What is an object? One could kick the can down the road a little and respond, well it's a thing. But what then is a "thing"?

One could get really specific and say a thing is a contiguous and well defined area of spacetime with some level of persistent properties.

But then I might ask: is a cloud an object? It has no clear boundary.

And I might ask: is a photon an object? It has no clearly defined volume of spacetime, nor well-defined properties.

One could come at it from the other angle - an object is an exclusory statement. It picks some set of information about the universe and bisects it from the rest. An object then necessarily exists in parallel and symbiosis with its contradiction. There exists a leaf, and the universe except that leaf.

I might point out that there isn't really a place within physics where the concept of "object" fits. As far as we can tell, the universe makes no distinction between leaf and not leaf. It is the same mechanisms operating within, without, before and after. The fields which make up the composite atoms, which in turn form the molecules that shape the leaf, do not themselves contain a boundary. The universe does not know what a leaf is, nor does it need to know in order for the leaf to exist as an object to us. Does such a reality mean that a thing like an "object" cannot truly exist?

Abstract Fields

If one is to take this view of materialism, then you should probably follow-up with some kind of theory as to how these concepts of objecthood arise. If we're all wibbly wobbly soup, how can we ever make sense of the universe in a way truly consistent with its underlying mechanics?

We are familiar with the concept of a field within physics. A measurement can be made at any position within spacetime in one of these fields and yield a value. Fields in this sense measure fundamental forces of the universe, of which we know of four. These are arguably the only naturally separable non-abstracted things, though even they probably stem from a single unified force that existed before. However their ubiquity across spacetime excludes them from objecthood.

Abstract fields operate in exactly the same way. However, they instead measure subjective abstractions. They are how we can conceptualise properties across the world we live in without first running it through the lens of objecthood. Instead, objecthood pops out the other end as its own abstract field.

Consider the abstract field "red". This field is defined as everything that you would look at and describe as red in colour. Redness, of course, is not a binary. And so we might define our field as spanning in value from completely lacking in redness, to being a pure red.

You might not like describing something so physical as a colour as abstract. You might say that it's just a range on the electromagnetic spectrum, physically measurable regardless of subjective experience, and you would be right. But even the act of placing that range upon the spectrum abstracts it away from the mechanical reality. The universe knows not of red. At best, it knows only of light.

But don't worry - abstract fields can have very little to do with mechanical underpinnings. Most abstract fields are incredibly sparse, as far as we know, reflecting the fact that most of the subjective experiences we have access to are limited to a tiny patch of the universe.

The Field of You

Now let's consider a much more exciting abstract field: "conscious". You and I are existence proofs of this field. There exist patches of spacetime that think - though perhaps some more than others. Your objecthood, entityhood and personhood all exist within these abstract fields, with some persistent membrane that defines the limits of its existence. A popular question in philosophy is how it feels to be a bat. Well, it feels like it does within your skull right now, just over where the bat is. This is the spatial version of that old temporal answer of what death feels like - well, it feels exactly like it did before you were born.

We have once again arrived at the idea of membranes. Indeed, my previous discussions of the nature of egos have discussed an abstract field we might call "me" or "you", and defined this field partially by yet another abstract field of "informational bandwidth".

One might be tempted to think I am saying none of these things - objects, egos, red or bats - are real, and I want to be clear that I do not think that this lens makes them any less physically present. To say that a watch is a singular object does not mean that you claim it is hollow. It is rather that this physical presence does not in and of itself create the object as distinct from the universe. That must arise from an abstract field, and that abstract field from a subjective experience.

Scale

We're used to discussing a lot of physical fields as scale invariant, where their rules don't change depending on how big or small you are. This is clearly not the case for objecthood. If you were 100 times smaller or bigger than the size of the average human, your perception of objecthood would necessarily be altered by needing to solve quite different problems. Abstract fields are a projection upon the mind by the universe, and the position and size of the window through which information can flow shapes the signal that can be extracted by the mind on the inside of that membrane.

The Universe Is The Only Object

This article is titled so as a somewhat intentional provocation. I've explored a little what the concept of objecthood means to me, and how this idea of abstract fields can serve to connect our objectless universe with our perception. Objects do, in any meaningful use of the word, "exist", but they are an abstraction layer that it serves us to notice.