https://www.facebook.com/groups/neoacademia/permalink/10157969399398042/?comment_id=10157969438328042
Somebody else:
The myth of physical objects
Are physical objects pragmatic constructs to help us deal with the flux of experience?
"But in point of epistemological footing the physical objects and Homer’s gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conception only as cultural posits. The myth of physical objects is epistemologically superior to most in that it has proved more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience." Quine Two Dogmas of Empiricism
Me:
The idea that thinking in terms of physical objects is particularly efficacious for "working a manageable structure" seems to contradict the previous notion that it's purely a cultural construct.
I think physical objects either don't exist or don't exist how we think of them in absolute reality, but thinking in terms of physical objects is overwhelmingly intuitive and useful.
Physical objects are thought to be solid and have precise surfaces, but we know that they're made of subatomic particles which have no solidity or surface. And ideas of macroscopic physical objects seems to be just abstractions grouping together many microscopic ones. And it's often (or, more or less, always) arbitrary where one object is thought to end and an adjacent one is thought to begin.
I guess you could still call a subatomic particle itself, with no solidity or surface, a physical object though. But we really have no idea what a subatomic particle fundamentally is and why it has the properties it does (i.e., why it interacts with our instruments of observation in the way it does). Also, subatomic particles are made of fields, which don't have a definite border but extend outward into space infinitely albeit with great attenuation. So all particles exist within all other particles. Again, the delineation between them seems to be imagined. And not to mention that nanoscopic particles are merely a scientific model, and scientific models (and, ultimately, any model we devise even informally and intuitively) only have to reliably predict and control. That's what they're based on. They don't have to be metaphysically correct.
One thing I like to say, which I mentioned earlier today (don't remember if it was in this group), is that any two things you can compare are necessarily ideational in nature, while reality outside of our concepts of it is, supposedly, non-ideational. That means that there's no bigger schism or conceivable difference than between the our concepts and reality outside of our minds. So who knows how it "really" exists. I'm guessing it's some kind of holographic (meaning every part is embedded in every other part) of energy (whatever "energy" is)/flux or something.
Of course, the OP's quote makes no mention of mind-independent reality, but it does say "the flux of experience," and "the flux of experience" is right there on the border between our mental conception of reality and reality beyond mind. Presumably it's external reality that affects us in such a way that we experience perception, and of course on its rawest level, all perception is perception of flux.