Tables and organisms

A common-sense response to Eddington’s two table problem is that a table just is composed of molecules. This leads to difficult questions of exactly which molecules it is composed of. I assume that at table boundaries, molecules fly off all the time (that’s why one can smell a wooden table!).

But I think we could have an ontology of tables where we deny that tables are composed of molecules. Instead, we simply say that tables are grounded in the global wavefunction of the universe. We then deny precise localization for tables, recognizing that nothing is localized in our quantum universe. There is some approximate shape of the table, but this shape should not be understood as precise—there is no such thing as “the set of spacetime points occupied by the table”, unless perhaps we mean something truly vast (since the tails of wavefunctions spread out very far very fast).

That said, I don’t believe in tables, so I don’t have skin in the game.

But I do believe in organisms. Similar issues come up for organisms as for tables, except that organisms (I think) also have forms or souls. So I wouldn’t want to even initially say that organisms are composed of molecules, but that organisms are partly composed of molecules (and partly of form). That still generates the same problem of which exact molecules they are composed of. And in a quantum universe where there are no sharp facts about particle number, there probably is no hope for a good answer to that question.

So maybe it would be better to say that organisms are not even partly composed of molecules, but are instead partly grounded in the global wavefunction of the universe, and partly in the form. The form delineates which aspects of the global wavefunction are relevant to the organism in question.

Eddington's Two Tables

As far back into my childhood as I remember thinking about such things, I thought of the physical objects around me as made up of particles. I learned last night, in talking to various philosophers, that this attitude in childhood is not universal. In fact, apparently, many educated people have Aristotelian intuitions that material objects are solid and continuous through and through, and while they can think the particle hypothesis, it does not come naturally to them.

This is an interesting case of how theory-laden the "intuitive" can be. To me, it is entirely intuitive to see an object as a bunch of particles, though I wouldn't say that I have a positive intuition that it is so—just a pervasive belief. At the same time, this is a belief I need to think myself out of (and into a suspension of judgment) because I do not think current physics gives one good reason to think there are particles.

This little case study is kind of scary to me. For instance, right now it seems entirely intuitive that space-time be a four-dimensional manifold, with time being ontologically on par with other dimensions. In fact, I've gotten to the point where a philosophical statement that says something like "substance S has accident A at time t" seems clearly incomplete: I want to know which reference frame this is in, and how the accident is spread out in a space-like hypersurface.

But since these intuitions are highly dependent on a physics that might turn out to be wrong (quantum theory and relativity theory are not both true, since they are incompatible), I need to be more open to three-dimensionalist ideas, which I find kind of scary. Three-dimensionalist ideas induce a kind of conceptual vertigo in me—the thought that I am this three-dimensional object in some kind of flow of time is weird, though I do of course think such metaphors sometimes.