Coherence and Identity.
Take two sticks and bind them together in the middle and you have another object. Two pebbles on the beach we do not consider an object, that is “two objects”. With the sticks the difference is made by the connecting rope,but we also do that in our abstract world by identifying concepts as a coherent group of ideas and the connection there is much harder to identify.
Physically one can say that an object is something which is identifiable such that leaving some parts out you do not keep the same identity,so a bucket of water and an ocean ,it is still water,but taking some electron out of an atom changes the atom to something else. This definition is like the definition of a molecule, so a molecule of water seems to be the same object as a bucket of water or an ocean of water, that is we can reduce two pebbles to the common idea of pebble and view the abstract concept as the identification of the object.
That is a rough approximation because one pebble could be of gold and the other rabbit excrement.
The best definition I can think of is via the potentials defining the existence of the “object”. A potential at moment t,so a subset of pre-things at moment t ( see story DRP:Death and Rebirth of Philosophy on Medium) is coherent if for all pre-objects in it also all pre-interactions between them are in the potential. If this holds at every moment in the existence interval of something then the realized thing is called a coherent object,sub-objects satisfying the same condition are called coherent sub-objects. An electron is a coherent sub-object of an atom but two electrons are not. A coherent object may therefore be a coherent sub-object of something bigger, the whole universe obviously is coherent.
The internal interactions in an object are thus seen as part of the object,outer interactions will be actions on the object! The inner interactions will be seen as “causing” (correct interpretation via organic causing, see also DRP) changes not changing the identity of the object, exterior interactions may change the identity of the object but not necessarily always do. If some outer action does not change the identity of the object we call it a coherence interaction,thus taking an object and putting it in an other place is a coherence interaction,making an atom split with some nasty consequences is not a coherence interaction.
When a tree grows from a seed that is not the result of a coherence interaction,yet it depends on whether we identify the tree and the seed, that would be strange but not stupid say from a genetic point of view . For example we do identify the boy and the man he becomes but that is also the result of a non-coherence process of interactions, this stems from a more abstract identification process which associated a “soul” or persona to the human which is supposed to be invariant. This is a belief and cannot be phrased in potentials, it also shows how we “believe” automatically that concepts are invariant in time. On the other hand we say people can change,which is a “potential” view!
With aware organisms the problem of coherence and identity get extra dimensions fro the sensing of outer actions and interactions. It does not require a big brain capacity to be able to estimate the strength of an outer action on the organism, for example an effect of the sun may be recorded but the effect of Orion remains ignored. Even when some effect is sensed it may be deliberately deleted from the cognitive analysis when it is deemed too small relative to other sensed effects. There is a limit of observability defined by the quality of the sensing organs, moreover the Planck units present a physical limit on observations, so there are many outer interactions which are automatically ignored just because one does not sense them. Luckily in an existing object there are forces keeping the object together,these forces or resistence to splitting are not the same all over the organism,for example it is easy to pull out a hair but with a leg one has to pull harder,removing part of the outer skin is easier than removing some vital organs,so the organism has developed in such way that the more essential parts are harder to take away than the more superficial ones. This defense to “reduction “ of the organism is partially unaware, in dead matter there are also cohesion forces determined by the construction of the material of the object but for example splitting a rock does not change the identity of the rock except for the shape and the quantity of the material.The strength of an outer interaction is usually observable while inner interactions in an organism are usually not registered. Thus there is a hierarchy in coherence of sub-objects parameterized by the growing cohesion of smaller coherent sub-objects,taking an electron out of an atom may be easier than splitting the nucleus. Stronger coherence thus means bigger cohesion forces. For water the cohesion changes with the temperature, there is obviously a relation with entropy,ice is harder to take apart than water or vapor.Thus also the position of the potential in the state of the universe influences the outcome of the existence process,for example the local conditions (interactions) defining the existing temperature on the place of existing of an object do influence the appearance of the object (e.g. the state as a solid,liquid,vapor,plasma,…). Thus for a complete knowledge about existence of some thing we need the potentials in an existence interval together with the places in the states leading to the dynamical place in reality (over the existence interval). The loss of coherence is very obvious when matter transforms to energy, so if you identify matter with energy you ignore coherence, thus coherence is a property gained for matter from energy as condensing the strength of inner interactions,thus condensing a coherent object with cohesion from an incoherent object in terms of local conditions on the place in the universe where things are happening and this being determined by the outer interactions in the complement of the inner ones for the object.
Coherence first is defined over one existence time interval,so it will be a process during the existence history of something and…it can be lost ,even regained or not. If we lose a hand it is the result of an incoherent action but afterwards the new object regains a new state of coherence When we die ,certainly that is a result of an incoherent interaction which will not allow regaining of a coherent system in existing reality…but outside?