Revisiting the Form Versus Object Distinction
Actually written JANUARY 29, 2023
I feel the need to review my understanding of the Form versus Object distinction. I just want to check whether it still makes sense, especially now that I’m leaning toward what I call my “super deep relationalism”. So I figure I’ll review my understanding by trying to explain it to others.
A Form is similar to a Representation. Both of them are types of Appearances for the Object. Thus the Form versus Object distinction and the Representation versus Object distinction are two types of the Appearance versus Object distinction.
APPEARANCE VERSUS OBJECT DISTINCTION
So let’s start with the Appearance versus Object distinction. This distinction accommodates two crucial things about consciousness:
1. The processing nature of consciousness.
And
2. Perceptual relativity.
1. Consciousness has a means by which it works; it works by a process. This means that our awareness is processed. Pure accurate information goes in; processed inaccurate information (the appearance) comes out. Consciousness distorts as it grasps. And it can’t help doing so. For consciousness to even exist, it must function by some process, and the process distorts, giving us an imperfect appearance standing between us and a truly accurate grasp of the object.
2. The processing nature of consciousness provides an obvious way to explain perceptual relativity. The question at work here is: How can we perceive the same objects if those objects appear differently between us? The consensus seems to be that the processing nature of our minds generates the subjective appearances for the objects. Each mind generates these appearances slightly differently. Hence the relative variance in appearances.
So Appearances come from the processing nature of consciousness. And this is true whether the Appearance is a Form or a Representation. So Form and Representation have this much in common. But now let’s deal with how Form and Representation differ.
DIFFERENCE BETWEEN FORM AND REPRESENTATION
This is the tricky part that I barely grasp. I’m not sure how to distinguish Form from a Representation. But after a few days of thinking about it, I at least have a decent speculation on the matter.
Unfortunately, my speculation requires yet another distinction to throw in the mix and complicate things a bit more. So I hereby introduce the distinction between Object and Awareness-of-the-Object.
This is the basic idea here: There’s the Object; and there’s someone’s Awareness of the Object. They are not the same.
AWARENESS AND REPRESENTATION
Now, here’s how the Awareness of the Object relates to a Representation: The Awareness of the Object comes into existence by means of first and primarily having an awareness of the Representation. Again, the Representation causes the Awareness of the Object it represents. Also note that there are three items here: the Object, the Representation of the Object, and the Awareness-of-the-Object. And these items are all distinct.
AWARENESS AND FORM: FORM-AWARENSS EQUIVALENCY
By contrast, here’s how the Awareness of the Object relates to a Form: The Awareness of the Object can vary. The particular variation it is, is its Form. For the Awareness of the Object to even exist, it must exist in some variation, in some Form. If it didn’t exist in some particular Form, it could not exist at all. I regard it as contradictory to believe that anything that could exist in one of several variant Forms might instead exist in none of its Forms. No - for a variant thing to exist at all, it must exist in one of its variants. I will go further here: a variant of a thing is that thing. Yes, I’m saying that a variant thing literally is the particular variation it is. (As the Objectivists say: To be is to be something specific.) Likewise, an Awareness-of-an-Object literally is its Form. And, since a Form is an Appearance, this means the Awareness-of-the-Object literally is the Appearance of the Object. Appearances are Awareness. An Appearances is the particular variation/Form of an instance of Awareness. When you look at a tree, the way the tree appears is your awareness of it. Your awareness of the tree is in the Form of that Appearance.
And now note that, while a Representation involves three items, a Form involves only two distinct items here: the Object, and the Awareness-of-the-Object.
Ok. That’s what my racing mind came up with last night while keeping me awake. I will call my idea the “Form-Awareness Equivalency”.
But now of course I’m curious how well the Form-Awareness Equivalency idea holds up to contrary intuitions and stuff.
