Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: The Thingness of Things, published by Tsvi Benson-Tilsen on January 1, 2023 on The AI Alignment Forum.

[Metadata: crossposted from. I'm fairly likely to not respond to comments promptly. If you're especially interested in chatting, my gmail address is: tsvibtcontact ]

What's a thing, in general? Minds deal with things, so this question comes up in trying to understand minds. Minds think about things, speak of things, manipulate things, care about things, create things, and maybe are made of things.

Things

Examples of things: table, elephant, carbon atom. France, Martin Luther King. Insertion sort. Chess. Unicorn. Learning. Seven. Towel, strand, wing, crystal, finger, space, diffraction. The laws of electromagnetism. The first World War.

Non-things

What about non-things? It might be hard to list non-things because what we have words for, tend to be things. Redness seems like sort of a thing, but less so. Laws of physics also. Also ghosts. One might say "the ideal gas law is totally a thing" or "ghosts aren't a thing", though I think ghosts are a thing. Events can be things; WWI seems like a thing to me. But a minute ago I picked up my bottle of water and drank from it; that's clearly an event, a real one, but it doesn't feel that much like a thing. The abstract [drinking from a water bottle] feels like a thing though.

(There are some usual critiques of thingness. Yes, there's no sharp dividing line between a wave and a trough, but clearly waves are a thing. Yes, seven is not a physical object you'll ever bump into, but it's clearly a thing. The ideal gas law isn't localized in space or time, but it's a thing. Unicorns aren't real, in that you'll bump into people speaking about them but you won't bump into unicorns themselves and won't be constrained by unicorns in the way you're constrained by seven, but they're things. The world of Ender's Game isn't real, though it's a remote possibility, and it's a thing.)

Features of things

Coherence. A thing usually has properties, parts, aspects that are coherent with each other. Some things are big, some things are small; but usually there's nothing like a table that's both big and small.

Prediction, homogeneity, constancy, constraint. A thing usually has some predictive meaning; its presence implies constraints on other things or the future, and it implies some constancy in some features.

Expression. Related to prediction, a name that names a thing or an idea that's about a thing contributes to expressing thoughts about situations involving the thing. Expressing thoughts about the thing contributes to further behavior such as successfully predicting or manipulating the thing.

Cluster. A thing that's an instance of a type of thing, has multiple features mostly shared by most things of that type and not mostly shared by most things not of that type.

Exterior, relations. A thing usually can "impinge on other things from the outside". "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."

Indicatability. A thing can be indicated. A physical object can literally be pointed at, seven can be pointed at by showing how to count and showing sets of seven like things, and many things can be pointed at by saying the word for that thing.

Truth, solidity, fixed import. "True" comes from PIE deru- ("be firm, solid"), cognate with "trust" and "tree" and possibly "durable". Things have truth to them; a thing makes a promise of agreement between minds on questions about the thing upon further independent investigation. Beyond indicatability, the truth of a thing implies that the thing can be advantageously treated and used in a fixed way.

Hollowness, cavernousness. The more comprehensively the history, features, changes, components, causes, internal relations, overarching structures, and explanations of a thing are kept in min...