Telekinesis and the unreality of artefacts

Telekinesis is not within our power. How can we formulate this fact? Well, it's a bit tricky. The natural way of formulating is to say that no human thought has a physical effect outside the body except through an extra-mental bodily movement (this formulation leaves open the possibility that the mind is a part of the body). However, we can, just by thinking about it, change the positions of needles on gauges on a neural scanner. And if Christians are right, it is possible to pray mentally for a physical effect, and have the physical effect occur by a divine intervention. Moreover, we want to insist that just as one person can't do telekinesis by herself, so too a dozen can't do it together.

One way to handle the neural scanner concern and to extend to the case of multiple agents is to say that whenever human thoughts have a physical effect in virtue of their content, they do so through causing at least one an extra-mental bodily movement. The case of miracles can be handled, perhaps, by adding a qualifier "except for miracles".

Now, suppose that tables, chairs and other artefacts exist. Then, I think, the existence of an artefact depends crucially on what people think: it depends on the intentions of the artificer and what other people plan to use it for. We could imagine a physical object just like a chair but which can survive the loss of all of its legs, because its purpose is quite different from the purposes of a chair. Whether that object exists or whether a chair exists in its place depends on what people made the object for, and/or what they plan to use it for. Likewise, whether one is making a palisade—a single object—or a series of upright pointed sticks tied together depends on one's intentions for the project. If, for instance, one is planning to untie all the sticks and use them as spears as soon as the enemy approaches, then what one has made is a bunch of spears tied together for ease of storage, and one has not made a palisade. Thus, the number of artefacts depends on the contents of our thoughts.

Facts about what artefacts exist depend crucially on the content of what people think. Since many artefacts, including the ones in the above examples, are physical objects outside of human bodies, it follows from the above, that if there really are artefacts, then the contents of thoughts can affect what kinds of and how many physical objects exist outside of human bodies. Moreover, this happens without any miracles, in the ordinary course of things. Hence, if there really are artefacts, there is something very much like telekinesis.

Of course, nobody really thinks there is some miraculous multiplication or aggregation, respectively, of objects when a bunch of spears tied together or a palisade, respective, is made. The reason for that is that we realize, perhaps inconsistently, that artefacts are not real things.

There is a way out of this argument, and this is to assume compositional universalism. But that faces at least one serious problem, as an earlier post has shown.

Metaphysically light existence

In the previous post, I argued that artefacts do not exist in a "metaphysically serious way". The notion of metaphysically serious existence is a foggy one. But I think I can give two sufficient conditions for it. The trivial one is that Fs don't exist in a metaphysically serious way if there just are no Fs. The non-trivial one is that Fs don't exist in a metaphysically serious way provided that whenever "x" is the name of an existent F, the proposition that x exists is a proposition that holds in virtue of the truth of some proposition that does not make reference to the x.

For instance, if x is a particular hole in a wall, the claim "x exists" holds in virtue of a proposition reporting a certain area's being surrounded by the wall but not itself containing any parts of the wall. Likewise, if x is a waltz that George and Sally are dancing, then the claim "x exists" holds in virtue of George and Sally waltzing at a certain time in a certain way (the "certain" encode the amount of precision to ensure that we're talking of this waltz rather than another waltz). Thus, holes and waltzes don't exist in a metaphysically serious way.

Note that the "in virtue of" relation here is more than just "being entailed by."

On my view claims like "This table exists" may be true in virtue of facts about arrangements of particles and/or fields as well as the intentions and/or practices of agents and/or communities. Or, alternately, such claims are false as they stand, but they are close approximations to true claims which hold in virtue of facts about arrangements of particles and/or fields as well as the intentions and/or practices of agents and/or communities.

Artefacts

There are no artefacts, at least not in any metaphysically serious way. To see this, consider some puzzles that face those who believe in artefacts.

You come across a stump in the woods. You sit down. Has the stump become a seat? It seems so. Even though you haven't actually changed the stump, you have given it the function of a seat. An artefact does not, after all, need multiple pieces. I could manufacture wooden seats by taking logs and carving them into seats, or by spending a lot of time in the woods and finding pieces of wood that already have the right shape and bringing them back. Or perhaps it's not enough just to sit on a stump to have a seat.

But actually, if I manufacture seats, the stuff I make does not become a seat when someone sits on it—it is a seat when the manufacturing process is complete. Likewise, then, it seems that the stump has already become a seat when I intend to sit on it. Or if giving something the function of being sat on once is not enough to make it a seat, maybe it becomes a seat as soon as I intend to take it home and put it in my living room. But this is really spooky: by simply intending to treat a stump a certain way, I have made a new object—a seat—with new persistence conditions. Very strange, that.

