In the previous two installments we talked about chairs, specifically, what distinguishes a chair from a non-chair. We considered and rejected the "chairness hypothesis" in favor of the atomic theory, which says that chairs — and all physical objects (at least inanimate ones) — are made of atoms. (N.B. I am actually a human, notwithstanding my fondness for em-dashes.) What makes a chair a chair is not some mysterious metaphysical "chairness" but simply the arrangement of a bunch of atoms. If the atoms are arranged in a way that we humans recognize as a chair, i.e. a thing that you can sit on (or at least a thing that resembles a thing that you can sit on) then it's a chair. The line that separates chairs from non-chairs is fuzzy.
Note that although "chairness" might sound a little silly, the idea is not quite as absurd as it might seem. It goes back to Plato, and there are people who take this concept quite seriously. In fact, that article I just linked to points out a potential Problem:
[S]ome modern philosophers declare that chairs dont exist at all, really there exist only “particles arranged chairwise”. Why, they say, should we privilege the particles arranged “chairwise” as being a thing but not, say, the particles arranged as “my nose + the Taj Mahal + the moon”. No, they say, there are no composite objects such as chairs, otherwise we must accept crazy, gerrymandered objects like the nose-Taj Mahal-moon. Only the fundamental particles (whatever they turn out to be) exist. Awkwardly, this means you dont exist, only “particles arranged Acerwise” [Note: this text is part of an answer to a question posed by someone named Acer], but we can still talk about chairs, plants , planets and people as if they existed. Some of us (myself for one) find it hard to accept that we don't exist..."
Personally, I think this is a straw man. Chairs obviously exist, as does your nose, and the Taj Mahal, and the moon. If you want to, you can aggregate all of these into a composite object and give it a name. The nose-mahal-moon exists too. It's not particularly useful to give that particular collection of Things a name, but there is nothing stopping you if that's your jam. And there are examples of weird collections of Things that are useful to consider in the aggregate and so we do as a matter of course give them names: Universities. Corporations. Governments. Museums. Research laboratories. Movie studios. All of these consist at least partly of Things, which are made of atoms arranged in particular ways.
The question I want to begin to address now is: what else is there? Do we need anything other than Atoms Arranged in Particular Ways to explain any of our observations? Yes, we do. At the very least we need light to explain the fact that we can see things. Light is not made of atoms. In fact, Light is some seriously weird shit. I'll be talking a lot more about light in later installments, but for now it's enough simply to observe that we need it to explain observations and, whatever it's made of, it's not made of atoms.
What else might we need? What about heat? We observe that things get hot and cold, but the repertoire of atoms doesn't seem to necessarily change with temperature. A chair can be hot one moment, and the exact same chair made of the exact same atoms can become cold at a later moment. Maybe the difference between a hot chair a cold one is that a hot chair contains more "hotness" (a.k.a. heat) than the cold one.
It turns out, after a very very long story, that we don't need "hotness" to explain why some thing are hot and others aren't any more than we need "chairness" to explain why some things are chairs and others aren't. Hotness and coldness, it turns out, are actually just the result of atoms moving in a particular way. Atoms, it turns out, are always jiggling around with tiny random motions. The faster they jiggle, the hotter the object.
Note that there is a lot of heavy rhetorical lifting being done by the slogan "the faster they jiggle, the hotter the object." Hidden underneath these eight words are two entire fields of scientific study: thermodynamics and statistical mechanics. I don't want to get into those weeds, but it is important to know that the weeds are there.
So besides atoms and light, is there anything else we need to explain our observations? The answer turns out to be mostly "no". Why just "mostly"? Because there are some other things that are required to explain things like nuclear reactors, black holes, the movements of galaxies, and other esoteric phenomena. But for things that happen here on earth and in our solar system (outside of nuclear reactors and particle accelerators) atoms and light are all you need. Again, this apparent simplicity is covering up a lot of hidden complexity, but for our purposes we can ignore most of that complexity and just go with the intuition that atoms arranged in some ways make chairs and atoms arranged in different ways make noses and atoms arranged in yet other ways make the moon and the Taj Mahal.
