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Hi everyone! This is the topic of our monthly gathering this Sunday in Santa Monica (4-19-09; see the event listing nearby on this tribe page). I hope to see you there! Whether or not you come to Sunday's meeting, feel free to carry on a discussion by posting your own ideas here, either before or after Sunday's meeting.
Here's the full wording of this topic, which was the winner of the email vote this week:
THE BOUNDARIES BETWEEN THINGS: What is a "boundary" and in what sense is it real? What demarcates or separates a thing from its surroundings? Do the boundaries we talk about exist in nature and reflect the structure of the world, or do our minds or languages create the boundaries we seem to perceive?
See you Sunday!
Brian
Here's the full wording of this topic, which was the winner of the email vote this week:
THE BOUNDARIES BETWEEN THINGS: What is a "boundary" and in what sense is it real? What demarcates or separates a thing from its surroundings? Do the boundaries we talk about exist in nature and reflect the structure of the world, or do our minds or languages create the boundaries we seem to perceive?
See you Sunday!
Brian
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Re: What’s a BOUNDARY, & is it real or mind-created?
Wed, April 15, 2009 - 4:37 PMOPTIONAL READING FOR THIS TOPIC: I've located only one optional reading for you this month, plato.stanford.edu/entries/boundary/
Read what philosophers have been thinking and debating about in this Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on "Boundaries," one of the shortest entries of theirs I've seen. Inspire and clarify your thinking on the ideas by reading or at least skimming it!
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FYI, here are the full vote-by-email results for the month:
1) The Boundaries Between Things: What Is A "Boundary"…? (27.25 Votes)
2) Trust: What Is It, When Is It Worth It, And How Valuable Is It? (24.0 Votes)
3) Do We Have Moral Obligations To Dead People? (8.0 Votes)
2) Should We Restrict/ Discourage The Number Of Children People Have? (24.5 Votes)
5) Torture and Interrogation: How Do You Define Torture…? (8.0 Votes)
Each topic stays on the list until it wins or consistently receives a paltry number of votes. You may have noticed that the votes do not come in whole numbers. This is not because fractions of a person turn in votes, but because you receive one vote for your top choice, a half vote for your 2nd choice (if you had one), a quarter vote for your 3rd choice, and so on. Recent, regular participants at our gatherings have their vote doubled.
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Re: What’s a BOUNDARY, & is it real or mind-created?
Sun, April 19, 2009 - 5:02 AMphilosophy-in-la.tribe.net/thre...19e64
On Boundaries:
"No need for mechanical - I come strictly organical." -- Michael Franti
Boundaries can be usefully divided into two main types:
1. Those that are formal and artificial. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article notes, "Such boundaries reflect to various degrees the organizing activity of our intellect, or of our social practices...Geo-political boundaries such as the Mason-Dixon line are of the fiat sort, and it may well be that even the surfaces of ordinary material objects such as tables or tennis balls involve, on closer inspection, fiat articulations of some kind."
2. Those that arise organically. I believe that this kind of boundary is based upon an organizing (cooperative) principle that relates the various sub-parts of the bounded entity. The fuzzy boundary exists at the set of points within which the influence of the organizing principle attenuates toward zero. The formal boundary exists at the set of points within which the influence *starts* to attenuate monotonically toward zero.
The Stanford Encyclopedia article seems to overlook the role of cooperation in determining boundaries, but I believe that this is the key to some of the apparent paradoxes that it ponders, including the issue of a boundary's "vagueness."
An example of such an organic boundary would be that of the human body, within which DNA serves as the most succinct expression of an organizing principle. The DNA organizes the sub-parts of the person, consisting of organs, tissues, connective systems, and so on. The influence of this DNA starts to attenuate dramatically and monotonically at the outer layer of skin of the person; therefore, the outer layer of skin represents an organic boundary of the physical person.
