Part of what makes a pencil a good object is that all its parts share approximately the same rotational velocity—i.e. it’s a rigid body object. Part of what makes a squirrel a good object is that its parts share approximately the same genome. Part of what makes the water in a cup a good object is that its parts share approximately the same chemical composition—i.e. it mixes quickly.
Pencil and water: agree (though for water, much of what I’d point to is “how it will interact with other stuff”).
Squirrel: no! Unless you are doing biology on the squirrel, I don’t think the genome is mostly what matters.
I think the two big things are “rigid body” and “this rigid body is controlled by an agenty-thing” (read: “this is the body of an animal”). The thing I see is that squirrels, cats, and birds all do things like scan the environment for food, move their muscles to get the food, regulate their internal temperature, turn the food into energy, etc.
If it turned out that squirrels were some weird symbiote, like if the legs were actually a different species, then for the most part this only matters in so far as these ‘subparts’ affect the squirrel. Like, they ‘factor through’ what the squirrel does. I think this is pretty general, even beyond agenty things like animals.
I buy the general point, though.
Important example: It seems like much of how I split up the ‘subparts’ of objects around me is by the material they are made out of—for example, a soft chair cushion has different material properties from the wooden body.
When I look at objects, the different colors of these materials seem to be doing a lot of the work.
Next to me is a chair, whose cushion has a multicolored pattern on it, while the body is solid green and the headrest is grey. The whole thing is sitting on a metal base, with a metal rod connecting it to the base.
This is also how I split the chair up. I also split up the mosaic pattern of the cushion into parts like “this blue circle” or “that smaller white circle”, but not “this undistinguished patch of the blue circle”.
If I imagine the body and the headrest having the mosaic pattern of the cushion, I feel like I get a little confused about where the parts start and end in my imaginary chair.
The only part that doesn’t fit is the way I distinguish the rod from the base—it seems like shape, or maybe “adjacency” (the rod separates the chair from the base) are doing the rest of the work? But it’s pretty promising that color alone gets you most of the way there.
I had exactly the same thought. I didn’t write the same comment, though, because:
1) He did say the genome is part of what makes a squirrel a good object, and 2) The genome is a very natural dividing line between “part of this squirrel” and “not part of this squirrel,” and natural dividing lines are useful!
A “good object” is in the eye of the beholder—indeed, you spend most of your comment beholding and talking about how you and your brain chunk up the world around you, and that all makes sense. But “in the perception of a particular human” is not the only way to judge what a good object is.
Identical twins share the same genome, but are usually considered separate objects for most purposes.
A genetic chimera has different genomes in different parts of its body, but is usually considered a single object for most purposes. (Often, you can’t tell the organism is a chimera on a casual inspection.)
I submit that “same genome” often coincides with the natural object boundary, but isn’t usually a good criterion for the boundary. The common genome is not a significant part of what makes a squirrel a good object.
I think the thing we usually care about is something more like “it acts like a single agent” or “the parts are approximately aligned towards the same goal”. (Notice these criteria suggest that when an organization acts in concert, we care more about the boundaries of the organization than the boundaries of the individuals within it; I think I endorse that implication.)
Interestingly, according to Wikipedia there doesn’t seem to be an accepted scientific definition of “organism”.
1: The natural abstraction thesis that a substantial part of what makes “good objects” don’t depend on the beholder (or at least a large class of beholders will agree on a large class of “good object”)
2: If something feels like a relatively basic part of my perception, then it hints at fundamental evolved algorithms, that are then likely to point at “good objects”. As an example, your eye cells have built in edge detectors that work a lot like the image processing algorithms humanity invented. I expect many nonhuman animals’s brains to categorize animals and edges similarly (e.g. there are center surround retinal ganglion cells in mice).
A central (get it?) example for me is a math thing: the definition of the boundary/interior/exterior of a topological set. I have some intuitions, built from my life of interacting with the world and from evolution, about what “boundary” should mean. Given some prompting about open sets, I was able to basically come up with the ‘official’ definition. I suspect that if/when alien civilizations exist, that they’ll have a very similar concept.
3: I agree there’s an important sense in which the genome matters. But for example: imagine a world where (non-human) animals were symbiotes, that only join/separate rarely, usually out of sight, and that have complicated genetic inheritance patterns; but otherwise usually looked and acted like our world’s animals.
I predict that in that world, humans and other animals would partition life into objects in a very similar way. Later, humans would realize the symbiote thing, and would perhaps add words for it; but it would have to be something kids were taught by their parents, or only learned when they were helping around the farm at 10 years old.
