Sandwiches Are Fuzzy, But Some Things Are Sharp
Probing some concept boundaries
Before I get too far into all this I want to give a bit of a disclaimer. I’m not an expert in any of what I’m writing or plan to write about, it’s just stuff I think is neat. and I apologize in advance for any wrong things that I will lead you to believe. Let me know if you ever think I’m wrong about something, I like friendly arguments and changing my views!
I also want to show off this little character I picked for the logo, isn’t it cute? The scribbles on it are the notes I write, and the guy is the part of my mind those notes capture.
Looking for Sharp Concept Candidates
I argued in a previous post that sandwiches and many other things we encounter in our lives are more fuzzy-boundaried collections of attributes than anything sharply defined. But are all our concepts like that, or do some concepts have sharp boundaries?
One factor I found to be a contributor to sandwichness was prominence of bread. But bread itself is a fuzzy concept! Is yorkshire pudding bread? Is a tortilla? Let’s see how deep the rabbit hole goes, tracing through concepts until we find something solid.
One important component of bread is that it’s made with flour. Flour seems to have a fuzzy boundary as well, for example as the grain becomes coarser it becomes meal rather than flour, but there’s no precise point where that transition happens.
Flour is made of grain, it’s also fuzzy. Do grains have to be cereals? Some definitions say so, but that would exclude quinoa, which seems at least sort of like a grain.
Grain is a seed from some types of plants. Most life is easy to classify as plant or not, but there are edge cases! Ghost pipe is like a plant in most ways, but doesn’t photosynthesize, Euglena does photosynthesize, but also moves around.
Plants are a form of eukaryotic life that photosynthesize. Viruses straddle the border between life and non-life, so even life has a fuzzy boundary.
Life is a form of self-sustaining process. Self-sustaining processes must be fuzzy as well, how long must one be sustained to be self-sustaining?
Self-sustaining processes are patterns in the fundamental quantum fields that make up the physical world. Hmm, this one actually seems pretty sharp.
Once we arrive at fields (or maybe further down at the wave function depending on your favored interpretation of quantum mechanics), I think we might have reached something with sharp boundaries. If quantum mechanics accurately describes the physical world, then fields aren’t just arbitrary bundles of characteristics like the rest of the concepts before them. Something is either part of one of the 17 quantum fields in the standard model, or it is not. I’m not totally sure about this though, maybe they are fuzzy in a way I haven’t considered! But this gives us a starting point to think about other things that might have sharp boundaries.
Mathematical Concepts
Quantum fields are mathematical objects, and seem sharp, so what about other math stuff? I think a lot of it is pretty sharp. A number can be an integer or not an integer, but there’s no space in between where it’s sort of an integer. Two numbers are equal to each other or not equal. Most mathematical concepts and many logical concepts seem pretty sharp to me in this way.
Building Up from Fields
If fields are sharp, could some other physical things that build on them be sharp as well? I’m not sure. The best case would be something that is a very simple emergent product of fields, like an electron. Electrons do have some quite sharp properties, like precisely defined spin and charge (though I’m not sure whether spin/charge are sharp concepts themselves), but there are also aspects of them that could be considered fuzzy. Virtual particles are short lived particle-antiparticle pairs that sometimes exist briefly, is a virtual electron an electron? And electrons are constantly interacting with quantum vacuum fluctuations, are those fluctuations part of the electron or not? I’m not sure where I land on this, but I do think that simple physical concepts are at least a lot less fuzzy than many others.
Another candidate for sharp concepts in the physical world is physical constants, like the speed of light in a vacuum or the charge of an electron mentioned above. I don’t have the physics knowledge to say with much confidence though.
Is Consciousness Sharp?
Most elements of our conscious experience, like emotions, are pretty clearly fuzzy. But what about consciousness itself? Can an organism be sort of conscious, or is it black and white?
I think the answer to this depend on the fundamental nature of consciousness. Some philosophers, like Daniel Dennett, have argued that conscious experience is nothing more than a pattern in the physical world we know. Patterns are arbitrary and fuzzy, so if Dennett is right, consciousness if fuzzy. But to me, it’s not immediately clear how how our experience can be explained in terms of the physical world. Here’s co-inventor of calculus Gottfried Leibniz arguing that the physical world as we know it doesn’t explain consciousness:
We must confess that perception, and what depends upon it, is inexplicable in terms of mechanical reasons, that is through shapes, size, and motions. If we imagine a machine whose structure makes it think, sense, and have perceptions, we could conceive it enlarged, keeping the same proportions, so that we could enter into it, as one enters a mill. Assuming that, when inspecting its interior, we will find only parts that push one another, and we will never find anything to explain a perception. And so, one should seek perception in the simple substance and not in the composite or in the machine.1
This suggests that consciousness may be separate from and not reducible to physical properties. If that’s the case, then it must be part of the stuff that reality if built out of, similar to quantum fields. If so then I think consciousness may be sharp as well.
Conclusion
This list of sharp-boundaried things isn’t very long! It’s hard for me to decide whether this is due to there actually being very few things that are sharp-boundaried, or my failure to think of others that exist. I’m also not quite sure how precise the sharp/fuzzy distinction is. Is there a sharp boundary between sharp-boundaried and fuzzy-coundaried concepts? Probably not! So I shouldn’t treat the sharp/fuzzy distinction as a core element of the world, but rather a useful but fuzzy concept like most of the other concepts we use.
More on Leibniz’s argument here: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/ergo/12405314.0001.003/--leibniz-s-mill-argument-against-mechanical-materialism?rgn=main;view=fulltext
I'm intrigued by your concept of consciousness.