I do not need to know every detail of a car in order to utilize it. As long as I know it needs petrol, steering, acceleration, and braking controls, I can use it.
This applies to everything else, including the body I inhabit. It may well be a mistake (I tend to think it is) to say inhabit as though there are separate objects – a body and a mind. The mind may be a very good illusion.
What constitutes a property? Existence is not a property, but a fact of reality. All else are properties which rely upon things to be instances of properties.
In sum, there are things, and properties of things.
While it is possible to account for everything in reality at any one (synchronic) time, it is not feasible. As a thought experiment, it is worthwhile.
Since mass-energy in reality is finite and constant all particulars can be accounted for with a kind of synchronic snapshot. Let us say that some particulars while everything else unaccounted for are lumped into a category of “other”. In this way we still have a complete inventory of reality. This is important because it takes into consideration the context for which a particular belongs. Logic ignores context, that is, logic de-contextualizes the particulars.
But that is the nature of universals. To generalize is to remove context, to think of the concept without particulars. As such, universals are useful mental “objects” but literally useless as physical objects.
The mistake often is to forget that mental “objects” only “exists” as long as conceptualizing physical objects exist. And for this reason we should keep an inventory of particulars before we keep an inventory of universals.
No thing or being is outside of the time and place for which they exist. I am situated with preconditions beyond my control. And it is in these conditions that I am to live with and exist in.
Pay attention to the particulars. Because it is always the particulars which affect you, and not the universals.
A corpus is a snapshot of language frozen in time. A POC is also a snapshot of the ontologically existent things at a certain time.
An atom could be a part of this body but belong to another body years later. So it is important to specify when (the snapshot) we are talking about.
This is what I mean by keeping track of the particulars.
1.
I have a white car.
I went to a car manufacturing factory and saw how they make cars. The body is silver at first they dip the entire body into white paint.
So is my car white, or is my car covered in paint that is white?
2.
In spring the leaves are green. but in autumn they change to yellow or red, then eventually to brown. What is the true colour of leaves.
3.
Two trees have green leaves. Taking a sample and putting the leaves side by side they are not identical in colour. One is lighter than the other. Why do we still call them green?
4.
A book is sitting on my shelf. It has been sitting there for years. One day, I take the book off the shelf to read and notice that the edge of the pages have yellowed ever so slightly compared to the inside of the book. Yet when the book was on the shelf I still thought was white. Is the book pages still white in that sense?
Reality exists independently of it being perceived.
Matter, space, and time does what it does without it being understood.
What is perceived is the past is near the present and is never the future. There is always a delay.
This “is” is the thought of a time, whether it be a past, a present, or a future.
Imagine a database that traces everything in the universe in snapshot like the British National Corpus (BNC).
I would call it the Philosophical Ontology Corpus or POC.
Just like the BNC my POC would be a snapshot of say for example now. And instead of being a sample it would be of the statistical population, that is, everything would be accounted for. This is theoretical, of course. To sample the population would be impossible.
So let me take this snapshot, which would be a synchronic study. It would be of the moment, POC-2024-05-07-0421-05.
The first piece of data would be to identify everything in reality. For argument’s sake let me take all individual atoms in reality to be ontologically existent. In order to identify all atoms I would give them a unique identifier (UID). Now, even though every atom in this snapshot is accounted for it is not useful. Elemental atoms clump together to make units, molecules. Suppose that two oxygen atoms did form a unit O2 I will now include this in my database and give it a UID. But I would also need a new data column to identify the original atoms. So this new column would identify its composition and have the UID of both atoms in it. In other words, the column would no longer be of only all the individual atoms but also includes units that are composed of individual unit as well. The POC would be now much larger to the original database.
Now only that, now let us say that I want to talk about me as a unit I would have my own UID which would have a composition UID (cUID) of all the atoms. This seems straight forward enough.
But what if I only want to talk about “my hand” which is part of my body? A new UID would be created with the corresponding cUID of the material that make up my hand.
In other words, I will need a new column with the identifying words “my hand” if I have only talked or thought about it. But, unlike a traditional corpus, POC will start with UIDs instead of token usages of the language. The UID would be mapping of everything in the world and I have theoretically conceived in thought. That is, because I have chosen to ask the question “what exists”.
Clearly, it is not only of the particulars, but also of the conceived combinations of particulars (O2, my body, my hand, etc).
And if I continue with this, then I will also include non-particulars (green, fast, on, the, he, and, numbers, unicorns, capitalism, etc) as well.
POC would be an extremely large database.
Thoughts and symbols are, by definition, infinite. Whereas, objects are finite. So, naturally, there will be more thought and symbolic entities than object entities of reality.
theoria 