| Summary: | Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology has employed a variant of
occasionalist causation since 2002, with sensual objects acting as the mediators of
causation between real objects. While the mechanism for living beings creating
sensual objects is clear, how nonliving objects generate sensual objects is not. This
essay sets out an interpretation of occasionalism where the mediating agency of
nonliving contact is the virtual particles of nominally empty space. Since living,
conscious, real objects need to hold sensual objects as sub-components, but nonliving
objects do not, this leads to an explanation of why consciousness, in Object-Oriented
Ontology, might be described as doubly withdrawn: a sensual sub-component of a
withdrawn real object.
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