I would add that since being is, in my view, equivalent to cooperative diversity, and non-being is the lack of that cooperative diversity, the boundary of a cooperatively-defined entity can be seen as an area separating being from non-being for that entity. It is ironic, but nonetheless true, that without distinct (limited) things there would be no diversity, and hence no Being (that is, there would be universal Nothingness), and yet the boundaries that make limited things distinct from each other are only possible due to a form of non-being for those limited entities. Likewise, each sub-part of a finite entity (e.g., the organs of a human body) must be limited (i.e., bounded by relative non-being) in order for those distinct and diverse parts to work together in order to form something larger than themselves.
While there clearly is such a formal vs. organic distinction, sometimes the line between the two is unclear. For example, the boundaries between nation states have an arbitrary element, because people have decided and agreed upon them. But they also represent a set of points beyond which the influence of the laws, customs and languages that cooperatively unite the various persons and groups within a nation state dramatically and rapidly attenuate, and to that extent they are organic. They may also have evolved based upon natural constraints, such as rivers, oceans or mountain ranges, which have determined the evolution of the ecologies on either side of those constraining structures, and to the extent that those respective ecologies have become self-referential and reflexive within their respective partitions, the political boundary that is based upon those natural barriers will also have an organic aspect.
Arbitrary (e.g., political) boundaries may create similar internal reflexivity over time, resulting in those boundaries evolving an organic element, just as organic boundaries may be recognized and formalized by laws and treaties that are themselves not the cause of the organic demarcations that they acknowledge.
On the other hand, when political boundaries are imposed in an arbitrary manner, without respect for existing populations or natural ecologies, a constant tension between the imposed and organic entities of the affected areas will be felt, and the arbitrary boundaries will likely be repeatedly challenged. Like any process of human envisionment, certain visions of social or ecological possibility will be resonant with existing potentials, while others will be dissonant and unworkable. Anyone can draw an arbitrary line in the sand, but what makes that line a meaningful boundary between distinct things? It is possible to deliberately bring a new organic entity, such as a nation, into being through a deliberate process, but if that process is not respectful of existing persons, communities, and ecological relationships (e.g., of farmers to the land), then it will be unstable and unsustainable.
This kind of interplay between formal and organic boundaries is unique to humans, since we deliberately alter our environment rather than simply adapting to it, as other animals do.
The observation by the Stanford Encyclopedia article that a boundary between two things is neither in one thing or the other, and therefore is without dimension along the axis of separation, appears to be a meaningless fixation that results from the article missing the key role of cooperation in defining boundaries, as described above.
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Re: What’s a BOUNDARY, & is it real or mind-created?
Sun, April 19, 2009 - 2:38 PMSome further notes:
In computer science we have a long-established practice called "object-oriented programming," in which software "objects" are created that have public interfaces, but which also have internal workings that are not directly viewable or manipulable by objects that are external to them. This property of software objects is known as "encapsulation."
It is this sheltered, internal aspect of an object that gives it its distinct being vs. other objects, since an object without such an internal life would merely become a staging ground on which other objects could disrespectfully place their data, erasing or altering it at will.
For a nation state, this would correspond to the interface of that state with other nations through treaties, cultural exchange, diplomacy, and other constrained processes. The nation speaks through these limited channels to other nations, and thus formalizes its cohesiveness through a more or less representative process (approaching what is called, in the limiting case, "speaking with a single voice").
This inside vs. outside distinction is strongly and obviously related to the determination of the nation's distinct being through its cooperative internal relationships, as described in my earlier message. It is not strictly geographical in nature, and so forms another, more abstract, but nonetheless real, example of a boundary.
I would note that the Stanford article does mention a "qualitative heterogeneity" that distinguishes entities as providing a basis for boundaries, and this serves as a *placeholder* for the concept of internal cooperation creating distinct being, but the article does not explore or otherwise capture the role that internal cooperation plays in creating such distinct "qualities." In other words, the distinct "quality" of a particular entity is, in my view, the *result* of the internal cooperation of its sub-parts, but the article does not elaborate upon how such "qualitative" uniqueness is created.