There is a technical term for an arrangement of things. It's called a state, as in a "state of being". There is also a technical term for the things that are arranged in a particular state: those are called a system. So a chair, a nose, the moon, and the Taj Mahal are all systems of atoms, and those systems are in particular states which we label "chair", "nose", "moon" and so on.
The concept of "state" is much more general than that. The state of a system comprises more than just what category of Thing it belongs to. It can also include things like that system's location, its state of repair, its temperature. In the case of something like a folding chair, the state can include whether or not the chair is folded or deployed. In the case of (say) an electronic device, its state can include things like "broken" vs "in good repair", or "on" vs "off".
Thinking in terms of systems and states is extremely general and powerful. These concepts allow us to talk about a huge variety of seemingly disparate ideas in a unified manner. We no longer have to spend mental energy debating whether a folding chair is still a chair when it is folded, or whether a broken chair is a chair. All of these things -- chairs, folding chairs, broken chairs, non-chairs -- are just systems of atoms in different states. The ideas if "chairs", "folding chairs", "broken chairs" are just labels that we attach to those states. The labels themselves have no particular significance, except insofar as they allow us to group together different kinds of systems and states in ways that have significance to us for one purpose or another (for example, if want something to sit on).
The boundaries that constitute a system are also flexible. If you take a chair and paint it, you are allowed to consider the paint as now being part of the system that you call "the chair". This kind of flexibility is particularly useful when talking about living things, where atoms are constantly coming and going. A system where atoms come and go is called an open system, and one where the repertoire of atoms is fixed is called a closed system. (If absolutely nothing comes and goes then it is an isolated system, an idea which will become very important when we start talking about quantum mechanics.)
It is tempting to equate systems with nouns like "chair" and "desk", and states with adjectives like "folded" or "broken". But there are many nouns that actually refer to states of systems rather than the systems themselves. A common example is nouns that refer to activities, like "contest", "golf", or "election." Some nouns are chimeras that can refer to both systems and states. "Football", for example, can be a general reference to a particular sport (i.e. a collection of activities, i.e. a state), or it can mean a physical Thing, the kind of ball that is used to play the sport of (American) football.
For modern readers, familiar examples of nouns that refer to states are things having to do with computers: software, data, program, web page, bug, security hole, app. We think of these things as, well, things, nouns, but when we ask what software is made of we run into trouble because software isn't really made of anything. Software is not a system, it's a state, specifically, a state of a system we call a computer. And it's a very specific kind of state of that system: it's a state of that computer's memory. And it's even more specific than that: software is a state of a computer's memory that can be seen as binary digits, ones and zeros.
What do I mean by "can be seen as"? Aren't the ones and zeros in computer memory just an objective fact? The somewhat surprising answer to that question is: no, they are not. The only objective fact inside a modern computer's memory is the presence or absence of electrons in certain locations. (I haven't talked about electrons yet. I'm going to ask you to suspend disbelief and assume that what you were taught about electricity in high school science class is actually true.) And even that gets a little questionable when we get to quantum mechanics.
At this point you may have noticed that I seem to be doing some pretty frantic hand-waving. I'm having to explain hedges like "can be seen as" and throwing in new concepts like electrons and their presence or absence at certain locations, and then questioning whether that even makes sense to talk about. There are two reasons for this. The first is that the real truth has a lot of complicated details. There is a reason that it took thousands of really smart people a couple of centuries to figure all this stuff out. Even today, [climbing this learning curve takes years](https://blog.rongarret.info/2024/04/the-scientific-method-part-4-eating.html). It is possible to present an easier-to-understand simplified version, which is what I am necessarily doing here. This is not a graduate-level physics course. But every now and then I feel honor-bound to peel back the curtain and give you a glimpse of the complicated details so that you will continue to trust me not to mislead you. After all, my testimony is all I have to offer, so I am going to bend over backwards to preserve its value.
