We divide the world into objects naturally by instinct. The world isnāt just random noise, its particles seem to gather together to form structures, it has for example created me, the human - an object holding itself together through space and time. The world canāt be just forces and particles, and objects canāt just be our way of making sense of a chaos of unrelated matter. Objects exist!
The question is when something becomes an object, in an absolute sense. Or is it a gliding scale, based on the complexity, material, history and distinguishability of it?
Greek philosopher Empedocles had a theory where ālove and strifeā were two forces that made things stick together or broke things, making the universe start from a dense point and end in complete separation, then reverse it. Not unsimilar to the current big bang/heat death theories and how the forces seem to work in a way where we right now live to see wide variation and matter coming together to form objects.
Empedocles also claimed that we currently live in a time where the forces love and strife both are active which gives the variation in the world.
Maybe we should follow what Henry Lindner wrote in 1990 and see evolution as not only biological but āthe inherent process of Cosmic self-development from the formation of the first particles to humankindās development of language and, eventually, philosophyā and see if it could explain the nature of complexity and objects? (https://henrylindner.net/Writings/Hierarchical.html)
One part of science is measurements and proofs and stuff, but another important part is following your pure intuition and seeing where it takes you, and right now I can only come up with this: There are 5 forces - gravity, electromagnetism, the 2 nuclear forces, and life.
Life being the force that creates more complex objects than planets, stars and galaxies (yes, they are BIG but they are not complex!).
And life seems to be a force that operates not only in space but also in TIME (Iām practically stealing material from Sara Imari Walker here).
The electromagnetic force makes molecules stay as they are not dissolve into their building blocks. Gravity makes planets stay as they are and not dissolve. Life lets humans, animals and all the inventions & things we create stay as they are and not dissolve.
It looks like we use the electromagnetic force and gravity etc to create all the products and things we create, but just as one force can make another force happen (gravity pulls two objects together to make them interact electromagnetically), the force ālifeā can make us create all these new objects with electromagnetism and gravity.
An example would be building a house. Gravity pulls the bricks toward the ground, electromagnetism creates friction that holds the bricks together. But it was LIFE that led us to do it, something that couldnāt happen (I think?) through the 4 usual forces. But now Iām starting to speculate too much for my own good here, good night