What are your thoughts? — elucid

Objects that touch don't occupy the same space, they occupy spaces immediately next to each other with no space between them. If you want to go on from there and talk about how the atoms in one object interact with those in the other you can, but you don't have to.

What you are saying makes sense.

Is touching possible? It depends. Some animate two-legged objects are very fussy about being touched without giving their express permission. Soccer players may objected to their lips being touched by another pair of lips.

I suppose the touch averse do not want the electrons orbiting their nuclei having commerce with the electrons orbiting somebody else's nuclei, especially if an intermingling of electrons wasn't given prior authorization.

Seriously, though... I am sure that surface atoms (electrons) do touch; when a hammer hits a nail the two objects give every indication of having touched and the force moving the hammer having been transmitted to the nail. How many layers of atoms of hammer and nail come into contact, I don't know, And just guessing, but I assume that the nuclei of atoms do not touch under normal circumstances. Do Plutonium nuclei touch one another when a ball of plutonium is compressed by the shaped explosives in a nuclear bomb?

The bonds that hold solid matter molecules together are very, very strong, so touching is possible but not intermingling of solid matter atoms. The hammer molecules don't interact with the nail molecules.

???? Corrections, anyone ????

My suspicion is that if you need to refer to electrons to explain touch, you’ve gone astray somewhere. Not sure where.

Even if I touch your hand with my hand, there are still electrons involved -- though it isn't necessary to talk about electrons in animal to animal touch. On a "common sense" level, objects can touch -- we can see it happen everywhere. But still, how much matter interacts with matter in objects that touch, or animals that touch? That's where electrons come into it.

Touching is by many considered an object coming into contact with another, which perhaps requires the objects occupying the same space. — elucid

It's doesn't mean occupying the same space, but sharing a point of contact. Problem solved.

Touching is by many considered an object coming into contact with another, which perhaps requires the objects occupying the same space. — elucid

This is a naïve conception. If touch is to be conditional on its everyday, naïve conception, then there is no touch. Of course there is touch, but it doesn't operate that way.

I *think* that the force of touch is ultimately electromagnetic, electromagnetic fields pushing against other electromagnetic fields. There is also mingling, when humans touch, oil and protein and dna intermingle. But none of this involves atoms contacting each other directly.

If i cannot touch my coffee, how does it wake me up?

and taste it, which is also like touching.

Quite. There is a misguided tendency to take physics way outside of its purview.

If getting cut by a knife or tickled by a father doesn't register anything, perhaps there is nerve damage.

Maybe some sort of analogue of Mandelbrot's fractional dimensions is needed here? At a certain scale, two items seem to be touching, but zoom in or out and this can change.

North and South America appear to touch, until you zoom in very far to see the Panama Canal. Two humans holding hands appear to touch, but at a fine enough scale what you get is view where the borders of each human are poorly defined, and the primary "substance" of molecules don't touch, but rather repel each other based on charges.

Of course, a lot of us, myself included, probably have a skewed conception of touch based on the "empty atom model." In this model, the nucleus of an atom is comparably the size of a bee buzzing around a baseball stadium. Almost all the space "inside an atom," is empty, mostly occupied by an electron cloud, which is what does all the heavy lifting in explaining chemical reactions and touch.

But we also have to bear in mind the Pauli exclusion principle: the less massive the particle, the greater the delocalisation. Thus, a single electron cloud might engulf an entire large molecules, and it becomes more useful to picture how this cloud works by thinking of it as a sort of semisolid soup rather than as a bunch of incredibly tiny singular electrons in wild orbits, moving through mostly "empty space."

https://aeon.co/essays/why-the-empty-atom-picture-misunderstands-quantum-theory

If we take the "electron cloud as soup," picture, we can recover an intuitive picture of touch. We have touch when the clouds come into contact with one another. The problem is that sometimes this touch causes simply repulsion, but sometimes we get reactions that change the molecules and the shape of the clouds themselves. In a chemical reaction, the "touch" often results in both original objects disappearing and a new one forming.

