Talk:Mereological nihilism

message: Could someone (who knows) edit the article make the distinction between the two a little more clear? This is especially important because it M.N. seems often be referred as plain nihilism. If this terminology confusion persists in the field of philosophy, then point out this confusion in the article also.  Thanks.
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Isn't MN just a type of nihilism? I think it is an old old use of the word too, because it traces back to the words nihilism and mereology, which I think are both Greek, and the position of mereological nihliism was held by Democritus, an ancient Greek atomist. 
But anyway... I think MN is just a type of nihilism. So that could be pointed out in the article.
I think mereological nihilism should not be as obfuscated as it is in regards to nihilism. It is a branch that one needn't be nihilist to take. It is a sort of metaphysical minimalism. While a nihilist may reject fundamental or common metaphysical assumptions (ethical truths, objective meaning etc) the nature of matter or objects needn't be one of them, and in this way the two ideologies differ. Perhaps something along those lines should be added, and if you get into some of the first formal defining of active and passive nihilism, and subsequent branches, you'll see this distinction.
Also, and I'd be less sure on how to deal with this, but there is endless scope for the confusion of mereological nihilism and metaphysical nihilism, and unnecessary links to modal realism. It's a little harder to explain without going into the literature, for me anyhow.
Wselfwulf (talk) 16:28, 21 April 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: nihilism vs. mereological nihilsm

message: Uh, how much scientific basis does mereological nihilism have? I've talked to a number of people who study theoretical physics and only a handful of them have heard of mereological nihilism, and they're vaguely farmiliar with it. It seems like it's a fringe theory of quantum physics with few supporters. I'd go far enough to say its borderline crank science. For example, I spoke to Jeffery Grupp via email once, and he believes that since no composite objects would exist in accordance with mereological nihilism, the only thing that would exist would the conciousness, the soul- a form of cartesian dualism where our soul is interfacing with an aspect of the blob reality to generate what we see.
It seems to have alot in common with the position of a number of ancient Buddhist Fundamentalist viewpoints, and it sounds alot like Vedic Science the more I've looked into it. A classic example of Vedic Science is Human Deevolution, which, although having generated controversy a number of years ago among the scientific community, is now dismissed as pure pseudoscience.—Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.202.50.178 (talk • contribs) 
:Mereological nihilism is a philosophical position.  I wouldn't think it could have or require a scientific basis. Michael Slone (talk) 15:38, 4 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Popularity, and Removing Grupp Part 1 

message: ::This seems to be purely a philosophical position, but its arguments seem very questionable to me... for example, relating it to quantum mechanics: subatomic particles seem to have an interesting, paradoxical kind of "existence": they are both waves and particles; perhaps neither... and they "pop" into view only when there is an observer to measure their position. In quantum physical terms, there can't be said to be a "particle" there... only the "probability" of one, although their existence is basically taken for granted... on the other hand, take the human body, for example: its unbelievable complexity and astonishing abilities are endless, and all bodies are composed of parts, individual living entities that function together for a purpose. But the body is somehow less real than a particle whose place in space and time is ephemeral... hmmm, sounds very suspect. -Daniel Villalobos 14:55, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Eh? See way further down, below. Mainstream QM as taught to physics students, from standard textbooks, loves to avoid the part/whole particle/wave debate by brushing it under the rug. Quit trying to decompose some wave function or some Hilbert space into "parts". There are no parts. Believing that QM is capable of describing "parts" is based on a fallacy, a mis-apprehension of what is actually happening at the subatomic level. (More generally, a mis-apprehension of what a Hilbert space is.) 67.198.37.16 (talk) 06:45, 21 May 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Mereological Nihilism and Quantum Mechanics 

message: "and these smallest building blocks are individual and separate items that do not ever unify or come together into being non-individual. Thus they never compose anything" This is not absolutely true, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bose-Einstein_condensate. However as this article is about the arguments of mereological nihilism and not about truth, I guess it does not matter.
I'm curious why you think mereological nilihism is incompatible with the existence of Bose-Einstein condensates. I cannot see how this idea could derive from anything but a misunderstanding of M.N. It's a philosophical position - there is no conceivable scientific experiment that could prove or disprove it, because the question is not in that domain.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 54.240.196.185 (talk) 23:34, 26 March 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Explanation 

