The Thing-As-Such and Its Place

If a solution to a problem is working well, the animal will repeat it. Humans find it useful to unify and to abstract. Discarding the particularities of an object allows building a more general concept of the kind of object this particular one is a representative of. Kant has repeated this step-by-step process to its ultimate end, where he arrived at the idea of the thing-as-such (‘t-a-s’). A purely logical concept, the t-a-s is the idea of a thing without any of the properties of an actual thing. There might be, however, some advantages in doing one step less in the process of abstraction and leave a bunch of things as such with some basic properties of type, like the modality.Overdoing the abstraction defeats its purpose of having a concept that is useful and helpful in achieving some goals. Here, we shall use the t-a-s in its appearance as the mathematical unit of “1” but allow for multiples of the unit to be of a distinct modality. Genetics teaches us that Nature does not go to the Shannon extreme of abstracting into “this” and “not this”, but keeps at least 4 markers in use and distinguishes between left, middle and right among places. One of the differences between Information Technologies and Natural Information Technologies may be that the latter does not continue schematising and abstracting to the very end, but allows for a small number of types and kinds of t-a-s to remain distinct. This concept is used in psychology under the name of “archetypes”, of which there are several, the last step of abstraction into an idea of the archetype-as-such not being done.

The management of the place-related properties of an object appear to be done by different regions of the brain than utility-related properties of the thing. We experience the well-established distinction between topical and sensual properties of the objects that make up our world by pairing the attributes of things in a mental experiment. That the place is clean does not mean that things from there can be eaten; edible things loose on the other hand their property of nourishment if they are or were located on a place which by its properties negates the edibility of things. The strict distinction between where something is to be found and what kind of a thing it is becomes immediately evident in the resistance against the idea that it is useful to sort things according to their properties.

Sorting is a central concept of the model to be presented. This essay attempts to drive the reader’s attention towards sorting and resorting data sets. Normally, people treat the place of an individual thing as less relevant to the thing as its other properties. There is a reason for this condescending attitude towards the collection of comparisons {<|=|>} that assign a place to each element of the data set. After all, it is only sorting and ordering, and if the object were in a different multitude, its place would be a different one. We overcome this critique by assuring that the individual elements are and remain in one and the same collection of individual elements; therefore the place an element will have depends only on its properties and the concept of order we impose on the whole of the collection.

We demonstrate the idea of order on a collection of things-as-such. It is obvious that a spider maintains a clear idea of what is order, and we cannot discuss the fact that spiders are a part of Nature. The task is then to figure out, what logical rules a spider obeys while establishing what to do so that its web is well-ordered. In order to be able to discuss, what is well-ordered we first have to discuss what order is as such. To do so, we introduce a collection of things-as-such and order and reorder them under several of their aspects.