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Holes

plato.stanford.edu

54 pointsNatsu16 comments

What even is this article

Holes describe a modification of a shape, a large class of such modifications can be lexicalized as nouns regardless of whether they describe addition or removal of material. This article seems to lose its mind over the latter.

Replace the whole thing with "bumps" or "spikes" or "knots" instead of "holes" and it reads like the ravings of a madman (or, more so than it already does). Similarly, holes are not the only modification that remove material, as pointed out by the article, "cracks" and "cavities" and a dozen other words do as well.

Naturally, as modifiers, all of these are "guest" modifications on a "host" shape. You can't have a bump without a flat surface from which the bump can emerge, and you can't have a hole without a shape from which to excavate it. Why does explaining something so plainly obvious require a bibliography 28 references long?

It's an encyclopedia page, not really an article.

For spikes appear to be immaterial: every spike has a material “host” (the stuff around it, such as the edible part of a donut) and it may have a material “guest” (such as the liquid filling a cavity), but the spike itself does not seem to be made of matter. Indeed, spikes seem to be made of nothing, if anything is. And this gives rise to a number of conundrums.

The immaterial claim for "holes", doesn't hold up with for "spikes". It's getting at something specific, though broad.

Holes as an isolated word can be attempted to be described as 'nothing'. But they are shapes, which the article concedes multiple times.

You risk destroying the concept of boundaries between objects and what it means to have shape at all, if you can no longer differentiate between a hole shape and nothingness.

Also, if you form an intentional concavity, say by using the lost-wax method[1] in preparation for casting a bronze sculpture, the hole has been planned and has a purpose. That it did exist will be proved by the resulting sculpture although the hole will no longer exist (if it did).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost-wax_casting

Haha, that's my fun fact of the day that there is a serious philosophy article on holes (on the Stanford encyclopedia of all places, one of my two favourite philosophy resources, the other being Existential Comics).

On topic, I was actually expecting a bit more discussion of the fact that mathematics has arrived at a pretty rigorous way of defining holes (in topology, the 'donut equals coffee mug' type of math).

I'm assuming that this is a joke paper trolling the philosophy department at Stanford.

Uh, you can treat holes as being defined as entities by their cause and telos, just like any other object/entity.

e.g. A hole made by a hole punch (cause), for fitting into a 3-ring binder (telos). Done.

I feel pretty much the same way about Prime numbers. They're nothing but holes left when you mark all the composite numbers. Being prime isn't a property, it's the absence of the property of being composite--like calling black a color.

But because prime numbers are so interesting and useful we call this background shape as if it's the foreground and even speak of non-prime numbers. Gödel, Escher, Bach has plenty to say about foreground vs background, inside vs outside.

Not really, primes are pillars of all the numbers.

If you think of positive integers as having only multiplication (a semi group I guess), then prime numbers are the building blocks

I believe it may be much more fruitful to observe and talk about our conception of holes rather than discussing any kind of ontological existence.

We only perceive a hole as some kind of entity because our perception works in such a way that it preferably recognizes simpler, smaller and more “figure”-like shapes (see Gestalt psychology). I think that this perception of a single, coherent unit leads us to believe that there is some kind of independent existence, which is why we talk about holes in the first place.

But there is nothing special about holes that we could not attribute to the properties of space itself or the physical shape of their sorrounding objects. Where does a hole begin and where does it end? What “is” a hole independent of any host object? Why do we not just talk about complex shapes, why do we even need to talk about holes? The idea that holes can move (as opposed to a region of space) is just part of the idea of holes itself and does not follow from any observation about physical holes.

It may still be interesting to explore how we talk about holes and what our concept of a hole constitutes. The idea of holes is after all very useful in various fields (even computer science – see “typed holes”, maybe even the idea of the zero was inspired by holes). I have the impression that the article actually discusses exactly that but seems to be more concerned with the existence of holes, which, from my perspective, is a meaningless endeavour. But I am not a philosopher so maybe there is a context or method here that I don’t know/understand.

The author does appear to push for seeing holes as adequate reason to validate the word and he rails against it. It is easier to analyze the word 'hole' as a credible belief we all share, which we do. We can describe round holes, square holes, dirt holes, hexagonal holes in beeswax. It's a Platonic shape with describable properties.

Digging holes is one of the best methods of revealing gold flakes. How would one describe the result of digging for core samples, without using hole, pit, cut or anything else that suggests a subtraction.

The core sample drill rig extended it's drill onto the earth's surface. A pile of excess dirt grew next to the drill rig as it moved further towards the nadir. When the drilling cycle completed, a cylindrical column of rock had been added to the drill rig. The drill rig drove the rock to coordinates x,y,z of the mine site. The drill rig arrived at the mine site storage facility, which obtained four smaller rock columns and they were stored in 4 containers for analysis...

The column of Rock was separated from the ground and cut into pieces, but we made no mention of it. But we believe the cuts still happened and the hole in the ground from drilling exits, otherwise we cannot validate the correctness of separating the rock into 4 separate containers, nor can we reveal what happened after the drill rig arrived. There is no defined boundary between earth and rock, any earth could do as a sample. A hole is where rock isn't, and thus we can show two separate conceptions of rock and thus validate them.

Treating holes as a figure of speech, like the author attempts, is no different to treating wind as a figure of speech because we can't see it directly. After all, what we see directly, is the trees adopt complex motions when it gets windy. Is the wind causing trees to bend, a 'hole' in stillness for our trees?

"We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want.” - Lao Tzu

Almost the entirety of our electronics theory and practice has been built on top of holes...

Was it Monkey Island game where one cound pick a hole and apply it elsewhere?

btw. Same language thing is "darkness", but Pratchet already talked about it..

"Holes" is a really, really good movie.

Bonus: with Sigourney Weaver as the villain.

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