But the more important reason is that the idea of systems and states are not in and of themselves part of any explanation. What they are instead is a kind of framework for constructing explanations, a sort of Erector Set for scientific theories. By forcing ourselves to talk in terms of systems and states we impose a self-discipline that frees us from much of the vagueness and ambiguity of the English language. We no longer have to fret about puzzles like, "What is software made of?" Software isn't made of anything. Software is not a system, it is a state of a system. It's the same with chairs. Chairs are a system (of atoms) but chairness is a state. Note that the statement, "Chairness is a state," is an explanation. It is an explanation that conforms to the constraint that it be couched in terms of systems and states.
Why would we want to tie our hands in this way? Maybe there are observations that require explanations that cannot (or simply do not) conform, or for which the best explanation is one that just happens not to conform. That's possible. But so for, in the four-hundred-year-long history of modern science, no counterexample has ever been successfully demonstrated. All successful scientific theories to date conform to this constraint, and it's actually not hard to see why: it's because the world happens to be such that it lends itself to being described in terms of things that actually exist in some foundational way (systems) and the behaviors that those things can exhibit (states). There are technical terms for all this. The list of things that are considered to make up systems is called the ontology of the theory, and the description of behaviors (i.e. how systems transition between states) is called the dynamics of the theory. The familiar physics of everyday life, the kind they teach in high school physics classes, and which mostly corresponds with common sense, is called classical mechanics. The ontology of classical mechanics comprises objects that exist and move around in three-dimensional space (i.e. atoms) and the dynamics are Newton's laws of motion, and Maxwell's laws of electrodynamics. And if you want to get fancy, you can throw in relativity, both special and general, under the classical umbrella too.
I have to emphasize here again that none of the details actually matter for our purposes. What matters is that all of what I have just described is entirely uncontroversial. You don't have to understand any of the details of these scientific theories. All you have to know is that they exist, and everyone who takes the time to understand them comes to the same understanding of what these theories say. And this is an observation that itself has an explanation, namely, that these theories correspond, at least approximately, to actual objective truth. In other words, the Objective Reality Hypothesis is correct.
That's the easy part. We have in hand scientific theories that explain a lot of our subjective experiences. Does that mean we're done? Can these theories explain all of our subjective experience? Or are there still Problems that remain to be solved? Yes, of course there are! One of the many elephants in the room is the fact that we are able to construct scientific theories at all! In order to get to this point, two things had to be true. First, the universe had to be such that constructing scientific theories was even possible. In other words, the Objective Reality Hypothesis, or something like it, had to be true to begin with. In order to discern the laws by which the universe behaves, it is necessary that the universe actually behaves according to laws, which our universe apparently does. But why does our universe behave according to laws? And why does it behave according to the particular laws that seem to apply? There is no immediately obvious explanation for that.
The second apparent requirement for our discovery of scientific laws is that we have the ability to reason, to invent mathematics and technologies that allow us to build scientific instruments and electronic computers and generally carry out the scientific enterprise. How did that happen? Again, there is nothing immediately obvious in the behavior of atom that should lead them to naturally make brains, let alone such uncommonly capable brains as ours.
And then there are all kinds of additional mysteries not directly connected to science, but which are nonetheless part of our subjective experience. Where does consciousness come from? Where does our sense of right and wrong come from? And what is the point of all of this?
I touched on this at the end of the last installment, and I don't want to belabor it. I just mention it here for completeness, and also to reiterate my promise that, despite the fact that this chapter was rather dry and technical, I am going to get to the hard questions and not just sweep them under the rug. But to do that I had to lay some foundations. Next time I will start to talk about information, and it is not possible to understand information without first understanding what systems and states are.
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Public Service Announcement for those of you who made it to the end: I am going to be doing another debate with MadeByJimBob on Wednesday, April 29 Thursday, May 7 at 9PM Eastern time. The topic is going to be "Is belief in God a reasonable position?" It will be on the same venue as last time, Modern Day Debate. They haven't posted it yet so I can't give you a link, but as soon as they do I'll update this announcement. Tune in and watch the sparks fly.
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