[vageli]

> This presumes the existence of a category like 'cow' or 'finger'. I'm pretty sure there's nothing intrinsic about 'cows' and 'fingers'; these are artifacts of human cognition. I base reality, there are no such things as 'cows' and 'fingers'. Just systems with similar properties. And if you have to be very pedantic, there are not even discrete systems, since everything is linked by information. You cannot separate a river from the ocean - it's part of the same system.

When I cut my finger the cow does not share in my pain. When we kill the cow for its meat, we do not share in its pain. That the cow becomes part of us through its consumption does not seem to invalidate this point—discrete systems do exist in our experience.

Of course, if you zoom out far enough you might refer to the sum of those discrete parts as some singular, complex system, but it seems the human experience is fairly limited in exposing this subtlety (not to mention that it is often useful to discuss the parts themselves without considering their relationship to the entire universe).