Another thought: disruptive coloration by making color a worse latent (in the mediation condition), so it doesn’t track rigid body or animateness or composition as much.
Pencil and water: agree (though for water, much of what I’d point to is “how it will interact with other stuff”).
Squirrel: no! Unless you are doing biology on the squirrel, I don’t think the genome is mostly what matters.
I think the two big things are “rigid body” and “this rigid body is controlled by an agenty-thing” (read: “this is the body of an animal”). The thing I see is that squirrels, cats, and birds all do things like scan the environment for food, move their muscles to get the food, regulate their internal temperature, turn the food into energy, etc.
If it turned out that squirrels were some weird symbiote, like if the legs were actually a different species, then for the most part this only matters in so far as these ‘subparts’ affect the squirrel. Like, they ‘factor through’ what the squirrel does. I think this is pretty general, even beyond agenty things like animals.
I buy the general point, though.
Important example: It seems like much of how I split up the ‘subparts’ of objects around me is by the material they are made out of—for example, a soft chair cushion has different material properties from the wooden body.
When I look at objects, the different colors of these materials seem to be doing a lot of the work.
Next to me is a chair, whose cushion has a multicolored pattern on it, while the body is solid green and the headrest is grey. The whole thing is sitting on a metal base, with a metal rod connecting it to the base.
This is also how I split the chair up. I also split up the mosaic pattern of the cushion into parts like “this blue circle” or “that smaller white circle”, but not “this undistinguished patch of the blue circle”.
If I imagine the body and the headrest having the mosaic pattern of the cushion, I feel like I get a little confused about where the parts start and end in my imaginary chair.
The only part that doesn’t fit is the way I distinguish the rod from the base—it seems like shape, or maybe “adjacency” (the rod separates the chair from the base) are doing the rest of the work? But it’s pretty promising that color alone gets you most of the way there.
I had exactly the same thought. I didn’t write the same comment, though, because:
1) He did say the genome is part of what makes a squirrel a good object, and
2) The genome is a very natural dividing line between “part of this squirrel” and “not part of this squirrel,” and natural dividing lines are useful!
A “good object” is in the eye of the beholder—indeed, you spend most of your comment beholding and talking about how you and your brain chunk up the world around you, and that all makes sense. But “in the perception of a particular human” is not the only way to judge what a good object is.
Identical twins share the same genome, but are usually considered separate objects for most purposes.
A genetic chimera has different genomes in different parts of its body, but is usually considered a single object for most purposes. (Often, you can’t tell the organism is a chimera on a casual inspection.)
I submit that “same genome” often coincides with the natural object boundary, but isn’t usually a good criterion for the boundary. The common genome is not a significant part of what makes a squirrel a good object.
I think the thing we usually care about is something more like “it acts like a single agent” or “the parts are approximately aligned towards the same goal”. (Notice these criteria suggest that when an organization acts in concert, we care more about the boundaries of the organization than the boundaries of the individuals within it; I think I endorse that implication.)
Interestingly, according to Wikipedia there doesn’t seem to be an accepted scientific definition of “organism”.
Furthermore, the placenta and the amniotic sac are genetically the fetus’s, not the mother’s.
Well, I was taking for granted:
1: The natural abstraction thesis that a substantial part of what makes “good objects” don’t depend on the beholder (or at least a large class of beholders will agree on a large class of “good object”)
2: If something feels like a relatively basic part of my perception, then it hints at fundamental evolved algorithms, that are then likely to point at “good objects”. As an example, your eye cells have built in edge detectors that work a lot like the image processing algorithms humanity invented. I expect many nonhuman animals’s brains to categorize animals and edges similarly (e.g. there are center surround retinal ganglion cells in mice).
A central (get it?) example for me is a math thing: the definition of the boundary/interior/exterior of a topological set. I have some intuitions, built from my life of interacting with the world and from evolution, about what “boundary” should mean. Given some prompting about open sets, I was able to basically come up with the ‘official’ definition. I suspect that if/when alien civilizations exist, that they’ll have a very similar concept.
3: I agree there’s an important sense in which the genome matters. But for example: imagine a world where (non-human) animals were symbiotes, that only join/separate rarely, usually out of sight, and that have complicated genetic inheritance patterns; but otherwise usually looked and acted like our world’s animals.
I predict that in that world, humans and other animals would partition life into objects in a very similar way. Later, humans would realize the symbiote thing, and would perhaps add words for it; but it would have to be something kids were taught by their parents, or only learned when they were helping around the farm at 10 years old.
Another thought: disruptive coloration by making color a worse latent (in the mediation condition), so it doesn’t track rigid body or animateness or composition as much.