- Mark Balaguer

For someone who claims that everything that exists is physical, they will need to specify exactly what they mean by that term, and what counts as physical evidence for a claim. It’s not as easy as one might think. One way to get at what we might mean by physical is by theoretically simplifying reality as much as possible, and seeing what it reveals about our actual, complex reality.

For example, for any object in the universe, you could run this same thought experiment:

A maroon, ceramic coffee mug sits in front of me on my desk. It’s made out of smaller parts that I can’t individually see, like aluminum, silicon, and oxygen. The mug appears to me as a completely solid object, with no space between any of its parts. But, of course, that’s only because of my perception scale relative to the mug. If my eyes could zoom in to the mug, to as small of a scale as I wanted, I would see vast amounts of weird-looking stuff buzzing around between all those molecules.

Let’s assume that at some point you would reach the ultimate, indivisible building blocks of the physical world. Scientists used to think that what we now know as atoms couldn’t be split. Then they split atoms into smaller parts. So to avoid confusion I won’t use the term “atom”. Instead, we’ll call the ultimate, indivisible building blocks of the physical world bits. Bits are just objects we stipulate based on theory; we haven’t seen them or measured them with instruments. But whatever characteristics they have, we will assume the rock bottom of reality is all made up of bits. It may turn out that we are wrong. But the theoretical alternative—that the physical world can keep getting split infinitely—makes less sense to me. It seems like there must be a stopping point where you can’t split the thing anymore. We’ll call that thing a bit.

Now take this bit assumption and imagine a universe that includes only one bit. That’s it. The only physical thing that exists is this one bit.

It can’t be divided, it isn’t related in any way to any other physical objects, and it isn’t a part of anything else. If any object is a candidate to be a purely physical object, this one is.

Let’s add just one more bit to this simple universe and see what happens. Imagine a universe with just two bits.

Now we can start asking all kinds of questions about this two-bit world that will apply to the vastly more complex objects we encounter at the human scale, like my maroon coffee mug. For example, maybe the two bits are very close together, so we can call them one pair. And we can call that one pair whatever we want, like one bitto. Two bits become one bitto whenever they are close together. So in addition to the two bits, we now also have one bitto. So how many objects do we have? Still two? Three? Now change the distance between the two bits in this universe to one light year.

Do we still have one bitto, or is that too far of a distance to count as one? At what point exactly do we have too much distance between them that we no longer have this one thing that’s a bitto? If the answers aren’t abundantly clear, what does that say about what makes something physical?

Most importantly, for any question we can ask about our very simple, two-bit universe, we also need to ask what physical evidence we can point to in this most simple universe for whatever answer we give. Because physical evidence is the only kind of evidence that the physicalist allows…right?

Next time we’ll talk about what we could mean by physical object when our toy universe gets more complex than just two bits.

Until next time.

Jared

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