But we still have points in favor of the fractal dimensionality view! Because if we keep shrinking down our view, the soup does indeed to resolve into a bunch of tiny particles flying in orbits in empty space. And at this scale, nothing touches. Instead, our stable electron particles shoot virtual particles at each other. But even these virtual "particles" don't actually "touch," because they are actually just perturbations in the same base field. Parts of a field touch of course, but only in the trivial sense that a field "touches itself."

Thus, it seems like the geometries we use to define objects and if they are in contact with one another undergoes a sort of kaleidoscopic fractal shift depending on how closely we look. Perhaps beneath the fields are strings that "touch," the jury is out.

IMO, this might just be showing the limits of an "object" and "substance," based metaphysics. After all, what are the boundaries of an object like a human in the long run? 90+% of the atoms are going to be replaced, there is no static form to supervene on. A human is better defined by process, which in turn determines form.

Questions like: "is touch real?" or "is cause real?" seem pretty silly. Of course these things occur. But it's also the case that a full explanation of them causes us to see them in a highly counter intuitive light. In the process view touch can be real, but it's also emergent. Objects that can touch only exist in virtue of existing stabilities, the energy well stabilities of atomic nuclei or the far from equilibrium thermodynamic system stabilities of most everyday objects.

But

Quite. There is a misguided tendency to take physics way outside of its purview.

Touch, for example, billiard balls touching and transferring kinetic energy, etc. is the bread and butter of physics. It's not that touch isn't the sort of thing physics should describe, it's that it isn't always useful to reduce things as far as possible. Actually, if there is strong emergence, it's counterproductive to try to define touch in terms of EM fields, but the question of emergence is an open one.

"Do things actually touch," really seems to be a question about weak versus strong emergence to some degree. If things don't touch in fundemental physics, and we think all physics is fully reducible to this sort of contactless description, then that provides us with a different sort of answer then in a world where we think:
A. Fundemental physics does involve contact.
B. There is strong emergence.

Actually, if there is strong emergence, it's counterproductive to try to define touch in terms of EM fields, but the question of emergence is an open one. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Even in this absence of strong emergence, it is pragmatic to recognize that different language/modeling is appropriate at different emergent levels. The fact that a physicist has access to a more detailed model of what is meant by touch, which is contrary to the folk physics notion of touch, doesn't seem to result in confusion on the part of physicists when presented with a touch screen.

Even for a weak emergentists it is counterproductive to try and talk about everything at the level of physics.

It's rather separation that is impossible. My gravitational field extends indefinitely, at the speed of light Excuse me, mind your backs, coming through!.

What are your thoughts? — elucid

I'm touching a keyboard.

If I'm touching a keyboard then it is possible to touch something.

Therefore, it is possible to touch something.

Hell yeah. Finally managed to prove a truth.

Oh for sure. But when someone say's "does touch really exist," I assume they mean: "from the standpoint of fundemental physics or metaphysics," simply because the question is silly in any other context.

This is an example where the understanding wrought by the linguistic turn seems to backfire. "Take language the way it is commonly used," is all well and good advice in some cases, but it missteps when it assumes that people don't ever think about metaphysics in their day to day lives. This just doesn't seem to be the case. Books on this sort of thing wouldn't sell millions of copies and churches wouldn't be packed each weekend if these sorts of questions only interested a few egg heads. In our ordinary, everyday lives we still sometimes ask deep metaphysical questions of this sort.

For example: you don't need to study any philosophy to see that:

A. Objects break down over time and things change; and then ask:
B. Is change or objects fundemental?

I'm of the mind that "prephilosophical intuitions," don't really exist. The oldest writing we have speaks to metaphysical concerns. A rough sketch of Plato's theory of forms is sketched in Memphite Theology near the dawn of written language capable of carrying such ideas.

"Do things really touch?" in the sort of question a middle schooler might ask, because they see that naive explanations are often partial, and are hoping for a greater level of clarity.

Pragmatics has to do with how the question is being asked. But sometimes we ask things from a purely speculative place. "Do you see the same type of red as me? i.e., questions of inverted qualia, are things I recall talking about in high school before ever picking up a philosophy book. To a certain extent, philosophers have caricatured "naive language," to fit it in a nice box so that "intractable" problems can be dismissed as "merely the delusions of us egg heads." But IMO, almost everyone has at least little egg head in them.

