Todd Suomela's Library tagged ontology →  View Popular

These are imbroglios, where humans and nonhumans are bound up with one another in complex networks without any particular actor or object standing above the rest. And this, in the end, is what immanence or flat ontology means: a single world characterized by imbroglios, where no actor or object stands outside the others. Perhaps there are gods and spirits, but if there are then they do not stand apart from being or outside of the world, but are caught in imbroglios like all other objects.

Just as all other objects find themselves caught up in imbroglios with other objects, this requires first that signs, for example, are caught up in imbroglios with non-semiotic objects rather than circulating throughout the world in a smooth space without resistance or encounters with density. If I have been attracted to the concept of memes, then this is because the concept of memes approaches this dimension of imbroglios with respect to signs.

Throughout his post John draws a distinction between reality or the “really real” and illusion. But it is precisely this distinction that is undermined by the ontic principle. As I argue in my post on Flat Ontology, there are not two worlds– one consisting of the really real or “mind-independent objects” and another consisting of mind and the social –but rather only one world, the real, of which mind is counted as a member. Consequently, the first point to make is that the phenomena that take place in the mind regarding the game are themselves real.

What is taking place in the mind regarding the game is an instance of what I call translation. The principle of translation states that there is no transportation of a difference without a transformation or translation of that difference. In other words, in the interaction between the game and mind a difference is conveyed from one domain (the game) to another (the mind). In being received by the mind– or, for me, more preferably, the brain –that difference is reorganized or transformed in a variety of system-specific ways precisely as John describes. However, the important caveat made by the object-oriented ontologist is that this process of translation is true not simply of mind-object interactions, but of all object-object interactions regardless of whether or not minds are involved. In other words, translation is every bit as much a phenomenon characterizing the interaction of rocks with sunlight as it is of frogs tracking “flies” and humans regarding the Game of Life. There is no object that receives differences from other objects like a glassy reflection in a mirror… Including mirrors themselves! Rather, for every interaction between objects there is a translation and a transformation. As such, translation is not an epistemological limitation that prevents us from ever getting at the “true things in themselves”, but is rather a general ontological feature of all inter-ontic relations among objects. Translation is an ontological process.