Well, after trying to write about these contrary intuitions for a few days, I’ve come to realize that I’m not up to the task of figuring it all out. It is a daunting task that would likely fill a whole book on its own. As usual, I don’t have the discipline or time for it and, frankly, it is likely I don’t have the level of intellect required to do it either. I hope maybe some disciplined Objectivist scholar could take on that task some day.
Ok, so while I’m unable to untangle the full knot, I can offer some initial investigations into the matter. Just keep in mind that this is just the tip of the iceberg.
FORM AT DISTANCES FROM OUR AWARENESS
Here’s one of those contrary intuitions to try resolving: If a tree’s Appearance is the same thing as my Awareness-of-the-tree, why is the tree’s Appearance 30 meters in front of me, but my Awareness-of-the-tree in my mind? My answer is that actually both are in my mind. The tree’s Appearance is actually not 30 meters away. My Awareness-of-the-tree is in the Form of, the Appearance of, it being 30 meters away. The tree itself may in fact be 30 meters away. And my Awareness-of-it is in my mind. My Awareness-of-the-tree is in the Form of, the Appearance of, the tree being 30 meters away. It helps to realize that my Awareness-of-the-tree is only part of my Awareness-of-all-the-other-stuff in my view too, wherein all that other stuff provides a full context for the Awareness-of-the-tree. The 30 meters is another thing I have an Awareness of, and it will also Appear to me, placing the tree in relation to it in my Awareness of both.
But that explanation still seems a bit sketchy to me for some reason. I feel I’m just paying lip service to the idea that spatial location is objectively real. Maybe someone else could work that out properly. As for me, I already favor my other explanation wherein spatial location is not objectively real. In this explanation, the tree actually is not 30 meters away at all, because there is no such objective thing as space. Thus my Awareness-of-the-tree is in my mind, but so is the Form of, the Appearance of, the tree. This is so because the entirety of existence has no spatial extension in which things could be located at all. On this idea, my Awareness-of-existence, of anything and everything, is in the Form of, the Appearance of, things located in space. Space itself is the Form of my Awareness-of-things, the Form in which I am aware of the differences between things that exist.
I elaborate on this view elsewhere in this book [blog], in my writing called “Against Metaphysical Continua”.
And there will be more on space-time a bit later in this writing.
But presently I want to cover many more things about Form.
PROCESSING NATURE OF CONSCIOUSNESS DOES NOT DISTORT
And now I’ll continue by covering the notion that the processing nature of consciousness produces distortions in our awareness of objects. I’d suggest that the theory of Form requires a reinterpretation of the processing nature of consciousness. The processing doesn’t really produce a distorted Appearance. If you think about it, what initially seems like a contamination of information about the Object is actually rather an increase of information accuracy about the Object. We get information about how that Object relates to other objects, other forces and energies, including how our consciousness processes the energies transmitted from the Object. It turns out that the processing nature of consciousness reveals everything it is capable of revealing in full context of what is really going on. So at the level of basic perceptual awareness, there is no distortion or contamination; there’s only awareness of objects in the full context of other objects and forces and energies. If there’s any distortions afoot, they happen at the abstract, conceptual level where we accidentally miscategorize relational/relativistic aspects of an Object’s Appearance as intrinsic to the Object instead. We try to minimize this through the practice of science. A decent elaboration on this idea is available on page 40 of Leonard Peikoff’s book: Obectivism: the Philosophy of Ayn Rand.
REVIEW: WHAT’S AT STAKE HERE
Before I move on to other bizarre intuitions about Form, I want to elaborate on what’s at stake here.
Given that anti-realism has no cognitive content and is not even a theory, what remains is to make sense out of realism. And this is no easy task, as realism has plenty of kinks to work out. And one of these kinks is a complete validation of the mind’s grasp of existence (objects) as it really is. This validation involves the claim that our minds have direct access to existence. To validate this directness, we need to eliminate the idea of Representations. We need to reduce the items in our model of consciousness to just two: the Object and the Awareness-of-the-Object. This means eliminating the middle item, the Representation. So far I have replaced Representation with Form, and held the item count at just two (for directness) by equating Form with Awareness-of-the-Object. And this has produced violations of intuitions that need resolving, such as the Form needing to be both in our minds and yet 30 meters away where the tree object seems to be.