You buy a chair. Dust settles on it. The dust is not part of the chair. But you then make a tag: "Dusty Chair II". You put the tag in front of the chair. Oh, I "forgot" to say—your home is an art gallery. When you put the tag in front of the chair, with the right intentions, you created a work of art, an artefact with certain complex persistence conditions. One of the persistence conditions is that while the dust is not a part of the chair, it is essentially a part of Dusty Chair II. So, simply by putting a tag in front of the chair, I have brought it about that a new artistic artefact comes to exist. The token tag is not, however, a part of the work of art. (The signs in a gallery are printed by the gallery, and need not travel with the works of art.) So I created a new entity, without in any way causally interacting with it—just by putting a tag in front of it. And of course the tag is unnecessary. If I just stand in front of the chair telling all the visitors to my home that this is Dusty Chair II, that's just as good.

The case of the stump-seat and Dusty Chair II violate the principle that one cannot bring about the existence of a new object without a relevant[note 1] causal interaction with the object. Artefacts are simply too easy to make.

The above arguments assumed that what defined the identities of artefacts were maker's intentions. The alternative is social practices. But it is no less weird to suppose that a bunch of people by getting together can create an object without relevantly causally interacting with it.

It is clear that the persistence conditions for artefacts are defined by the makers and/or users and/or the community. But let us say that a careful study of our language shows that half of the users of English understand "chair" as an essentially four-legged artefact, and the other half think of a "chair" as surviving the loss of one of its four legs. Does that mean that my dining room chairs are coincident objects, colocated chair(1)s and chair(2)s, where a chair(1) cannot survive loss of a leg and a chair(2) can? Or is the question whether I have chair(1)s or chair(2)s settled by figuring out what the majority of the folks in the chair factory thought (suppose my chairs were made in an English speaking country)? Or is it settled by what the bosses thought? Or by what I thought? But I have no opinion on the question. So is there no fact of the matter whether one of the things in my dining room would survive loss of a leg? These questions seem insuperable.

Now one way to get out of all of these puzzles is to be enough of a compositional universalist: any bunch of parts with coherent persistence conditions and interworld identity conditions defines an object.[note 2] Thus, when I come upon the stump, whatever my intentions towards the stump, there is an object there with the persistence conditions of a stump, and an object there with the persistence conditions of a seat. Perhaps, then, I do not bring about the existence of the latter object with my intention, but I simply bring it about that it is appropriate to call the object a "seat". Likewise, while artistic intention is needed to transform the dusty chair into Dusty Chair II, even if I didn't have this intention, there would be a nameless object there with the persistence conditions that Dusty Chair II has.

But the main reason to save the existence of artefacts is to save common sense. And this kind of universalism departs far from common sense. It posits that there is an object sitting in the same chair as me, with the same shape and physical properties as me, but with the counterfactual property that were I to yell "Abracadabra!", it would instantly (faster than light!) move to the Amazon rain forest, where it would be wholly composed of a poison-dart frog. To embrace this kind of compositional universalism to save artefacts seems too costly.

Of course, this denial of the existence of artefacts needs come along with some kind of a paraphrase story that allows ordinary sentences like "She sat on a chair" to be at least approximately true. Presumably, the story will involve particles or fields having chair-wise arrangements, and so on. Moreover, I think we are going to have give such a story even if we admit tables and chairs into our ontology—just not for tables and chairs.

For there are always going to be artefact-like cases where almost nobody—not even the compositional universalist—will want to posit an object. The person whose home is a museum can make a work of art "composed" of shadows, by simply placing a tag on a blank wall with an interesting shadow pattern. But shadows don't exist. Or one could have an earring that is made entirely of the concentration in some kind of a field (maybe a magnetic one—the earring then could be seen by aliens who have a magnetic sense). But while fields might exist, it seems unlikely that concentrations of them do. Just as one can use a nail, it seems one can use a hole (one can put something in it, or one can sell it to an art gallery), but holes don't seem to exist.

Authors write books, and programmers write software. And it seems that, more and more, the most valuable artefacts are of this sort, artefacts that are the subject matter of intellectual property law rather than of tangible property law. These books and pieces of software seem type-like, abstract, rather than object-like. It is the book-type that we care about the author's writing. But what is odd is that if we take these type-like creations seriously, we have to depart from the common-sensical idea that the author causes them to exist. For surely we don't cause type-like things, abstracta, to come into existence.

