Object Oriented Ontology

Written By Nicholas McCay

Table of Contents:

Object-Oriented Ontology—

  • Look around you. Are all the objects you see experiencing existence?

  • What is Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO)?

    • A “Theory of Everything” will NOT be scientific but philosophic.

    • Ontology is a branch of philosophy that deals with ultimate questions of what reality and real things are or ‘the study of being.” Flat Ontology - everything exists equally and nothing has special status.

    • Knowledge is just duo-mining, but NOT “reality.”

    • Undermining an object is breaking it down into parts.

    • Overmining an object is describing its effects.

    • Real-world implications in knowledge, aesthetics, and even politics!

    • OOO in summary

  • Text (5 books)

  • Audio (5 podcast episodes)

  • Video (3 quick hits & 5 lectures/talks)

Object-Oriented Ontology—

Abstract: Object-Oriented Ontology” or “OOO” is a branch of philosophy, also associated with speculative realism, that puts “things” at the center of its study. In addition, it states that an object is not the sum of its bits or all of its effects, but instead just an object in itself.

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The two thoughts that occur to the majority of people, when reading the title of Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology, would most likely be: a “new theory of everything” is a bold claim, and what is Ontology?

Like most everyone else since the beginning of our shared species’ quest for knowledge, you and I have unconsciously, and then consciously, thought about our reality wearing blinders. You have been hoodwinking yourself and didn’t even know it!

Let’s do a fun little experiment. Look up from this essay and take a gander of your current surroundings. Here is mine:

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Now, according to Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO), every “object” you see and every object in my picture has, or could have, ITS OWN EXPERIENCE OF EXISTENCE.

Going back to my picture...

What does my computer want? What about my plant? And the book that this post is based on? Can the sand in my (half)hourglass explicitly want anything that lies outside of our own human-centric definition of consciousness? Can I ask the same question to my yerba mate?

This is a little easier to gulp down and digest when you view the question(s) through an animal and/or artificial life prism. The scientific breakthroughs of today have given us a much better understanding of animals’ minds and - in a different area - given us machines bordering on “intelligence.” This has put heavy pressure on continuing to see reality ONLY through human experience.

Right now I can feel the breath from all of the exhalations from readers about to throw in the white towel of defeat in continuing to read. Don’t distress, and continue on. This isn’t some esoteric discipline for a small subset of people and situations. This is literally a theory of everything, so by definition, it includes everyone.

One of the biggest proponents of OOO, Ian Bogost, has this to say about how the movement could benefit greatly from regular people:

“I’m of the general belief that academia has a responsibility to the public interest, but more than any other philosophical movement in recent memory, OOO stands to benefit from the deep engagement of ordinary people, since it returns the attention of philosophy to the real, everyday world.”

—

A New Theory of Reality?

You may have heard in the past few decades of the unification of all scientific thought into one theory. There have been many attempts, like string theory - which has its own experimental issues that would give Karl Popper an aneurysm - along with the below “Quantum Field Theory.”

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“This is the amplitude to undergo a transition from one configuration to another in the path-integral formalism of quantum mechanics, within the framework of quantum field theory, with field content and dynamics described by general relativity (for gravity) and the Standard Model of particle physics (for everything else). The notations in red are just meant to be suggestive, don’t take them too seriously…No experiment ever done here on Earth has contradicted this model.” - Physicist Sean Carrol (For those playing along at home, this is the same equation from the Consilience essay.)

Most notably, however, is that this is NOT a complete “theory of everything.” Quantum Field Theory doesn’t account for dark matter and has not been fully connected to the force of gravity.

Critically, the above theory or “any scientific theory of everything” will never be enough due to its marriage with the “real.” In other words, a theory of everything WOULD INCLUDE imaginary things.

If you disagree, then please just think about how much influence imaginary things like religious entities, companies like the Dutch East India Trading Company to Manchester United Football Club, and “energy” from astrological events millions and millions of light-years away - have on our discourse.

Graham Harman states that the difference between a real horse, an imaginary horse, and a unicorn is essentially FORM. Unfortunately, that form is always “dark” to us in a sense and we can never “know” the true form because by expressing it we really change its form. There is no free lunch in the universe…

“The difference between a horse, an imaginary house and a unicorn is not that the former ‘inheres’ in matter and the latter two do not. Instead, the difference is that the real horse has a different form from the imaginary horse, and certainly a different one from the unicorn. One of the implications of this is that we cannot ‘extract’ a form from a thing and express this form in mathematical or other directly knowable terms; or rather, we can do this, but only by paying the price of changing the form into something else.”

Metaphor also plays a huge role in these distinctions. Aaron Lewis recently wrote a great piece on how we are still led, at least partly, by the metaphorical: Metaphors we believe by: the pantheon of 2019

“The more I learn, the more I suspect that rationalists only managed to kill a very narrow and anthropomorphic conception of God. People who study complex systems started using new words to talk about god-like phenomena — metaphors that are more palatable to secular minds. I believe these new words can help scientifically-minded people better understand what it actually felt like to believe in God before science became a Thing. Let’s take a tour through the pantheon of 2019 and explore what these seven “gods” might teach us in our era of ecological crisis and post-truth confusion.”

Nicholas McCay
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