So I think of this project as a “great bifurcation of equivalencies”. On one side of the bifurcation, we have the Object - existence as it really is. And on the other side we have the Awareness-of-the-Object, which I say is equivalent to the Appearance of the Object, which is equivalent to the Form. So on the Awareness-of-the-Object side, I’ve got three items equal to just one.
EACH OF US IS EVERYWHERE
And now I propose tossing in yet a fourth item as equivalent to the Awareness-of-the-Object: the Self. And doing so will produce more bizarre intuition violations to explain.
Given that the Self is equal to the Appearance of the tree I’m looking at, how bizarre it still seems that I can point to the tree and say “there I am!” I literally am the tree’s Appearance. To be clear, when I point at the tree and say “There I am!”, my pointing is not meant to indicate the tree, but the Appearance of the tree. I am the Appearance of the tree, not the actual tree Object. I am pointing at the Appearance of the tree and claiming to be that Appearance. Still, were you to observe me so pointing and saying this, it would seem quite bizarre to you, I’ll bet. Even more so were I to point at you and say “There I am!”. Let’s go to extremes: Everything I can perceive appears everywhere, from the shoes I’m wearing to distant stars in the Milky Way. I could be tempted toward a sentimental mystical notion that “I am everywhere.” or at least “I am everywhere I look.” But I lean toward taking this sentiment literally, so long as we regard space (and time) as our Form of experiencing difference. If space is a Form, and a Form is an Appearance, and an Appearance is Awareness, and Awareness is the Self, then space is the self. And since “everywhere” is just another name for space, I am literally everywhere because I am space. And so are you. We are all everywhere. All conscious beings that experience existence in the Form of space are everywhere. But let’s clarify: “I am everywhere” does not mean that there is some “container”, such as space, that “contains” all possible locations, and that I am occupying every one of those locations. No, I am not located everywhere, or anywhere, in space. I am the everywhere. I am the space. Space itself is me. And everywhere in space is therefore me. Likewise, generally, the objects that comprise existence are also not anywhere because there is no space out there. And since we are part of this spaceless existence, we too are not actually everywhere because we too are not actually anywhere. We are “everywheres” that are themselves nowhere in space. We don’t occupy any space, nor have any location in space, but we are space.
But now it seems contradictory that a spaceless existence can contain, not just one instance of space (just me), but an astronomically huge number of spaces (all of us). Perhaps we’ve got an intuition that space must be contained in... well, more space. If you’re gonna put space inside something, that something must itself have the space for it. To deal with the apparent contradiction, we must challenge that intuition. Spaceless existence can indeed contain multitudes of spaces - of us.
While I can’t offer a full dissertation on how a spaceless existence can contain instances of space, I want to suggest that the explanation for this lies in a much deeper investigation of the idea of “containment”. For a few years now I have thought about what I like to call that “fallacy of the container”. I suspect we intuitively over-apply the idea of a container and end up confusing our understanding of several issues; from set theory, to metaphysics and meriology, and now the matter at hand. If I have time before my self-imposed pseudo deadline for publishing this here book, I may write a piece about that.
SELF-AWARENESS
Ok now what about self-awareness? When I look at myself in the mirror, I see myself, but I also see how I appear. So in this case, I’m seeing myself twice! I’m seeing myself, but since I am also seeing the way I appear, and that Appearance is also just me, then I am seeing myself again when I see my Appearance.
How to make sense of this and explain this kind of self-awareness in a way compatible with Form-Awareness Equivalency seems like a daunting task. I haven’t had much time to mull it over. But I suspect the resolution of this one has something to do with the way we (our minds) can change what we focus on; such as our ability to focus on the tree instead of just one of its branches or one of its properties, or instead of the whole forest. This ability to change focus already played a role in my idea about pointing at an Appearance instead of an object, when I wrote: “...when I point at the tree and say ‘There I am!’, my pointing is not meant to indicate the tree, but the Appearance of the tree.” While we are given a starting item to focus on, i.e. the tree, we can direct that focus to the Appearance of the tree instead. But again, rather than trying to work all that out, I’d simply like to pass on it for now.
