What a marvelous set of concepts! I’ve long been attracted to the family of embodied cognition, and also to notions of various pluralisms but this is a new one to me and I greatly appreciate your sharing of it.
A few years ago I had come to the conclusion that “ontological pluralism” was the most pragmatic solution to a whole host of issues I was tripping over anytime I tried to find some kind of mono-nature of things. I’m more of a computer person than a philosophy person and when studying some of the theoretical underpinnings of computer languages starting with Church’s Lambda Calculus and why he introduced “types” and how that became the evolutionary flow rather than untyped lambda calculus, I had to reconcile this whole notion of incompatibilities as functionally irreconcilable sometimes.
I think I had struggled for so long in acceptance because I wanted to hold onto this notion that “information cannot be destroyed”. But the thing is, yes, it most certainly can be destroyed and is all of the time. Maybe at some level we humans have no access to, it doesn’t and we can pretend to have access to some high dimensional plane with access to all spacetime and every process at any stage but in the end no, we do not have anything close to such access and for all sorts of reasons, I don’t think we ever can.
Olimpia Lombardi is a philosopher of science in Argentina who has done a lot of work in physics and chemistry and the whole notion of ontological pluralism being the way things are. That physics and chemistry simply do not meet and merge into one field. That the distinction is more than just the ‘names of things’ but these differences are fundamental. Her findings are unrelated to my computer-science musings but are another example of an ontological pluralism in the wild.
So a pluralism-of-the-self concept feels quite at home to me.
I even made a little graphic a few years ago while I was chasing rabbits down holes, starting with a notion of “a concept is a theory of a category” – a sentence I read that started me on a journey connecting things in a way that made sense to my brain, ending up with a “Pluralistic Ontology”. First person POV starting with Emergence and ending up in Pluralistic Ontology at the end down the tunnel. It was just for my own visualization of an idea – my poor followers in various places online had to suffer with my ramblings for a few months as I was working through such ideas (without proper training which likely makes a lot of it basic nonsense). This is more of a stunted computer-science kind of view of these concepts and not philosophy / philosophy of science. (amateur hour).
There may be an ultimate simplicity – a “The One” but our access I think would necessarily be some kind of panentheistic connection allowing for some distinction to remain, even if there is sharing via communication via multiple channels simultaneously now and again to where there is a near-merging.
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