This is an example where the understanding wrought by the linguistic turn seems to backfire. "Take language the way it is commonly used," is all well and good advice in some cases, but it missteps when it assumes that people don't ever think about metaphysics in their day to day lives. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Ordinary language philosophy is just one of many strands within the linguistic turn. What OLP gets right is the appreciation that whether we take our world for granted or make a deliberate effort to ‘think metaphysically’, we can’t help but do so within the wider metaphysical mesh of a pre-existing community, which is what makes the terms of our inquiry intelligible.

Pragmatics has to do with how the question is being asked. But sometimes we ask things from a purely speculative place — Count Timothy von Icarus

Speculation is always oriented around what matters to us and how it matters. This is a question of pragmatics. Speculation is relevant to ongoing concerns. This relevance is thus constructed socially via pragmatic interaction.

I think those are all good points. Speculation is pragmatic, we get joy (utility for us welfare economists) simply from feeling that we understand the world better. It's just that this sort of pragmatic value is less attached to concrete goods in the world or actions (unless we consider "understanding" to be an action).

What I wanted to get at is that "is touch real?", "do you see the same blue as me? or "do dogs or worms have minds and do other people have minds?" while being the purview of philosophers, aren't only the concerns of philosophers. I remember thinking of solipsism back in elementary school. So, we shouldn't dismiss those sorts of problems on the grounds that we can sufficiently explain touch naively for your standard use cases. If people were satisfied with naive answers, they wouldn't ask these sorts of questions in the first place.

Now, if they don't ask those sorts of questions, I'd agree that there is no point informing them about electron clouds, fields, etc. They have better things to do lol.

Oh for sure. But when someone say's "does touch really exist," I assume they mean: "from the standpoint of fundemental physics or metaphysics," simply because the question is silly in any other context.

This is an example where the understanding wrought by the linguistic turn seems to backfire. "Take language the way it is commonly used," is all well and good advice in some cases, but it missteps when it assumes that people don't ever think about metaphysics in their day to day lives. This just doesn't seem to be the case. Books on this sort of thing wouldn't sell millions of copies and churches wouldn't be packed each weekend if these sorts of questions only interested a few egg heads. In our ordinary, everyday lives we still sometimes ask deep metaphysical questions of this sort. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Maybe, but then philosophy flirts with the risk of being viewed as irrelevant, a joke, a psychological disorder, a fictitious narrative, a new religion, etc.

Agreed to a large extent. It seems to me this question hinges on two different, albeit related issues of what "touching" is, that roughly corresponds to Sellars' "manifest" vs. scientific image of man.

In ordinary life, we touch things all the time, keyboards, fruit, other hands, etc. There can be no doubt touching happens here: just peel an orange.

Things become significantly more complicated in the scientific image in which the forces of physics must be taken into account in considerable detail.

So yes, there are aspects of touch that are the bread and butter of physics, though they often don't directly play a role in our ordinary usage and thinking of our concept of touch.

As for brute emergence, I'm the odd one out and think it happens all the time. That's a different story though.

As opposed to how well philosophy doing right now at being relevant? Every time I go into a book store I check out the philosophy section and it invariably is tiny and has just a few copies of books by the same 4-6 authors. Philosophy has become so scared of error that it's afraid to be relevant. Sometimes I even think the arcane vocabulary becomes a hiding mechanism.

BTW, these are the best sellers in "philosophy/metaphysics"


anonymous photo

Refusing to enter the field for fear of looking silly seems to result in:

A. People reading one of six or so "great names," and taking them as gospel, or not enjoying them and deciding philosophy is nonsense or;
B. People curious about metaphysics reading about how we're in the Lizard People's simulation and the this knowledge is what they killed Princess Diana/Sophia/Wisdom over (yes, Di was an Aeon and the British royal family are Lizard People Archons, except from Prince Harry who was converted over to being an Aeon by the Princess Meg Aeon).

IDK, people might get more value if the field wasn't left empty.