FORM AS HALF THE APPEARANCE LEADS TO SOME ANTI-REALISM / IDEALISM
I now want to offer some sloppy speculation about a potential problem with David Kelley’s definition of Form. Kelley wrote: “I will therefore introduce the concept of perceptual form, to designate those aspects of the way an object appears which are determined by the manner in which our senses respond to the object in the particular conditions at hand.” (The Evidence of the Senses, p86) In this definition, Form does not fully equal Appearance. Form is only part of the Appearance. Form is the part of Appearance that comprises the relativistic / relational aspects of Appearance that varies from person to person and situation to situation. Presumably the other part of the Appearance is not relative / relational. But the important idea here is that Appearance is now split into two parts. And this produces a problem.
Splitting the Appearance into two items violates my “great bifurcation of equivalencies”. Now we have three items instead of two, and thus lose directness - maybe. It depends on the nature of this new item. Perhaps its nature will allow us to absorb it into one of the two sides of the bifurcation. But which side? What is the nature of this new item? Well, it is the part of the Appearance that has no relative / relational content. And that right there means it cannot be equated with the Form, or the whole Appearance, or the Awareness, or the self. It simply cannot be on the Awareness side of the bifurcation. So what’s left? The only side left is the Object side. The new item, the non-relational Appearance-of-the-object, must be literally equal to the Object. Now we have a case where an Appearance (or at least part of the Appearance) is equal to an Object. But this rather violates the distinction between Object and Appearance. And it smacks of anti-realism by so violating. It means there is some part of an Object’s Appearance that is identical with the Object. Equating Object with Appearance is the end game of idealism / anti-realism. [I want to explain this more, but must move on.]
Ok, this has gone off the deep end for me. What am I doing?
TINKERING WITH MODELS OF CONSCIOUSNESS
I feel the urge to back up a lot and ponder my thinking process here. So here I am tinkering with models of consciousness, accounting a bunch of items in those models and lumping some of the items together. Super bizarre ideas come out of it. Am I doing any of this right? I feel like I’m out of my league here. Honestly I feel like I should quit while I’m only this far behind.
As with other issues surrounding this topic, I want to flag this pondering about manipulating the items in models of consciousness as super important, but then move on - because, again, I may not even be smart enough to figure it out.
Even so, I think I have a somewhat relevant way to segway from model items to something else that fascinates me here. Here goes:
PRECEDENT FOR THE WEIRDNESS OF ITEMS IN A MODEL
I may be way wrong here, but it seems to me that one popular starting place to investigate this business of models and their items is with discussions about entities versus their properties. All I know about this I gleaned from some statements Ayn Rand made about it, wherein she claimed that an entity is its properties. If she is correct, we have a basic situation where several items are actually equal to just one, i.e., all of an entity’s numerous properties are in fact just one item: the entity. If this is true, this becomes a precedent for our mind’s ability to mentally split an item into many items, and the ability to focus on just one of these split-off items. Maybe the same reason we can do this for the properties of entities is also the reason we can do it for many other domains of experience, such as the items in models of consciousness.
We might say, as I think Rand would have, that we can do this item-splitting and achieve an awareness of a property by means of abstraction, the kind of abstraction she describes for the formation of concepts. And in this case we can begin to see how it is that our minds can produce epistemological item-splits that are not metaphysical item-splits - in other words, we can experience imaginary item-splits that aren’t really there. We can experience the property of a stick called “length” as split-off from the stick, regarding it as a distinct item, but only in our imagination. The split does not exist outside of our mind.
