Abstract
AbstractGraham Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology has employed a variant of occasionalist causation since 2002, with sensual objects acting as the mediators of causation between real objects. While the mechanism for living beings creating sensual objects is clear, how nonliving objects generate sensual objects is not. This essay sets out an interpretation of occasionalism where the mediating agency of nonliving contact is the virtual particles of nominally empty space. Since living, conscious, real objects need to hold sensual objects as sub-components, but nonliving objects do not, this leads to an explanation of why consciousness, in Object-Oriented Ontology, might be described as doubly withdrawn: a sensual sub-component of a withdrawn real object.
Highlights
When approaching Graham Harman’s fourfold ontology, it is relatively easy to understand the first steps if you begin from an anthropocentric position of naive realism: there are real objects that have their real qualities
It is easy to understand that when humans look at objects, they create images in their mind, but when this idea is extended to nonliving entities enacting basic forces on each other, like when a ceramic octopus is hit by a meteor, the puzzling question is who, or what, is producing the sensual object of their contact? Neither the meteor nor the ceramic octopus seems capable of producing an image
By exploring the origins of virtual particles in the quantum vacuum, we find the need to counter the anthropocentrism of the measurement problem, and the colossal problem of space–time; and by exploring virtual particles’ role as the carriers of forces in nonliving causal interactions, we encounter the obscure problem of the emergence of consciousness
Summary
When approaching Graham Harman’s fourfold ontology, it is relatively easy to understand the first steps if you begin from an anthropocentric position of naive realism: there are real objects that have their real qualities. It is easy to understand that when humans look at objects, they create images in their mind, but when this idea is extended to nonliving entities enacting basic forces on each other, like when a ceramic octopus is hit by a meteor, the puzzling question is who, or what, is producing the sensual object of their contact? Since virtual particles are readily categorisable as real objects, while being interpreted here as candidates for sensual objects, they are offered as examples of objects that exhibit contradictory and mutually exclusive conditions simultaneously, which Timothy Morton refers to as dialetheism Bringing these threads together, it is speculated that the quantum vacuum and space–time are perhaps two aspects or two states of the same object, and a conclusion is proposed that consciousness, from the perspective of ObjectOriented Ontology (OOO), is doubly withdrawn: a sensual sub-component of a withdrawn real object
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