 Today I want to talk about a concept that might not seem directly relevant to how you live your everyday life but in fact has huge implications both for metaphysics and the philosophy of mathematics. And it has to do really ultimately with the role of the mind, but you can also think of it this way. What is the relationship between the single and the multiple? Between composite and simple. Between the many, the one. Unity and plurality. Is it the case that you can have holes which are greater than the sum of their parts? So the example I love to give all the time talking about chairs, right? Philosophers love to talk about chairs. Is it the case that the chair exists in addition to the objects, the composite objects which compose the chair, the bits of matter, the pieces of wood which put it together, or is a chair really a word that just is a kind of shorthand reference for individual things but it itself doesn't exist? The way I like to answer this one talking about chairs is to say what actually exists are bits of physical space-time that are arranged in a particular way that our minds call a chair. But I think this gets at one of the essential functions of what the mind does which is to unify and to boundary the many into one. We treat multiples, a plurality of things as one thing. I think that's an essential thing that the mind does. So take the example of two, number two. What is the number two and how does it relate to the number one? Is it the case that two is a composite object? Is two actually composed of two ones? There's a one here and a one there and that's actually what the number two is. Do we put a boundary around those two ones and call them two? Is two some kind of third substance? Is two what happens when you somehow combine two ones? You get this new number that is the number two. What is it? I think it's the case that two is shorthand. Two is shorthand for multiple ones. Our minds are what put multiples together into one thing that we call two and this is of course true for ten, a hundred, a million and so on. A million units don't exist in addition to a million ones. Okay, so two areas that I want to apply this line of reasoning to. One is the universe and one is families. Is there such a thing as the universe? Is there one thing which is everything? Or is the universe a concept? I think it's the case that the universe is a way of talking about a bunch of individual little things that exist. I don't think there's the universe in addition to what we think of as being the objects within the universe. Now there are some philosophers who think that all is one. It's one thing that you're carving up in different ways but really all put together there's one thing that exists. I don't think that's correct. In fact, I almost say I'm certain of it. You just think about the contents of your perception. You think about the contents of your visual field. There are actual meaningful differences in the world but that's another matter. I think it's the case that when we say words like the universe we're talking about putting a bunch of things that actually exist and treating them in our minds as if they are one thing but there's no one universe out there. Take the family. What is a family? Does a family exist in addition to the people that compose the family? There's the mom, there's the dad, there's the kids, there's maybe the animals depending if they qualify. In addition to all of the people is there another thing which is the family or is it the case that the word family references a concept which our mind has come up with to unify the many into the one? It's much easier to talk about families in society than it is to always be referencing individuals, right? We come up with abstractions because they're really, really, really useful. I'm going to take this idea and I'm going to run with it to an extreme that you guys probably won't like but I'll eventually explain which has to do with the nature of the physical universe. What is the fundamental nature of the physical universe? Is there many substances? Is there one substance? Is there one physical universe? I think that the physical universe is composed of a bunch of simple units. A bunch of simple units. I call them base units and a theory that I'm working on. They're composed of a bunch of symbols and those are the actual only things that physically exist. As soon as you're talking about two units, you've interjected the mind because you're talking about plurality. There is no plurality as can be recognized in a universe without the mind. There is only the simple substances and they're just so happens to be. Because we live in a universe with minds, a hell of a lot of those particular simple substances, you know, 10 to the 51st or something crazy like that. So what is any of this matter? Well, this has really big implications for your life. It even has implications on ethics, right? Because what is a family? What is a society? Who are your neighbors? What is a neighbor's reference? Individuals or is an abstraction? How should you treat people in society differently than you treat individuals? Is society going in a direction in a different way that individuals are going? Metaphysics of the simple versus the composite directly impacts your ethical worldview, whether you like it or not thinking about these things. But also, believe it or not, this is going to have a big impact on the resolution for the mind-body problem. It has a huge relationship with how it could be that the mind and the world interact with one another. If we strip away all kinds of different properties from the physical world and just leave bits of matter that are located in space, that's all that's there. The colors don't exist in the world. All kinds of things don't exist in the world. It's just bits of matter that are on or off, that are empty or full. It actually is going to help us resolve the mind-body problem because what we think exists in the world is probably actually only existing in our mind. I'm not going to justify that. I'm not going to defend that. In fact, I might not for a little while, but that's where these ideas are heading. So a simple question you might ask to bother your family members and say, are we a family? Are we a family in addition to being ourselves? Do we compose something that is greater than us? And how you choose to answer that question is actually going to have a pretty big impact on the rest of your worldview.