Apples don't exist

Here I cover the explanatory exclusion argument for mereological nihilism, which the view that composite objects don't exist.

OUTLINE

0:00 Mereological nihilism
4:16 Explanatory Exclusion Argument
9:40 Moorean objection
11:58 Other arguments and resources

LINKS

THE USUAL...

[JimmyTuxTv]

Hmm if apples don’t exist we have more doctors

[zen_hayate]

You should do more short explanation videos like these

[MaverickChristian]

My first blush impression of mereological nihilism is that it seems to be a matter of semantics. "It's a collection of particles arranged chair-wise" to which I'd be tempted to reply, "OK, well, then that's my intensional definition of what chair is; in which case, it's still true that the chair exists."

[photon]

I lean towards accepting mereological nihilism, but it has an interesting consequence. Because I am also pretty convinced that consciousness is neither explanatorily redundant nor epiphenomenal. Therefore consciousnesses would need to be mereological simples, which cashes out as an argument for substance dualism.

[junemalory]

One avenue I want to explore further is a sense in which I don't have to identify things like planets, trees, tables, etc, as composite objects. I haven't worked out the details yet, but this idea has been floating in the back of my mind for a few months now.

[andreab]

Consider the following four objects of perception: a tablet written in Sumerian; a book by Dante in old Italian in gothic letters; an online rendition of a text by Shakespeare; a film based on a different play by Shakespeare.
A person that knows all the relevant languages might recognise the presence of "anaphoras" in all of them.
The words themselves are different. The material composition and shape of the works and their parts is different. The perceptual stimuli are different. The associated brain states are different. In one case, the relevant stimuli are not even synchronic but diachronic.
There is no way you can decompose the "person understanding each text as containing an anaphora" into its component parts without losing the specific object of knowledge.

[EitherSpark]

looking at the title and thumbnail, I thought it was an early april fools video

[DigitalGnosis]

Thinking on the spot here - I think that "needed to explain" is introducing a lot of ambiguity in these premises. There's a sense in which I think a physicalist can accept that in principle fundamental particles are all that is "needed to explain" (ontological reduction), but because we exist at the macro-scale using languages we've created in diffierent discourses (physics, economics, psychology, literature) that are not intertheoretically reducible we shouldnt expect it to seem "normal" to us (hence pumping our intuitions about what is explanatorily sufficient) to talk about things in a theoretically reductive way. That is, I think you can accept a thesis about ontological reduction without supposing something like linguistic or semantic reduction to the terminology of physics. Tldr; something fishy in premise 2.

[paulhammer]

Mereological nihilism seems to be supported as well by the arbitrariness of the definition of composite objects. This leads to the problem of the ship of theseus replacements as well as the question of how much material can I remove from an apple and have it still be an apple.

[MetroidTheorist]

With the way you speak of mereological nihilism, I think I might believe in that. You could think of how letters on a screen, or even an image, are made up of pixels. I don't think people would deny that.

[YLLPal]

I agree with mereological nihilism as an interpretation. I'd be inclined to frame it as there being a different class of "object."

Tables are defined by their relationship to function, while Electrons are defined by their relationship to charge and other properties.
Thinking about natural phenomena works the same too. Trees are defined in a sense by their function. That is, matter which performs treeness.

However, I also think you could argue for breaking fundamental particles down to their properties. Eg mass, charge, spin functions performing electronness.
I think that is likely what leads to taking the universe as the only object. Why isolate the single region of those properties that are performingelectronness? Why not look at the whole universal wave function of charge and call that a single object?

[doctorinternet]

I think mereological nihilism has useful application in the social sphere. Just as what we call objects can be argued to be arbitrary segmentations of experience (a car, for example, can't possibly fulfill its functions without air, fuel etc, but we don't normally view these as part of the car), so are social constructs actually arbiratry collages of experiences. Imagine a funeral, we have particular sets of expectations as to what compose a funeral, even tje very feeling of sadness is part of this abstract object. But nothing about a person dying informs us as to what would go with such event.

[eli]

5 that you say this violates common sense because I find this extraordinarily intuitive.

[not_enough_space]

It might be a petty reason, but I like that mereological nihilism would be something that philosophy adds to our knowledge of the world (in contrast to just slavishly codifying common sense).