And if this is true, then maybe the mind can produce imaginary item-splits by processes that don’t even involve abstraction. We may experience several kinds of imaginary item-splitting produced by correspondingly various mental processes.
And if all this is true, then arguments for the equivalence of items can be valid, even if they seem bizarrely counter-intuitive.
Next, it seems to me that there can also be item-uniting that is only mental. The mind may do both item-splitting and item-uniting.
And when the mind does either, this becomes our intuition about the taxonomy of items, an intuition that may be false. And the logical arguments that go against this intuition will seem really bizarre.
NAIVE ITEM TAXONOMY ERROR
Here I will introduce an idea I call the “Naive Item Taxonomy Error”. The naive item taxonomy error comprises all the items that seem distinct but are really just mentally split from their uniting items, and all the items that seem singular but are really several items. A lot of what intellectuals do seems aimed at reducing our naive item taxonomy error.
Now it also seems to me that the error varies in severity and type. Sometimes the error is strong, like I suggest is the case with the distinction between the Self and the Appearance-of-objects in space. It takes a lot to realize they are the same, to spite the extreme bizarreness of that realization. Sometimes the error is weaker, like the distinction between an entity and its properties. The argument for their equivalence, by means of understanding Rand’s theory of abstraction, doesn’t seem so bizarre.
Sometimes the error is pretty mild and mundane, like a false item-split that you don’t really notice unless you meditate on it or someone else points it out to you. I’ll give you an example now, because...
This brings me to one of these mundane false item-splits that I want to point out to you. Observe how I have been uniting items into my great bifurcation of equivalencies. Now I want to exaggerate an item split instead of uniting the items. Geez. Why would I want to do that? Because this item-split is interesting to me, and it might help us better understand the idea of Form.
RAW AWARENESS
On the Awareness-of-Object side of the great bifurcation we already have, what, four items unified? Well I want to split-out another, called “Raw Awareness”. I’m drawing a distinction that does not really exist beyond our experiences because it’s useful. To do this, I’m counting on the inkling of this false distinction already existing in your experience, hoping I can make you aware of it by offering you a guided meditation.
There is something else in our experience of objects besides the Appearances generated in our minds. There is also what I call the experience of the object’s “raw” existence, its basic presence before us. It’s the kind of experience I speculated can be brought to the forefront of our attention by a mescaline trip, as I have written elsewhere in this book [blog] in a section called “Buddhist Enlightenment in a Pill”. (See also “Transcendental Epistemologies and Their Benevolent Detractors”.)
But under normal conditions, this experience of “raw” existence seems ethereal and dim by contrast against the sensory vividness of the Appearance, those colors and shapes and, perhaps beauty. It is this difference in vividness that I suspect fuels all these intuitions about the object needing an Appearance even when nobody is looking. We have a hard time imagining something existing if that something doesn’t look like anything – has no Appearance.
Imagine what it must mean for all of existence having absolutely no intrinsic Appearance. Ya. Complete darkness. But more than that, since there is no extension in space or time, everything that exists is in one location. But actually, location does not even apply here, since location presupposes there is space wherein other locations are an option. But there’s no space. No size. No scale. And no time, hence no duration. All there is, is difference. Somehow, within this spaceless and timeless universe, are a fantastically vast quantity of different things. All these different things likewise occupy no space, have no size and so on. And likewise they do not occupy different positions on any continua. They do not differentiate by means of positions on any continua. And somehow, some of these different things are aware of other things, they are conscious. And it is the processing performed by their consciousness that produces the appearances, by means of experiencing difference as spatial-temporial continua. Time and space are the Form in which we experience difference, the Appearance we make for all the different things.
RAW AWARENESS COULD BE A PROBLEM FOR BOTTOM-UP AI
The cash-in, for me, of this notion of “raw awareness”, is that it may present a problem for physicalist theories of consciousness. Raw awareness has no appearance. It is formless. And having no appearance means it cannot be measured or represented, at least by any “bottom-up” approaches to hard AI. This would be interesting to explore. But for now, I must move on.
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