I'm pleased that at least someone saw the problem. Rationality is not completely absent here.

My response was a joke, of course, but a joke with a point -- the question needs refinement, else the little modus ponens I offered is an answer: touch is possible because I'm touching something, and in order for me to be able to touch something it must be possible for me to touch it. (Or, if we want to be sticklers about form, I should have started with the implication)

Note that the original question didn't mention anything of physics, but rather was speaking in terms of spaces. After @T Clark pointed out that touching is not when two objects occupy the same space, and @elucid saying it makes sense I read the problem as being resolved.

Still -- the argument I offered wasn't entirely vacuous. For one, you know I'm touching a keyboard because I'm typing out to you (or, at least, you could infer that it likely, given that I have no reason to lie about it even though it's possible I could be using a talk-to-text program), and so the argument points out a relationship between possibility and true statements -- to demonstrate that something is possible all you need is one true statement of the case.

For your argument you'd need to somehow introduce physics and electrons as worthwhile entities in the domain of discourse about touching.

As opposed to how well philosophy doing right now at being relevant? Every time I go into a book store I check out the philosophy section and it invariably is tiny and has just a few copies of books by the same 4-6 authors. Philosophy has become so scared of error that it's afraid to be relevant. Sometimes I even think the arcane vocabulary becomes a hiding mechanism. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Thank Descartes for telling us it is all a dream but don't worry God would not want to fool us.

The Age of Enlightenment at its best.

Why would touching be considered impossible? Touching is by many considered an object coming into contact with another, which perhaps requires the objects occupying the same space. And occupying the same space is considered impossible by nearly everyone. — elucid

Let's try these examples of occupying the same space:

1. Consider Matryoshka dolls. This is a good example of each smaller doll occupying the same space of the prior larger doll.

2. Take a 1 cubic meter container and add an equal mixture of two inert gases and close it. Wait a moment and I have two gases occupying the same space in the container.

3. I draw a square object and overlap it with a circle object, then color in the space where they overlap. Conclusion: The colored space where the two shapes overlap occurs in the same space.

It seems occupying the same space is not impossible.

When an object is touched, it does not mean that it occupies the same space as the other object. If that were the case, touching would be impossible. If two objects occupy the same space, they would interpenetrate and pass through each other with no interaction (no touch), like a ghost through a wall. No two objects can occupy the same space. However, waves are an exception to this rule as they can pass through each other and can be said to occupy the same space.

Whenever one's investigations of the world lead one to the conclusion that one is not in contact with the world, it is wise to doubt the results of one's investigations. Because to be confident of such a conclusion is to deny its validity.

Er, one cannot touch anything? Sorry your words don't reach me.

Some considerations. First of all, the physical world doesn't seem to be continuous or infinitely divisible. Most physicists these days seem pretty sure of the Planck length and Planck time as a limit. There is the holographic principle, the Bekenstein bound, and all that. There are some good philosophical arguments that the world is discrete or not infinitely divisible that I wont get into here.

However, if matter were infinitely divisible and continuous, and for example, you had two perfect spheres touching, it seems to me that true touching would involve a point on one sphere and a point on the other occupying the same exact space. There must be zero distance between the two points, after all. Can two points with zero distance between them occupy different points in space? I don't think so.

But it seems that a whole different picture of what space and matter are has been emerging in this last century. Things like particles might not even be truly distinct objects, but rather something like excitations of a field, or waves, or some such. And waves can certainly "occupy the same space". Actually, it seems problematic to think of waves in the same medium as separate things. What would it mean for two ripples in a pond to "touch"? You might think of them as simply passing through one another, temporarily adding up, or some such. But are they really separate things, or is that just how our minds like to carve up the world?

When talking about touching, since we are dealing with distance, we are talking about space, so the nature of space or spacetime is important. I find recent thinking in loop quantum gravity, in ER=EPR, in Stephen Wolfram's causal graph, and so on, very interesting, where space isn't thought of as a big openness, an emptiness that contains things. Rather, it is a sort of network of discrete, entangled nodes that are simply connected or entangled in a certain order, with everything we call matter or empty space or whatever just amounting to certain local topological arrangements of these nodes, some of which can be knot-like or whatever, some of which can propagate like cellular automata.

