The Sorites paradox is thousands of years old and is called the ‘sorites’ (derived from the Greek word Soros meaning ‘heap’) argument. The argument goes as follows:[1]
1. A single grain of sand is not a heap;
2. Adding a grain to a single grain does not make it a heap;
3. You can’t make a non-heap into a heap by adding a single grain;
4. Therefore, there are no such things as heaps.
The conclusion is that heaps do not exist. This is a paradox, since in our imaginations heaps seem to exist. There are more heap-like entities in this world than you can possibly imagine and we use them quite a lot in our day to day lives. My answer is that heaps do exist, yet they exist only in our human minds and the concept is nothing more than a model.
In one of my first Substack posts, I explain how Jeff Hawkins neuroscientific research proposes that our brains constantly make predictions, by constructing models of the world. These models determine when something is something. It is all about delineation.
We can use the number of grains to make the model of a ‘heap’ very discrete and delineate the model. We could for example agree that a heap consists of 2000 grains of sand and that it becomes a hill when we have 200 billion grains of sand. Although we can use real objects as a way to describe discrete models, it does not prove the model to be correct. Most models are subjective and relative and therefore never part of the real world independently of humans. Heaps do not exist in the real world, but they can exist as an agreement between different human beings. For that matter, grains of sand do not exist either because you can argue what constitutes as a grain of sand. For an ant, the grain of sand would possibly be seen as a rock. We could agree upon the exact amount of atoms that make up a grain of sand, but this would still be a human convention.
‘Etwas ist nur in seine grense und durch seine grense das et etwas ist’. Hegel
(Translated as: Something is only within its borders something and because of its border that it is something.)
I argue that this is not a paradox when you view it as being an anthropocentric model. [2] The argument can be correct if human convention allows it. If we all agree on two grains of sand being a heap, then it can be so, and if we agreed that 23576 grains of sands are a non-heap and 23577 constitute a heap, it can be so. Instead of heaps, we could also use more complex ideas such as a democracy. When is something called a democracy or not? How many members of parliament should there be? More than one perhaps, because would it otherwise be a dictatorship? At what point can you add another member of parliament to make a non-democratic parliament democratic? The same holds for voting. In some countries people are barred from voting because of the status of their citizenship or because they haven’t reached the proper age yet. What is the proper age for voting?
Maybe it is irrelevant when a certain number of grains of sand become a heap, but it becomes relevant when we decide when a certain number of human cells in the womb constitute a human being and when, for example, abortion is acceptable or not. At what moment are there enough human cells to make the fetus count as human?[3] At what moment in time or developmental stage does consciousness arrive? I think that there is no scientific answer to these questions that can objectively delineate the transition to human. All we can do is count the grains of sand, but we have to determine ourselves when and what counts as a grain of sand, a heap or for that matter a human being.
What we can do is use science to provide a useful reference frame. You can measure the presence of silicon dioxide, which at least means that what you are measuring is part of reality. You cannot say the same about consciousness, democracy or righteousness for example. What you can thus claim is that something like sand exists. The statements about different configurations or orders of sand are nothing more than models, but in some sense (as in agreements) they exist because the essential building block sand can be measured.
When you look closely enough you can find the sorites paradox everywhere. What seems to be paradoxical is that the problem implies that heaps exist outside of humanity, that there ‘is’ a heap, which is not the case. The only thing that really exists is silicon dioxide in different sizes and amounts, and only this we can scientifically investigate. We only ‘ought’ to call a large quantity of grains of sand a heap because this is what we agreed upon. It is called a paradox because there seems to be a misunderstanding between what ‘is’ and what ‘ought’ to be. I will argue that there are models that we can scientifically investigate on the one hand, and models that are anthropocentric and which we can or cannot agree on.
To conclude, what we call grains of sand, heaps or mountains lies within our own hands, hence the fitting picture at the beginning.
[1] Daniel Dennet: Intuition pumps, P395.
[2] Anthropocentric: humans are at the centre of everything, or strictly from an human point of view.
[3] There is of course more to being human than merely counting cells, but for now we cannot measure consciousness, only cells.
Bibliography:
- Daniel C. Dennett. Intuition Pumps: and Other Tools for Thinking (London: Penguin Books, 2013)
- Jeff Hawkins. A Thousand Brains: A New Theory on Intelligence (New York: Basic Books, 2021)