The Senior Common Room at St Anselm's
Late afternoon. Mr Blottisham sits triumphantly in the middle of the room surrounded by springs, screws, gears, and several pieces whose original purpose has become doubtful. Professor Quillibrace enters and stops abruptly. Miss Elowen Stray lowers her book slowly.
Quillibrace: Good heavens.
Blottisham: Ah! Excellent timing.
Quillibrace: Why is there a clock in fragments on my table?
Blottisham: Science.
Quillibrace: I feared as much.
Blottisham: I am demonstrating a profound metaphysical truth.
Quillibrace: One approaches this statement with understandable caution.
Blottisham: The world is made of parts.
You understand a thing by taking it apart.
Observe.
He holds up a gear triumphantly.
This does gear-like things.
Quillibrace: A devastating argument.
Blottisham: Larger systems are simply collections of smaller systems.
Parts possess properties.
Interactions produce wholes.
Simple.
Quillibrace: Ah.
Blottisham: What?
Quillibrace: We have located today's classical assumption.
Blottisham: Surely not.
Quillibrace: Entirely.
You have smuggled decomposition in before the discussion began.
Blottisham: But decomposition is how understanding works.
We break things apart to explain them.
Quillibrace: Frequently yes.
Blottisham: There we are then.
Quillibrace: Mr Blottisham—
using a method successfully does not establish that reality itself is organised according to that method.
Blottisham: Doesn't it?
Quillibrace: No more than successfully using maps proves the Earth is constructed from paper.
Blottisham pauses.
Blottisham: Hm.
Quillibrace: Classical thinking assumes something rather strong.
That wholes are built from parts.
That parts possess independently specifiable properties.
That the whole may be reconstructed from those parts and their interactions.
Blottisham: Entirely sensible.
Quillibrace: Sensible perhaps.
Guaranteed no.
Blottisham: But surely entanglement merely complicates decomposition.
Quillibrace: Ah.
No.
It removes its foundation.
Blottisham: Removes—
He stares suspiciously.
Blottisham: You keep removing things.
Quillibrace: Reality began this unpleasant habit.
I merely report developments.
Blottisham: But entangled systems still possess parts.
Quillibrace: Do they?
Blottisham: Well—
they appear to.
Quillibrace: Better.
Because what fails is not merely separability.
It is independent state assignment itself.
If subsystems possess no independent actualisation, then what exactly are the parts?
Blottisham: Smaller things.
Quillibrace: Smaller versions of the original mistake.
Miss Stray smiles faintly.
Elowen: Then perhaps decomposition itself becomes secondary.
Blottisham: Secondary?
Elowen: We usually imagine:
parts → whole
But perhaps the relational structure comes first—
and what we call parts are stabilised extractions from it.
Quillibrace: Exactly.
Blottisham: No no no.
That seems entirely backwards.
Wholes come from parts.
Quillibrace: Why?
Blottisham: Because—
because—
He gestures helplessly at the disassembled clock.
Quillibrace: Ah yes.
Mechanical theology.
Blottisham: Mechanical what?
Quillibrace: The belief that because clocks are assembled from gears, reality itself must be assembled from pieces.
Blottisham: You're making me sound unreasonable.
Quillibrace: I am making you sound mechanical.
Blottisham: Hmph.
But surely decomposition always exists in principle.
Even if we cannot perform it.
Quillibrace: Quantum mechanics becomes awkward here.
Because non-factorisability is not merely difficult decomposition.
It is decomposition becoming undefined.
Blottisham: Undefined.
Quillibrace: There exists no assignment of independently actualised local states preserving the coherence of the whole.
The issue is not that the parts are hidden.
The issue is that the system was not built from independently actualised parts to begin with.
Blottisham: Good Lord.
He looks uneasily at the clock fragments.
Blottisham: Then reductionism fails.
Quillibrace: Quietly.
Not dramatically.
Nothing explodes.
No contradiction appears.
One simply discovers that the conditions reductionism assumes are not universally available.
Blottisham: That's rather sneaky.
Quillibrace: Reality occasionally is.
Elowen: Then even causation changes.
Quillibrace: Mm?
Elowen: If parts are not fundamental, then causal chains between parts cannot be fundamental either.
What appears as local interaction becomes a projection of deeper relational organisation.
A pause.
Quillibrace lowers his teacup.
Quillibrace: Miss Stray—
you continue displaying a troubling tendency to arrive at the centre of discussions before everyone else notices there is a centre.
Blottisham: I dislike this immensely.
Quillibrace: Why?
Blottisham: Because I preferred reality assembled neatly from little pieces.
Quillibrace: Ah.
Quillibrace looks thoughtfully at the scattered gears.
Quillibrace: The difficulty, Mr Blottisham, is that you assumed reality resembled a clock.
Blottisham: Yes.
Quillibrace: Whereas it increasingly appears that clocks resemble reality only under rather special circumstances.
Silence.
Blottisham stares down at the dismantled mechanism.
Blottisham: I suddenly feel I owe the clock an apology.
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