message: Can something that isn't yet defined be a "probable monomer" (monomer: mer[e]ological simple)
of course still
* When we discover a notion it isn't longer a monomer (mer[e]ological simple).
* When a new particle comes into existence isn't longer a monomer.
Answer: No! Potentiality doesn't create monomers (mer[e]ological simples). Even if something only potentially exists or might exist, it still requires some probable metalogical basis, and that can never allow monomerism (state of being a mereological simple).  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A02:2149:8408:A600:ED1D:A045:9381:3E0B (talk) 10:48, 10 November 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  pseudomonomeroprobabilism 

message: The second sentence of "explanation" states:
:For example, a ball is made up of two halves, so the ball is a whole that is made up of two parts.
Huh?? Only if you are mentally deranged or schizophrenic! Now, during manufacture, a ball might be assembled out of multiple parts, sure. But once the ball is completed, it no longer has any "halves" (unless you mean "the inside half" and "the outside half" ??? The "top half" and the "bottom half"??? Which way is up??? The left half? Balls are sphere symmetric, there is no naturally distinguished direction. Footballs are not sphere-symmetric, but they still do not have any "halves" in any sort of perceptual common-sense manner.) Is there some other example that doesn't blatantly violate common-sense perception?  Like "For example, a piston engine consists of pistons and an engine block" or "A banana consists of a peel and an edible pulpy interior."?  Or is something fundamentally lost when you use something that obviously does have actual parts as an example of something that obviously does have parts? Does the example require the parts to only be imaginary, in-your-head, can't-actually-point-to-them kinds of parts that don't have a physical existence? 67.198.37.16 (talk) 18:58, 20 May 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  A ball is made of two parts????? 

message: The intro currently is tragically incorrect w.r.t physics, as is commonly understood. It states:
:The only things we know of that do not have parts are the smallest items known to exist, such as leptons and quarks[dubious – discuss]. These fundamental particles cannot be 'seen' and are not directly experienced.[dubious – discuss] They may, however, be experienced indirectly through emergent properties.[clarification needed]
Umm, leptons and quarks are hypothesized to be made out of preons, we have a WP article out of that. Please don't just make stuff up cause it sounds good to you! Next -- leptons and quarks are "seen" and "experienced directly" all the time: quarks, as jets in all the major particle accelerators, and leptons, in many typical college physics classes, e.g. the Millikan oil drop experiment that undergraduates do. The last sentence seems to imply that quarks and leptons have "emergent properties". This is a minority opinion, held by only a few (albeit famous) theorists, e.g. Eric Verlinde, but is definitely not the mainstream interpretation. The physics in these sentences is ... painfully wrong, and a deep mischaracterization of physics. 67.198.37.16 (talk) 19:22, 20 May 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Bad particle physics 

message: The "discussion" section contains this claim:
:... since "wholes" themselves only exist at the subatomic level.
This too seems to be based on a fundamental misunderstanding of modern particle physics. Just like you will not find any physics textbook or ArXiv preprint that talks about the "emergent properties" of a electron, so also you won't find one that talks about "wholeness", either.  Let me give a flavor of that: There are many theories in physics that interpret fermions as being themselves little knots in space-time and fields constructed in various ways, ranging Skyrmions in pion fields, instantons in Minkwoski space-time, spin manifolds as generic constructs in Riemannian geometry, or even whizzy ideas e.g. from Leonard Susskind's ER=EPR argument, suggesting that, uhhh fermions are knots in spacetime. From a physics standpoint, to argue that there is some kind of "whole" that exists at some fabled subatomic level is incoherent and meaningless. Is this claim being made by some serious, academically accepted philosophers, or is this just made-up non-sense inserted into this WP article by someone who didn't know any better?  67.198.37.16 (talk) 03:52, 21 May 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: Mereological nihilists maintain that such relations between part and whole do not exist, since "wholes" themselves only exist at the subatomic level.
The word "since" implies an if..then, cause-effect relationship: to say "A since B" is shorthand for saying "if B then A, and B is unarguably true" ... not only is B false, but A does not follow from B: lets try rewording it: "if wholes exist at the subatomic level, then relations between part and whole do not exist", which is a strange non-sequiter, an incoherent claim. 67.198.37.16 (talk) 04:03, 21 May 2019 (UTC)

