Seems surprisingly easy to incorporate the way I view things into what you’ve written En-De, unless I’ve missed completely what you mean by “points”. My trek into thinking about existence and reality started some years back under an assumption that there must be some connection between thing and attribute because they are both present to thought. The notion of information came to me; both hard and soft (or concreta and abstracta) things seemed to share the ability to inform perception. A working methodology remained to be worked out. As briefly as I can, here’s what I’ve come up with to date.
Premise: Material reality lends itself to lots of ones composed of manys; if information grounds material reality, might it not also be reducible? My working hypothesis is that the universe as a closed system (what I’d call ‘designed and manufactured’ reality) is made up of “bits” of information. Bit is a term attached to time and space, so I start with information in reduction as an “iota”. This, unless I miss your meaning above, might satisfy your “smallest possible thing” reality consists of. A micro level reduction of information would look like this: Consider that the human body has an estimated 50-100 trillion cells, the brain 80-120 billion. Further assume 1016 [sorry, superscript is apparently unavailable] atoms per cell. Each atom contains multiple elements of information—mass, position, spin, charge, momentum, subatomic arrangements, etc. and numerous relations between those parts. Information is available for each property and relation at each level of organization for every iota of data a mind can grasp, from points in time and space to properties, numbers, governments and relations between components. It’s easy to see that in reduction there would logically be many more “elements” of information than there are material components, as each piece of matter can have multiple properties and fluid, unending relationships to other pieces.
Information in Structured Reduction
Each iota of information (I) then has to have the “parts” necessary to form both hard and soft existents. Thus:
I = P^V, where P = particularity and V = value.
Briefly as possible, P is a simple quality that performs a single task: providing individuation for the formation of particular entities, abstract or concrete. This feature is functionally comparable to the Scholastic metaphysical idea of “thatness” or haecceity in particulars. Thatness seems usually used to signify substance, but P is more than this. P is the “power of particularization”, an individuating principle to form what I call “point-locales”. The term point-locale is includes P’s function of the formation of what we think of as substance at identifiable points in spacetime (material particulars) as well as furnishing a particularization identity to abstract entities like redness, the individuality of which is distinguishable from other abstract entities like greenness, triangularity or legality. P is in this sense—and in both cases—an idiosyncratic identifier, creating a capacity of discreteness at point-locales which occupy either spatiotemporal or non-spatiotemporal positions.
Value is much more adaptable than P and difficult to explain succinctly in message board format. Generally, while P holds reality “in place”, V “becomes” what is at that point-locale. When we extract properties, attributes, features, characteristics, etc. from things we are perceiving V content.
P lays out the playing field for V to do its dance. But the view of value proposed here is that value just is information, and information is wholly value. On this analysis, because all things that exist are a multiplicity of values, the notion of axiology as a branch of ethics is reversed: ethics, along with all other fields of knowledge including the sciences, are, in all their various pursuits, contemplations of value.
The concept of information as a twofold P and V is not just the idea that reality is fundamentally an abstraction—most of us presumably don’t feel like abstractions—it’s a case that all reality is value. Of the two hypothetical components that form information—which in turn forms reality—particularization may seem to be a different kind of thing than V, but it isn’t. Both V and P are value, they merely serve different functions.
This idea that being is naught but value is not as controversial as it might seem to some. Hume’s bundle theory suggests a reality of properties. Properties and relations are arguably themselves expressions of information. They both consist in and present information content to intellects, so information seems just as easily at home in thought as it does in neurons, mathematics or societal structure. Color, taller than, odor, repulsion, is the sister of, viscosity, combustibleness, x is fond of y, having 3 GHz of frequency, etc. either communicate some value directly or imply systems of values. To stand in relation to Jane as a sibling requires that Jane and I share parents, possesses appropriately coded DNA, the physical bodies involved in the relation occupy measurable positions in space at various points in time (including birth events resulting from the same mother and/or father), etc. These all boil down to multiple values (collections of I) associated with various spatial and temporal values.
Each body has cells, molecules, atoms and subatomic components that are just energy fields in certain capacities and quantities. They’re articulated in thought in the value-language of properties: spin, mass, resonance, charge, atomic number, location, electrostatic attraction, decay, strong force, etc. Chemical compounds are formed by transfer of or sharing between energy fields at material point-locales (electrons), changing the values of the individual components involved and creating a substance with new (sometimes emergent?) values. The sharing and exchange of values goes on up the chain with new traits, attributes and features inexplicably emerging along the way until Jane and I are produced from sufficient interactions in this enormous gumbo of interacting, substitutive values for the relation “sibling” to manifest. Everything that exists is a value-bearer. Thus, everything is information, everything is value and information is value are equivalent statements. The above isn’t the whole picture of reality, just the “internal” or informational part of it. Information itself isn’t a sufficiently cogent account of existence.
For me, unformed iotas (ioti??) of I are reality in potential. Might it be that unformed I is what occupies “empty” space? (by “unformed” I just mean individual “unconnected” iotas under the assumption that reality as we experience it is formed by multiples or “clusters” of P^V.) Apologies for length, felt need to elaborate ideas clearly.
This is true of material point-locales (particular energy [value] fields in time-space), especially, but of apparently timeless abstracta also, albeit with less force.
And yet the values attached to spacetime are not those driving human behaviour if Hume was correct. The energy fields of matter are directed by what appears to be a more powerful “external” force–unless one commits to deterministic materialism.