The reality of entity

I plan to tackle the issue of the reality of an "entity", and here
offer some preliminary notes, for which I'd appreciate criticism.

The basic issue is the appropriateness of "entity" as our basic way to
apprehend the world scientifically, or whether it should instead be
"process". However, I here primarily offer a critical inspection of
entity, leaving the subject of process largely aside.

I should start by making a distinction between entity as nothing more
than a convient mental construct and whether that construct is also
constrained by our experience of the world (or better, by our actions in
the world). I will argue that the notion of entity presumes a Cartesian
dualism that is inadmissible in terms of the material monism that is
today prevalent in the sciences.

While it is generally felt that our conceptions of the world are
constrained by our experience of it, there is also a view that would
limit our conception of the world to the realm of thought and
marginalize the question of whether our conceptions have truth value in
relation to the world. However, such a view is not widely held, and it
raises problems, such as how science is progressive; how we can predict;
how our actions can be efficacious. Action must obviously be informed by
past experience, not just past thinking. So I will here presume that the
truth value of our conceptions arise from their being constrained by the
world beyond consciousness.

Nevertheless, it seems useful to touch upon the subjective utility of
the entities present in consciousness. We tend to represent things as
instances of general categories. Prediction and communication depend on
these categories. We can't reference a thing, point to it in thought or
communicate very well without an object to which the thing refers that
does not reduce to description of its qualities. There is no doubt the
entity as a conceptual unit has practical utility.

The question, however, is the manner by which that conception is
constrained by experience to acquire its truth value. Does it capture
the whole of experience, or merely one aspect of it? It seems that the
entities to which we refer engage only the empirical aspect of things,
and there may be more to them than just this. We even handle that
empirical aspect selectively. The demands of daily life encourage us to
focus on what persists in time and space rather than on change, although
in fact all things in principle actually are processes. We tend to
reduce a process to a static description of an initial state and an
outcome, and then look for non-essential causal factors to account for
the change that act upon the empiria, so that the question is begged;
change is described, not explained. That is, we reduce a process to a
sequence of static states, and the force for change remains external to
our definition of the essential initial state.

But this convention, encouraged by the narrow scope of daily life, does
not imply we should necessarily adopt the entity as our ontological
basic unit in science. Science is not daily life writ large. For one
thing, in the course of history we find ourselves in a world that
changes at an accelerating pace, and our action in the world must
increasingly be seen in dynamic terms. We are no longer farmers who can
assume the world is essentially predictable. Also, thanks to
globalization in a broad sense, we live in a complex world in which it
is difficult to depend see it as consisting of empirically coherent
wholes, and in fact we need to define unities that arise from empirical
diversity.

If there is nothing compelling about adopting entity as our basic
ontological unit, we can turn to consider what the term usually means.

A morning fog is empirically real, and yet is not an entity. The reason
is that it is not bounded. The usual definition of entity is that it
represents a set of distinctive qualities or, if two things have the
same qualities, their separation in space. Both definitions presume
closure. The entity, unlike the morning fog, must be bounded. So an
entity must not only have qualities, but it must also have a boundary,
whether to distinguish its qualities from all else, or to distinguish
two entities having the same qualities.

This boundary makes the entity a closed system in the sense that what
defines it is what distinguishes it from its environment. This
introduces an element of artificiality, for in fact things tend to be
open systems. A completely closed system floating about in outer space
is often referred to as nothing more than a hypothetical. Although our
conceptual categories commonly presume a persistence of essential
qualities and closure, in science we need a basic ontological category
that implies openness, not closure, which means a scientific unit that
does not correspond to the conceptual unit that is so convenient in
daily life.

A closed system is determinant in that its outcome is predictable from a
a perfect knowledge of its initial state. This is not the real world of
our experience, which only to a small degree, and then imperfectly, is
unequivocally predictable. In fact, perturbations always arise in from
the entity's environment, which would violate the notion of entity as a
closed system. But these perturbations are necessarily represented as
being external and therefore as non-essential to a system that is
defined in empirical terms; they act upon it as accidentals, not as
something that is essential to the system. If in practice they are
always present and affect the behavior of the system, why are they
represented as un-essential other than for the convenience of daily
life?