text: Perhaps what we take to be the most fundamental entities of current physics can actually be decomposed, and their parts can be further decomposed, on down the line. If matter is infinitely decomposable in this respect, then there are no mereological simples.
This statement appears to be founded on theoretical concerns in physics, dating from the 1950's-1980's that has largely abated.  For a while, if you imagined that subatomic physics is just like human-scale physics, except smaller, then one might imagine that parts are made of parts are made of parts, ad infinitum. But subatomic physics is not at all like human-scale physics. It's different down there. The big break-through of the 1980's and 1990's was the application of cohomology theories to fields, including space-time itself - not only instantons, alluded to above, but also Donaldson's knot theory, or Milnor's exotic spheres, or the non-rigidity of affine Lie algebras. Or string theory, more generally. If subatomic particles are indeed just knots in space-time, then asking if a particle is made out of parts is like asking: is a trefoil knot made out of parts?  Show me the parts that a trefoil knot made out of!  So, although it would be true that, at some point, some-when, certain philosophers, physicists and grad students wrung their hands about parts being made of parts, ad infinitum, this is no longer a plausible concern, based on what we know about physics, today. It is perhaps still a valid philosophical concern, but if that is the case, do not drag physics into the debate. 
The entire "objections" section seems incoherent. After reading this article three times, I believe it is safe to say that the vast majority of practicing physicists are mereological nihilists. It doesn't take long to arrive there: Just try giving a Hilbert space basis to a hydrogen atom experiencing the Zeeman effect and you promptly run into the problem of wondering what the correct basis is for that Hilbert space. Now, the answer is that Hilbert space is sphere-symmetric; its like a ball, there is no preferred basis; there's no way to decompose it into parts, or preferred-parts. It's just a whole, its not composable or decomposable, it just "is". At best, there's just some coordinate charts that are more convenient than others. For a student, this feels like a crisis for a while, until you get over it. Perturbation theory forces you into accepting mereological nihilism as a fact, as the fundamental state of matter ... at least, in the domain of quantum mechanics. Now, of course, not everyone agrees, and perhaps the most insightful attempt to slay the dragon of nihilism comes from Max Tegmark, specifically this ArXiv paper:  https://arxiv.org/abs/1401.1219 where he tries to define a QM version of Tonini's Phi as a tool to evade nihilism, and to show how take a Hilbert space and create a "whole" that is a preferred assemblage, rather than an ambiguous homogeneous choice of coordinates. Its a way of thinking about compositionality, in quantum mechanics, as something that is non-trivial. Some coordinate frames are actually fundamentally better than others; some coordinate frames for Hilbert space actually allow you to perceive parts, which was not possible in the 20th-century theory. But all this is definitely brand-new, its not textbook stuff. Now, I am not expecting Tegmark's stuff to appear in this article, but it sure would be nice if the various claims about physics that are made in this article actually lined up with actual physics, or at least, with whatever it is that the philosphers actually said, with some explanation of why they would have said it.
67.198.37.16 (talk) 04:32, 21 May 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  More awkward/incorrect subatomic physics statements 

message: The section titled "Discussion" states:
:Mereological nihilists maintain that such relations between part and whole do not exist
Fine. But then the section titled "Objections" states:
:This empirical perspective poses a problem for nihilism because it does not look like material objects neatly decompose in the way nihilists imagine they do.
Do I need to explain the contradiction? The first statement says that nihilists do not decompose wholes into parts. The second statement implies that nihilists actually do decompose wholes into parts, just not correctly. Which is it? 
Its worse than that. Let's look at the surrounding sentences:
:For example, there is no single decomposition of light; light can be said to be either composed of particles or waves depending on the context.[6] This empirical perspective poses a problem for nihilism because it does not look like material objects neatly decompose in the way nihilists imagine they do.
The standard solution for this would be that all physicists are de-facto mereological nihilists: that is exactly how one evades the perennial particle-wave duality problem: stop thinking about the "parts", there are no "parts".  Feynman apparently said "shut up and calculate" as the solution to the inane parts-whole debate. There are no parts. Trust the formulas. The formulas describe reality, not the ambiguous word-play. Quit asking whether its a particle or a wave. Its both. Its neither. Yes. No. All of the above. Wrong question. Physicists are defacto nihilists, yet it seems to be somehow turned around, upside-down throughout this article.  (I'm assuming that nihilists deny the existence of a parts/whole relationship. Right? I think that is what this article is saying.) 67.198.37.16 (talk) 04:13, 21 May 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: So, the SEP article Material Constitution (see 4. Eliminativism)  suggests that mereological nihilists believe that simples do exist, must exist. Therefore, the physics viewpoint that there are no simples presents a crisis. I think that is what these sentences were trying to say. 67.198.37.16 (talk) 22:10, 22 May 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Contradictions