Supposing something like this the above is true, what then is the touching of two material objects? I suppose it is somewhat similar to thinking about waves in a medium. What seem like two different configurations of two material objects in space, one with a distance between them and another with adjacency, are really just two different arrangements of a single network. But what then does it mean for two of these "particles" of space to be connected in the network? They are entangled. But what does that really mean? I'm not really sure. What even are the nodes and how do they interact? Are they ultimately really separate things?

I guess when we talk about different macroscale objects touching, it is just a useful-for-us way of thinking about things and carving up a world that, in-itself, perhaps isn't carved up at all. It is a high layer of abstraction, like using icons in a computer application that are like packages of nested command hierarchies of ever-simpler and more fundamental operations that would be too cumbersome to think about directly at the level of transistors and memory registers.

But you might also just think about touching as causation, or information propagation, or even as chains of contingency or layers of dependency in some sense. There has long been a suspicion, probably a pretty good one, that causation can only propagate locally, by "contact action". Scientists and philosophers have been wise, I think, to be suspicious of "spooky action-at-a-distance".

Newton was really uncomfortable with the fact that his law of gravity had nothing to say about the mechanism of this incomprehensible situation of one body seemingly influencing another across a large distance without touching. Einstein restored locality with the realization that gravity is local after all, since an object simply distorts the space it is immediately in, and then the effect propagates as warping of spacetime from one part of space to each adjacent part, and only affects the distant object indirectly when the warping reaches it and begins to affect it. It is like a wave propagating adjacently, part-to-part, in a rope rather than action-at-a-distance across a true emptiness. Space or spacetime, in this case, is "something" itself, with its own degrees of freedom.

Yes, I hear you asking about entanglement, which seems to be action-at-a-distance. But is it really? Causal influence usually seems to involve an interaction that carries information. You can't send information nonlocally with entanglement. It is simply a correlation that isn't fully understood, as of yet. In some interpretations, there isn't any nonlocal influence.

To be touched is to be influenced, to be acted upon, to be changed by something, to gain information about that something, for something of that thing to enter into you, to become part of you, for some aspect of your present state to have been partly determined by the former state of that thing, like the kinetic energy in one billiard ball passing into another. If things can be changed by other things that they "touch", can they really be thought of as truly separate and distinct in the first place? It seems to require them to be kind of permeable and ultimately without true boundaries.

And then consider that for a photon, since it travels at the speed of light, and since length contracts, approaching zero, as you approach that speed, there is no distance. It is as if the electron dropping to a lower energy level and emitting a photon, or a packet of energy, and the "distant" electron absorbing it and jumping to a higher level are, from the photon's perspective, "touching", the two electrons having zero distance between them, as if there really isn't any photon at all, but rather just the a quantum of energy passing from one electron to another in the same place. Maybe the two electrons aren't even separate in the final analysis.

In the end, it might be best to just give up on the idea that there are any separate things in the first place. Even the space particles are probably just the way in which, incomprehensibly to me, the One, whatever it is, relates itself to itself in some mind-blowing hall-of-mirrors explosion of apparent form. Wheeler and Feynman famously speculated about the one-electron universe. Maybe it goes deeper than that.

Some in the physics community, like Nima Arkani-Hamed, are starting to talk about spacetime as emergent from something deeper. If distance isn't fundamental, then what? Can we even talk about distinct entities that could be said to touch or not touch?

Why would touching be considered impossible? — elucid

Touching is an object coming into contact with another object, and that is it. 

Digressing into

which perhaps requires the objects occupying the same space. And occupying the same space is considered impossible by nearly everyone. — elucid

sounds illogical.

Touching has nothing to do with space.  Space means there is nothing.  When something exists in the space,  the space disappears, and the object appears.

Therefore touching is possible. I am touching my coffee cup. My hand and coffee cup came into contact physically. The space around my hand and the coffee cup disappeared, as the two objects came into contact. When I took my hand away from the coffee cup, the space reappeared.

Trump brags that he grabs them by the pussy. Surely he would not lie.