf http://www.wisdompubs.org/sites/default/files/preview/Nagarj...
kordless 11y ago
I would add that there are basically three different types of Buddhism and that the interpretation of 'emptiness' varies a bit. Here's a good start on understanding (or perhaps un-understanding) emptiness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu_(negative) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu_(negative)
eli_gottlieb 11y ago
The chair's "chairness" is just the ways in which it can participate in causality. This includes being mulched or burned, thus having its mass, energy, and information rearranged in other ways. "Chair", in particular, is an abstraction that explains a large amount of the variance in the behaviors of that particular lump of mass and energy while having exponentially fewer free parameters than modelling the complete physics and chemistry of the chair from the subatomic level upwards.

by orasis 11y ago

kleer001 11y ago

> Why is it considered separate from the floor? Because it can be easily moved. That is the property all objects share. There are a few exceptions, but they are illustrative. Consider a rusted on bolt. Can it be moved? Not without a lot of effort. However a fresh new loose bolt of the same kind demonstrates movable-objectness. What about a chair bolted to the floor? It was once loose, it's an object. What about a chair welded to the floor? Same thing. What about a chair that's constructed of the floor its self, like a large lump or bend up from steel or molded? I would submit that that's the floor acting like a chair, and not an object chair, but a chair like part of the floor. An even more technical definition would be along the lines of "Objects are the static locus of continuity within a sharp boundary." And by static I mean to include floppy objects like plants or leather. And by sharp boundary I mean in relative space to the observer and their understanding of their environment. From the ground a cloud looks like it has a relatively sharp boundary, sure, it's complex, but the difference in the color and shading from the sky gives it away. If you're IN the cloud it just looks like fog. Is fog an object? Sure, it's in high contrast to the regular state of the air. Is air an object? Sure, it's in high contrast to the ground, and from a certain perspective interstellar space. Does liver fit this definition? If it's separated from the organism, sure. If it's still in a living body, it's an organ, not an object. >all objects are mind created. I would go even further and say that "All patterns are mind events." Phurpa drop! (A phurpa is a triple sided ritual dagger which in Buddhism symbolizes the slaying or destruction of foe or obstructions.)

soneca 11y ago
I would consider a wall an object. Why a plant and not a dog? Myself I would consider any physical body without life an object.
drdeca 11y ago
If you apply the same force as you would to a cup handle it order to pick up the cup, to a single atom of the surface of the cup, couldn't that remove the atom? "Can be removed using a specific level of force" is then not sufficient for determining whether a collection of particles form an object. Perhaps if one instead uses some amount of force applied on the collection of particles which depends on the mass of the collection? That seems like it could be tricky, because I don't think I would generally consider fluids to be objects (in the sense we are speaking of), but I would not be too surprised if some fluid could be removed from a glass with a given level of force depending on the mass of a portion of the liquid, applied evenly over the portion, while keeping the portion of the liquid contiguous. Which would seem to indicate that and portion of the liquid is an object. However, maybe that is actually a solution, by adding the additional restriction that no part of an object is an object? (In a particular sense of object). Or alternatively, the intersection of any two objects is empty? So, the section of the liquid is not an object, because a smaller part would then also be an object, and therefore, the individual molecules would be the objects. That seems plausible to me...
- pdonis 11y ago
  > If you apply the same force as you would to a cup handle it order to pick up the cup, to a single atom of the surface of the cup, couldn't that remove the atom? No, because the forces holding the atoms of the cup together are much stronger than the forces holding the cup to the floor. That's the underlying physical reason why it makes sense to consider the cup as an "object".
  - jacobolus 11y ago
    More to the point, if someone decides to reject that the chair is an object, that’s entirely fine, it’s just a semantic dispute, not a dispute about the underlying reality. The individual atoms (or really, electrons and quarks) which make up the chair and the floor and the air around it don’t behave differently based on what object boundaries some person attaches in their mind. Some of the atoms which the human considers to be “part of” the chair get left behind on the floor, while the bottoms of the chair legs pick some atoms up from the floor. Water molecules are constantly being traded between the chair surface and the air. And so on. The object boundary is in some sense arbitrary and porous. The way we define it is based on our own practical use and experience, and the aggregated/emergent properties which are relevant to us, since we don’t have the means to simultaneously apprehend every individual particle in our surroundings.

visarga 11y ago

Google, in 2012, made a neural net that "discovered" the concept of cat on its own, by unsupervised training, the same way we form our concepts. A neural net compresses data, and in this process, the concept of "chair" emerges. There is no such thing as "chariness" outside our brains, it's just a compressed form of representation of many perceptions.

shostack 11y ago
I'd argue that it discovered the concept of a cat under the limitations of its setup. Missing from that concept are all of the memories and societal connotations of "catness" that most people would by default have as part of their learned concept of cats.
orasis 11y ago
I concur with this. Compression and Generation are fundamentally what neurons do and how objects are "created".

joshuacc 11y ago

> There is no essense or Platonic form of an object inherent to the object. While I understand that Platonism isn't popular, the Platonic form thesis needs a bit more refutation than "this is obviously false" in a serious discussion. But then, maybe you weren't trying to have a serious discussion. :-)

orasis 11y ago
I'll point you to Nagarjuna, who can do a much better job of explaining the subtlety than I can. http://www.wisdompubs.org/sites/default/files/preview/Nagarjuna's-Middle-Way-Book-Preview-R.pdf http://www.wisdompubs.org/sites/default/files/preview/Nagarj...

kordless 11y ago

I would add that there are basically three different types of Buddhism and that the interpretation of 'emptiness' varies a bit. Here's a good start on understanding (or perhaps un-understanding) emptiness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu_(negative) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu_(negative)

eli_gottlieb 11y ago

The chair's "chairness" is just the ways in which it can participate in causality. This includes being mulched or burned, thus having its mass, energy, and information rearranged in other ways. "Chair", in particular, is an abstraction that explains a large amount of the variance in the behaviors of that particular lump of mass and energy while having exponentially fewer free parameters than modelling the complete physics and chemistry of the chair from the subatomic level upwards.