Monads, Volumes, and Phantoms

[Donnadogsoth]

Monads have been treated earlier, they comprise extensionless, partsless loci of perception and desire.  A simple substance.

Phantoms are sensory illusions (e.g., parallax) or cognitive illusions (e.g., psychosis).

A volume is a collection of monads which don't in of themselves comprise a monad. Examples are the contents of a glass of water, a handful of sand, or an animal body. Remove the enveloping monad—the glass, the hand, the mind--and the volume begins to disperse. In some cases, as with a tractor, to remove the envelope is identical to dispersing the volume, as the envelope is not physically different from the volume.

A volume, in other words, is a composite of several monads.

Are volumes are always associated with a single monad?  Is a pile of sand a mere volume, or is enveloped by a monad?  To this question I suggest that we view the matter in terms of language.  An enveloped volume is akin to alphabet letters.  An enveloping monad is akin to a word.  A pile of sand that can be distinguished from nearby sand in some way can be considered such a word.  Kick the sand, dematerialise the enveloping monad, and its volume instantly disperses.

This philosophy creates an infinity of monads or substances overlapping and nested within each other, each manifesting or not to our senses at any given time.  Divide the pile of sand in two and one manifests two new monads whilst demanifesting the original pile's monad.  And so on until the original volume has been separated into its individual grains.

Increasing in scale, now, we see that groups of people form monads of their own.  A rampaging mob forms its own entity enveloping the volume of the people involved.  What is it like to be this mob in of itself?  Not being alive or sentient it must be akin to being a boulder in motion down a hill, or an electron orbitting an atomic nucleus.  These groups overlap and nest until we reach the entirety of humankind past, present, and future taken as a single entity.  This would likewise be akin to an orbit, albeit the most sophisticated of all orbits.

[Donnadogsoth]

The problem with all this is, the magnitude of the number of monads it calls into being.  Take a collection of pennies.  Is the collection  ontologically real?  If so, what about the collection minus one penny?  And what about the collection minus another, different penny?  And so on for all the pairs, triplets, quadruplets, and other groups that can be formed.  Apply the same to all apples in the world, all stars in the sky, all atoms making up everything.  The number of monads rises towards infinitude.

And how are we to explain what it is like to be these monads?  Is a collection of disparate stars half a universe away from each other any different from asking what it is like to be the colour red?  Or be any other archetype?  Yet, if groups are not monads, then what about groups of copper atoms forming a penny?  And if not that, what about the copper atom composed of 29 protons, 34 neutrons, and 29 electrons?

An alternative to these infinities of very-difficult-to-imagine monads is that only things which we consider conscious in our ordinary lives are monads.  That would exclude the nonliving things, but still include the dust mites and diatoms.  Even this feels problematic, and we are tempted to shrink the circle to encompass only the visible things, such as worms and lizards and so on all the way up to us.

We seem caught between having way too many monads, and having way too few.