[FRIAM] Nick's Categories

[glen]

Great find. Thanks. I will read that.

I'm a bit worried how you went from "trampled dirt" to a "pile of trampled dirt". This is the target of DaveW's first question of composition and structure. "Dirt" is a mass noun, whereas a "pile of dirt" is not. Mass nouns like "data" are interesting, I think, for the very reason you're targeting. They seem to me to be qualities, not objects. When EricC mentioned "dirt at your feet", I implicitly *registered* a locality to the quality "dirt". There's some intuitive, natural to those of us with feet, boundary around "beneath your feet" versus "way the hell over there". So, you might hedge on "pile" with "local". But as fuzzy as the boundary of a pile is, the boundary around "local" is even fuzzier.

I hate the word "affordances". But it's as good as any, I guess, as a sign for that boundary-installing transition from quality to object. If I were born without legs and spent my life in a wheelchair, I suspect that boundary-installing registration of "dirt" to "dirt beneath your feet" would be VERY different than it is now, to me with my legs.

All this to emphasize, even more, that things like registration are *body* stuff, not whatever is meant by "mental stuff", much the same way as, say, self-organized criticality is body stuff, directly dependent on the shapes and sizes of the particles. I'd expect that what it is like to be a tiny chunk of quartz is different from what it is like to be a tiny chunk of hematite. And compositionally, I'd expect a carbon molecule sitting inside a diamond to *be* different from one sitting inside a lump of coal.

On 2/17/23 09:46, Steve Smith wrote:
> This may be something of a "punt" but I tripped over an essay on BCS's OOO a few weeks ago and I've been wanting to introduce it into the conversation.  I wonder if the gap in the metaphysical fundament that we (don't) share might be bridged by some of BCS's ideas about "what means object anyway?"
> 
> https://www.academia.edu/73428704/Extruding_intentionality_from_the_metaphysical_flux
> 
> I think where I might get most bamboozled by talk of "there is something that it is *like* to *be* trampled dirt has to do with the boundaries of identity and object and the subject-object relation of affordances.   A subject perceives/experiences/exercises/relates-to the affordance of an object?   A pile of dirt has identity as a pile only insomuch as there is a subject (also an object in it's own right) which percieves/acts-on the pile of dirt *as if* it had a boundary and an identity and with some kind of affordance (e.g. trampleable?).   I don't think there is anything intrinsic in being a distribution of dirt-particles which has anything to do with trampling or trampleable...   but then the nature of a foot does not make for trample-ability alone either?   To trample requires a tramplee?   A thing to be trampled?  A state change in the tramplee from untrampled to trampled?
> 
> Or to repeat myself, perhaps I am barking up the wrong lexicon/ontology/cosmology here?   We are possibly (always and forever?) on the opposite sides of a looking glass?


-- 
ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