Restricted Composition is Information Compression

Abstract

This paper proposes and examines an answer to the special composition question—complex objects compress information about their parts. I start by defending fastenation for material objects and then extract from fastenation the idea that the conjoinment of parts establishes correlations among the locations and motions of those parts. I move from this to the proposal that entities are parts of some object when that object allows for the efficient, if lossy, compression of information about those parts.

Why Do Things Exist and Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?

“…Petersen (2019) has proposed that things can come together to form a whole when they form a real pattern, where pattern is related to the idea of compressible data about the components of the whole. Bird (2023) has made a similar argument. To my ear, this is completely in line with the TEIIG hypothesis.…”

“…While I argue that the cause of the grouping does not affect a thing's status as an existent entity, some possibilities include the following. First, an outside-the-mind grouping can occur if there is a collection of physical force(s) holding particles together, or fastening them (Markosian, 1998;Bird, 2023), that is stronger than any force(s) pushing those particles apart. The collection of these forces and the particles themselves causes the grouping to exist.…”