There is a philosophical tradition that would posit an entity as being
independent of its qualities: an essential thingness, a
haecceity. Although often discussed in terms of, say, medieval
scholasticism, today I suppose we would look at the issue from the
perspective of the scientific realism that today is becoming
prevalent. It holds that unobserables can be real. So from this
standpoint, is it possible that an entity, understood as a haecceity
independent of its empirical qualities, is simply a real unobservable?

This might be a tempting line to pursue, but it ultimately fails. The
classic example of a real unobservable is a causal potency. However, in
terms of scientific realism, such a potency is not ontologically
independent, but is instead, like empiria, merely an aspect or property
of matter. It seems to me that efforts to posit a reality for entity
that is independent of its properties posits a metaphysical level of
reality that implies a dualism rather than the material monism that is
conventional today in the sciences.

There have been efforts to offer an alternative definition for entity
that addresses some of the objections I have raised, and broadly these
are known as holistic theories. Examples are Arthur Koestler's holons
and David Bohm's implicate order. In a general sense, the aim has been
to incorporate into the entity a connection with the broader world, what
I suppose William James would call "fringes" or transitive parts.

There are terms we might apply to such theories that offer alternatives
to atomism, such as continuism, holism and organicism. The question,
though, is whether they imply a whole/part dichotomy that presumes
entities, or do they transcend the entity.

A common form of continuism goes back to Leibnitz, in which the universe
represents an essential unity from which empirically discrete entities
arise. But this distinction of discrete/continuous, popular in the 19th
century, leaves us uncomfortable today. Generally, people prefer to give
greater weight to what is discrete, which leads us back to the issue
of entity. How can we give emphasis to empiria without recourse to
entities, and therefore their opposite, a non-empirical and
ontologically independent background reality?

Holism is a more popular notion, but is not without its
ambiguities. Since World War II, the philosophical debate over wholes
and parts has faded because we now broadly accept the principle that a
whole refers to properties that arise from the interaction of its parts,
but which cannot be entirely predicted from a perfect knowledge of
them. We typically refer to these as "emergent properties". A system
experiencing a decrease in entropy is a system that generates a novel
order or an outcome that is less probable than implied by an empirical
description of its initial state.

The point I would like to make here, however, is that the part and the
whole are still present as entities, as essentially closed systems
having no essential connection with the wider world. Both the parts and
the whole remain distinguished by their qualities and boundaries, for
otherwise both part and whole would dissolve.

Some (Val Dusek, for example) have countered that the whole in holism
affects its parts or structures their relations. In this case, the part
is not an autonomous atom, but is essentially incorporated within a
larger whole. Unfortunately, emergence can arise from the interaction
of parts without implying any dependence of the part on the whole. But
even where there is such a dependence of the part on the whole, it is
understood in terms of the qualities and relations of parts, which is to
represent things as merely interactive entities. The interaction or
interdepenency of a thing's qualities does not make them any less
entites.

The interdependency of part and whole seems better conveyed by the term
organicism. However, even with organicism, the parts and whole remain
entities in that they each have their own qualities, and their
integration into the whole is seen only in functional terms. It is hard
to see that holism or organicism really escapes the limitations of
entities.

In short, to move toward a more realistic conception of the world, it
appears that the qualities of a conceptual unit must be represented as
merely one aspect of its existence, and its casual relation with the
wider world (or causal potencies, if we conceptually represent it in
hypothetical isolation) as another. Neither aspect has any ontological
independence, but represent merely the aspects or properties of a
thing.

To make empirical qualities and causal potency or relations merely
aspects of a thing, it seems that today we would say that the empirical
qualities that are the effect of the past constrain the probability
distribution of the possible future actualizations of the causal
potencies that exist in the present. This turns out to be a definition
of "process", and so it would make sense to use the conceptual unit
process in lieu of entity when making scientifically realistic
statements about the world.

--

Haines Brown, KB1GRM



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