[michaelbarker]

I think beginning to understand what is and isn't a concept and then trying our absolute best to find evidence for non-conceptual things is the beginning of the path to a conclusion like mereological nihilism. Its easy enough to understand why a thing like marriage is a concept for instance. Its a conceptual story shared by at least a few people and of course there is no physical "marriage matter" anywhere to be found. Then its just a matter of moving down the chain of what we consider more physical than conceptual. At least for me moving down that chain and taking a closer and closer look at it seems to keep leading me to believe consciousness is the irreducible thing that's fundamental to reality. All we have to do is separate out what we can say about an object that isn't reliant or though the perspective of consciousness. Pretty soon we are left with nothing. The way physicists have dealt with this problem is in part known as the observer problem. Long story short before we can do physics we need a frame of reference. So we need a thing, in fact anything, it can be a rock for all we care, that is at some known referential existence in relation to the thing being studied. They reassure us it obviously doesn't have to be a conscious "observer." I know I am enormously simplifying here but even when I look at it in much more complex detail I don't understand why they seemingly miss the fact that the referent itself doesn't have to be conscious but we conscious beings need the referent in the first place.

In a physical, material reality why would a rock need a frame of reference beyond its own material existence? Which to be fair is exactly what many have expected and is why the observer problem is considered "weird". Because what kinds of things can we say about the no frame of reference rock? What does it look like, well nothing of course. Visual appearance is after all a thing of consciousness. Physical objects don't have an inherent appearance, their appearance is created upon appearing as something to some conscious being. The same is true of all other appearances of consciousness like smell, touch, noise, thought, etc. Ok so whatever it is where's it going and how fast? Which is where we can swoop in with theories of relativity to answer that. Movement, speed, space, force is a relational thing we say. But again we have the same problem. It needs a relation for US to understand it, but what about those things in themselves? What about the rock itself? Where was it before it was in relation to anything else? What even is a "relation"? Isn't it just a useful concept we've come up with as conscious intelligence to understand reality? Without a conscious being restricted to a frame of reference thats apparently in relation to the speed of the molecules inside our heads creating appearances of things including time what does time even mean and how fast does stuff go to get from here to there outside of that context? We can say that the universal speed limit or the speed of causality is the speed of light. But again that's in relation to our conscious perception. How long for instance did we have to wait to be born? Without getting into the question of identity we can just say no time at all because it was upon being born that we began creating the only thing that we know time to be. Saying that people and things obviously existed before we were born is simply and utterly a conceptual story. Point to it then if its obviously the case. Where is any of that stuff besides in our own thoughts? Where is all that time that isn't the time that's right now, appearing to us as now?

These are just some examples of how even the things we consider as the most obviously physical things turn into concepts upon closer inspection. Or I should say its exactly when we hold them up to the very closest inspection we know how is when they take on a more and more conceptual nature. Ultimately passing it off to consciousness and saying that we can only know things as they appear to us naturally leads us to observing consciousness for the sake of observing it as the thing itself. But, even then, the closer we take a look the less we are left with. When we take the closest look possible, when the contents of our consciousness are as bare as they can be and all thought has disappeared what's left is exactly what's irreducible, which is awareness itself. Its exactly the thing that is prior to description. It doesn't have any inherent qualities, characteristics or attributes of its own. Its not a thing or substance or an entity and its entirely empty of any self, ego or form. But awareness isn't nothing either. Its not a void, its not the absence of consciousness but rather the very presence of consciousness. Its the light that illuminates contents of consciousness. Awareness is aware of itself and its own emptiness. Awareness is aware emptiness.

Anyways I'm rambling. Don't take mushrooms if you want any of this to make sense because it will make sense, lol.

[ArthKryst]

I'd like to know if you have discussed Analytical Idealism and what's your take on it. I read Bernado Kastrup's work recently however I don't find it to be persuasive however I feel like I'm more in the camp of it's counter-intuitive as it's seems as though it's materialism+ an extra step.
Could you please discuss this in any of your future videos?

[unapologeticapologetics]

By saying "there are particles arranged table-wise, " then we are still talking about some concept, idea, or essence of "table"-ness. It seems like there is still some real composition of an idea, concept, or essence with the specific arrangement of particles.

Am i missing something here? I probably am, but it seems like adding "paraphrase" or "fiction" only seems to push the can down to road and still appear to use composite-like language.

[TheWeb]

I guess the challenge would be to explain emergent properties, to the point of making predictions

[LehanineFaicalYuto]

to me Mereological nihilism seems obviously true.
although i don't really like the 3rd primes one problem that i have with it is that it's not compatible with general relativity because that theory suggest that the explanation for an event is relative to the observer. which means existence would also plausibly be relative to the observer. and that seems ludicrous.

[Lemon-pfpm]

I hold to a kind of mereological Nihilism but not in a Netwonian system but in a Leibnizian-kind of system. The reasons being, among others, that I hold the substance of idea to be needed in order to compose physical simples into a consistent picture of the world, and an actual ontological order in the substance idea. So I don't think one can reasonable speak of particles existing in a tablewise way without connecting power or laws between them, at max that these powers or laws are not part of the material/physical world but part of the ideal world in interaction with it - and there I see monads to be the best model of explanation