Holes

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It’s an essential skill for reading scientific papers to notice what isn’t there. It’s as important as what is there.

p 106 “Holes and Other Superficialities

(f) holes have no parts in common with their hosts

• interesting, but what about their shape? They do not share common parts according to this definition but the shape of a hole (say a shadow) is clearly sharing a common body.
• what I’m getting at is despite no parts in common, but still I can match hole with body
• shape being formed by virtue of this absence?

holes have immaterial bodies

bubbles are holes

Hole/Shadows: can a book be defined as a host? hole/shadow. Are the words on the pages holes? are the words on the pages shadows? Are the words the host and the pages the holes

But this question of the hole inside a rotating disk, is it rotating?

Holes - David Lewis and Stephanie Lewis

Argle - I believe in nothing but concrete material objects

You are thinking, doubtless, that every hole is filled with matter: silver amalgam, air, interstellar gas, luminiferous ether or whatever it may be.

The matter isn’t inside the hole. It would be absurd to say it was: nobody wants to say that holes are inside themselves. The matter surrounds the hole. The lining of a hole, you agree, is a material object. For every hole there is a hole-lining; for every hole-lining there is a hole. I say the hole-lining is the hole.

Two holes are the same hole when they have a common part that is itself a hole.

SEP Holes

Hole representations — appear to be commonplace in human cognition. …the concept of a hole is of significant salience in the common-sense picture of the world, specifically of the spatiotemporal world.

Our impression of perceiving holes would then be a sort of systematic illusion, on pain of rejecting causal accounts of perception

It is difficult to specify identity criteria for holes—more difficult than for ordinary material objects

Take a card and punch a hole in it. You have made one hole. Now punch again next to it. Have you made another hole? In a way, yes: now the card is doubly perforated. But what prevents us from saying that we still have one hole, though a hole that comes in two disconnected parts? After all, material objects can be disconnected: a bikini, your copy of the Recherche, a token of the lowercase letter ‘i’. Perhaps holes may be disconnected, too? If so, perhaps we have just punched a single, disconnected hole?

Theories:

• Holes do not exist. “The hole in the carpet” is grammatically a variant of “the perforated carpet”

• Hole exist, but they are nothing over and above the regions of spacetime at which they are found. If you move a donut, the hole in the donut moves - so they are not a region in space.

  Take a donut and spin it clockwise. Take a wedding ring, put it in the spinning donut and spin it counterclockwise. Temporal part of the little hole is the spatiotemporal part of the bigger. Is it spinning both directions?

• Holes are qualified portions of spacetime.

• Holes are ordinary material beings: they are neither more or less than superficial parts of what are their material hosts. The hole is the hole-lining.

• Holes are negative parts of their material hosts. A donut would be a hybrid mereological aggregate - the mereological sum of a positive pie together with the negative bit in the middle.

• Holes are a disturbance. A hole is found in some object, same as knot or wrinkle. Peculiarities:

• Holes are ontologically parasitic. They are always in something and cannot exist in isolation. There’s no such thing as a hole by itself. There cannot exist a world of only holes.

• Hole are fillable. You don’t necessarily destroy a hole by filling it up. You don’t create a new hole by removing the filling.

• Holes are mereologically structured. They have parts.

• Holes are topologically assorted. Superficial hollows are distinguished from internal cavities.

It is, more generally, an instance of the sort of decision philosophers have to make when they scrutinize the ontology inherent in the common-sense picture of the world and the concepts, words, and purposes through which it is described and apprehended.

You and the space between you and someone. A hole. This is serious.