Idea: The number of things in the world goes down when you make new things.
When you smash a vase — as you regularly do, I’m sure — the vase ceases to exist. It’s gone. There is one fewer thing (one fewer entity or substance) in the world.
But that’s not all. The total number of things in the world actually goes up when you smash the vase. Now all its pieces are separate things (separate entities or substances).
In contrast, imagine you’ve got six pieces of wood. Then you put them together to form a chair.
At first, you had six things. Now you only have one: the chair. There’s a new thing in the world, but six old things are gone.
Where’d they go? They’re in the chair now. They aren’t things (substances, entities) anymore. They are parts of a thing (substance, entity).
In building things, you actually make the world simpler. Sort of.
Interesting, but you often talk about how groups aren’t things there are only individuals. Would that also apply to non-human things? Is a chair a thing or is it just individual pieces of wood, nails, glue or whatever. Actually are there such things are anything? People are just a bunch of individual atoms, or quarks or whatever.
Nice! I claim human beings (along with other living things like trees and dogs) are wholes, but groups aren’t. If a group were a whole, then the people who made it up would cease to be entities; they would become mere parts of the group. And I think that’s morally unacceptable (in addition to the fact that I don’t think groups behave like wholes).
I also think some non-organic things like tables and chairs are also wholes, while others (like traffic jams or avalanches) might not be. Someone might be able to convince me that there are no such things as non-organic wholes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mereological_nihilism#Partial_vs._pure_nihilism), but I’m currently suspicious.