Virtual parts, compressed files and divine ideas

Suppose I record some video to a file on my phone. The video on my phone then is made up of frames, say, 30 of them per second. The frames are parts of the video that it sure seems like we can quantify over. But what is a frame of the video? Well, it's natural to say: The file consists of a sequence of bits implemented as flash memory states arranged spatially in the flash memory of the phone (though not always in the "logical" order, because of wear-leveling and filesystem issues). A frame then would seem to be a subsequence of these flash memory states. But that is in general false. Video files are typically compressed. While some frames--the "key frames"--are stored as a whole as a discrete sequence of bits, typical frames are not stored as a whole. Instead, what is stored is basically a set of instructions on how to modify one or more other frames in order to get the current frame. For instance, if you are panning smoothly across a static object from left to right, the non-key frames will presumably say something like: "Take most of the previous frame, shift it over a little, and then add such and such pixels on the right." But we cannot identify the bits of an instruction like that with the video frame itself, because the video frame does not supervene on the instruction: it supervenes on the instruction and the previous frame.

Even a liberal materialist ontology with unrestricted composition that allows for fusions of arbitrary disconnected sequences of bit-encoding states, the parts of the video do not exist. Noentheless, we correctly (and truthfully) say in ordinary language that the video is made up of frames as parts.

This is a rather nice illustration, I think, of the Thomistic concept of virtual parts. Virtual parts are not fundamental ingredients in the ontology. Nonetheless it is correct (and truthful) to talk of them in ordinary language. There are other such illustrations in computing. For instance, images and sounds are compressed by algorithms that transform them from spatial or temporal sequential data to frequency data or wavelet coefficients. The "natural" parts of the image or sound (say, "the left half", or "the last third") will typically not correspond to a physical part of the device memory storage.

A more homely example is, I am pretty sure, the human visual system. I see an image composed of a variety of parts. There is a lit-up rectangular part (the laptop screen), which has a left half and a right half, and so on. But even without looking up any brain research, I am willing to bet quite a lot that the disjoint spatial parts of the visual image do not correspond to particular things in my brain: I do not have an array of pixels in the brain whose parts correspond to the parts of the image (I do not even have an array of pixels in the retina corresponding to the parts of the image, as the image is stitched together by the brain over time from a variety of images produced by eyes that are constantly moving across the image).

(Can the Platonist avoid talking of virtual parts, insisting that videos and pictures are abstract objects? But even if videos and pictures are abstract objects, I doubt that they have frames and subpictures as parts.)

One thing I would like to use this story for is divine ideas. God is fundamentally simple. But we can meaningfully and truthfully talk of a multiplicity of divine ideas, in much the way that we can talk of the parts of the visual image, which are all encoded in God's one idea of all possibility. And this grounds worlds, propositions and the like.