But suppose we insist that the book the author writes is the manuscript. Where is this manuscript, these days? On a CD sent to the publisher, let us say. The CD is not the manuscript, though. There might be several manuscripts on a CD. The manuscript, it then seems, is made of colored pieces of dye on the CD (assuming a consumer CD-R). Maybe that can be counted an object. But suppose that instead of using a CD, we use some medium where all the data is encoded as the state of some field. Unless we reify states of fields, the data won't be an entity. Or, more simply, let suppose that I put several manuscripts on a CD, and then archive, compress and encrypt them in such a way that it is impossible to single out the bits of one manuscript from the bits of another, but it is possible to decrypt and decompress the archive, and extract the manuscripts. (For instance, the compression may ensure that words and phrases that appear in multiple manuscripts get listed only once in full. The encryption might end up shuffling the bits of all the manuscripts together before applying the encryption function.) Then perhaps there is no plausible way to identify the manuscript with a bunch of colored patches on the CD, but the manuscript is still "there", on the CD.

In other words, unless we are going to have a really bloated ontology, we are anyway going to end up with artefacts that we don't admit in our ontology, artefacts such that we will need some kind of a paraphrase for sentences that treat them as if they were substances. So the kind of story the person who denies the existence of artefacts will need to give about tables and chairs is one that needs to be given anyway about shadows, holes, books and manuscripts. The cost of the story is, therefore, low.

Substances and artefacts

Let us suppose that I am playing a nice game of Xiangqi with my daughter. The pieces are wooden, with painted red or black characters. As we play, we notice that one of the red catapult pieces has the character on its surface half warn off. So, I grab a laser pointer, and some motors, and a little processor, and program the motors to move the laser pointer rapidly so as to trace out the missing half of the character drawn on the piece, indeed to do so so rapidly that it looks like the character is all in place without any flicker. Moreover, I add a little camera that tracks the wooden disc, and continually repoints the whole assembly to follow the disc, so that when I move the disc, the character drawn on it moves with it. As we keep on playing (maybe the paint on the piece is of very low quality), more and more of the character wears off, and I am continually reprogramming the motors to replace more and more of the paint by the laser beam. Eventually, the disc has no paint on it, but has a laser image of the catapult character on it. I then take a bite out of the wooden disc itself. (Maybe I'm a beaver.) And I keep on taking more bites, while reprogramming the laser beam not to track what's left of the wooden disc, but to track my finger motions. Finally, I finish eating the wooden disc. I can now finish the game of Xiangqi with my daughter, except that now one of the red catapult pieces has become a pattern of laser light.

Suppose we were tempted to say that the initial red catapult piece was a substance.[note 1] Now, surely, a pattern of laser light isn't a substance. Light-spots aren't even processes, but quasi-processes. They can, after all, "move" faster than light.[note 2] So then we have the oddity that a substance became a non-substance. But it is plausible, for the same reasons for which it is plausible to suppose that the Ship of Theseus survives the replacement of its parts, that the red catapult piece survives its replacement with a light spot. Thus, if the red catapult piece initially was a substance, then one and the same thing is an existent substance at t₀ and an existent non-substance at t₁. Moreover, this didn't take any kind of miracle—all it took was a bit of skill with motors and electronics. If this seems absurd to you, then you may wish to conclude that the initial red catapult piece was not a substance.

Similarly, a painting could be restored with new paint, or it could be repaired piece by piece by projected light. A chair could be replaced, piece by piece, with force-fields, perhaps, or maybe even with carefully aimed jets of air. A computer could be replaced, piece by piece, with an emulation of itself (just replace the parts one-by-one with emulations). If these things survive this kind of replacement, and if we do not wish to accept that there can be change between categories—that a substance can change into a non-substance, say—at least without a miracle[note 3], then the conclusion to draw is that Xiangqi pieces (and by the same token international chess pieces), paintings, chairs and computers are not substances. In fact, it seems plausible to generalize this: perhaps no artefact is a substance, unless perhaps it is wholly composed of one non-artefactual substance (such as Peter van Inwagen's example of the hammock that is made out of one snake, weaved into a hammock like a rope).

Some of us want to go one step further, and deny that artefacts, except perhaps if wholly composed of one non-artefactual entity, exist. For it is not implausible to say that spots of light don't exist, and anything that can change into a spot of light doesn't exist either.