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Re: What’s a BOUNDARY, & is it real or mind-created?
Sun, April 19, 2009 - 3:00 PMIn addition, I would note that the idea of bodies being bounded by the presence of "(regular) open regions of space" does, in a way, *negatively* acknowledge the internally-cooperative, internally diverse, nature of distinct objects, by placing them on a background that is "regular," and therefore homogeneous, rather than diverse, in nature.
However, we need to have a *positive* understanding of the cooperative diversity that creates being. As Gandhi wrote, "Nature abhors lifeless unity. She conceals unity behind sympathetic diversity."
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Re: What’s a BOUNDARY, & is it real or mind-created?
Tue, July 28, 2009 - 5:00 PMA real and definite boundary is the boundary of consciousness, as it were; each percipient is unique and distinct, never blending into another.
– Richard J. Eisner (7/28/2009; 1-818-343-0123; richard@richardeisner.com) -
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Re: What’s a BOUNDARY, & is it real or mind-created?
Sat, August 22, 2009 - 5:12 PMIn general, I believe that a boundary is, like time, essentially mind-created/ "man-made". Specifically, however, I would say that boundaries that relate to proximity to other people, for example, are real, innate, and reflect a basic need for personal space. Of course, there are some exceptions to this. For example, in certain European countries (Italy, in particular, comes to mind), people are often more comfortable being in closer physical proximity to one another. In the U.S., however, it seems that citizens generally feel more comfortable when they perceive that they have enough "elbow room"/ space -- and an American traveling within Italy, for example, might find that he/ she occasionally feels that things are "too close for comfort" or that someone is being a bit too "friendly" (even though that may not be the intention of the other individual/ party).
Perhaps then, when looking at this aspect of "boundaries", one could say that this is more of a sociological "issue"/ matter. Maybe it has more to do with how an individual is raised/ "brought up" in a particular society/ culture. At the very least, it certainly leaves room for further discussion/ speculation... :-) -
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Re: What’s a BOUNDARY, & is it real or mind-created?
Sun, August 23, 2009 - 12:25 PMAll of our perceptions occur as mental constructs, and so to say that a boundary is a mental construct does not distinguish the concept of boundary from any other concept, and therefore cannot be a meaningful definition or insight.
Now, the things that are in our minds either correspond to a larger reality outside the mind, or they do not. So perhaps what you are saying is that boundaries do not exist outside of the mind - i.e., that they are an illusion.
I believe that we can prove that boundaries exist outside of the mind. Because if there were no boundaries, then there would be no distinct things, and if there were no distinct things, then everything would be the same, and if everything were the same, then there could not even be a molecule, because the existence of a molecule requires various atoms that are distinct from one another, and therefore bounded. And if there were no molecules, then there could be no minds to have the illusion of boundaries. In other words, mental constructs themselves require differentiation, and such differentiation requires boundaries. So, "I think, therefore there are boundaries" would be a reasonable statement.
After apparently claiming that all boundaries exist in the mind, you seem to reverse yourself by saying that psychological boundaries are the one exception to this. It seems contradictory to say that boundaries that are apparently in the real world are actually only in the mind, while psychological boundaries that apparently originate in the mind are somehow "real."
To me it seems that your view is somewhat related to solipsism - the idea that there is no external reality but only an internal one that we mistake for the external one. But the proof (of the existence of boundaries) that I have attempted above is an example of how we can demonstrate that certain things are true within the larger world, even though we have only the constructs that have formed in our minds to use in making such demonstrations.
More generally, my view is that mental constructs present an abstract view of the larger world, and so our minds are a reflection of that larger world. This is an example of "immanence," the notion that the large (in this case, the world surrounding a person) reproduces itself within each small thing (in this case, within the mind of that person). The idea of immanence can help us to orient ourselves within the larger world. I believe that it is a sense of powerlessness within the larger world that leads people to views such as solipsism, which imply that the mind cannot have any effect beyond its own...boundaries! Yes, even the concept of solipsism implies boundaries.
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