Quora Answer: What determines the boundaries of physical objects?
What determines the boundaries of physical objects?
Why do we perceive only some combinations of atoms as objects?
I call the answer to this question General Schemas Theory.
If you take a Kantian perspective then space and time are projected and then the categories of objects are projected within the singular of spacetime. Schemas are the different templates of understanding of objects of different scopes within that projection. So what you are calling the dots (monads) and the objects (forms) are two of the different schemas that exist within the set of possible schemas. The set of possible schemas according to S’ theory is:
Pluriverse
Kosmos
World
Domain
Meta-system
System
Form
Pattern
Monad
Facet
And these are related to dimensions such that there are two dimensions per schema and two schemas per dimension and thus these schemas stretch from -1 to the 9th dimensions. Projection means basically that you are producing those objects out of sensory data unconsciously within the brain, and we don’t really understand how that occurs yet, but what we do know is that unitary phenomena we see are distributed into different processing areas in the brain so that different parts of the brain are processing different aspects fo the objects we see. There is a very complex functioning algoritm in our brains that produce the illusion of integrated unified objects that we see in our perception within consciousness and that illusion is the schemas. We are presented in consciousness with objects already schematized by the schema recognition apparatus that we are born with and that develops as we develop in our interaction with the world. Hopefully we will eventually understand how this actually works. But the key is that we can see by studying the models of things in science that there is a finite set like the one identified in S’ which has various scopes which are seamlessly nested to give us a continuous experience of the world without unschematized gaps. For more about the history of schemas theory see Umberto Eco Kant and the Platypus. The type of schema I am talking about he calls Mathematical and Geometrical Schemas which are the most basic kind of schema.